My Foray Into Furniture Design

Since moving into our house, we've wanted a better TV cabinet for our family room. For the time being we're actually using one I built in junior high wood shop. While I'm rather proud of the piece, it doesn't exactly suit our family room nor the way we want to use it. The TV it holds now is bigger than what used to sit on it, and its placement in the room isn't exactly normal.

Because of the size & shape of our family room, the best place for our TV cabinet is somewhat in the middle of the room, leaving the back of the TV visible to half of the room. With the back of the cabinet exposed, we wanted to accomplish two things: conceal the unsightly cables and keep them away from little hands, and create some storage space accessible from the back of the cabinet.

Enter Google Sketchup. This free program from Google has been a useful tool for some of my other small projects, and provided a fun way to design our cabinet. The design shown here is the basic concept. I plan to include some doors on the front, and a panel to conceal the wires on the back.

While I've managed to stock my garage with enough tools to get by on small projects, I haven't really built anything large since our current TV cabinet. This is where it comes in handy to have a Dad with years of experience building cabinetry and a high quality table saw in his garage. At this point with the design laid out, Dad and I will be getting together to buy some materials and start building this thing! Let's hope it all goes well.