TV Stand - Build Plans

Here's another installment of things i should have posted over a year ago. 

With about 20% work from me and 80% from John (who also designed the TV stand) we were able to build it in a few weekends. When Karrie and i went over to Katie and John's house we really liked their 2 TV stands they had.  John said that if i bought the wood and helped him build it, he would draw it on the computer for me.  A few months later the plans were all set and i went over to get the wood we needed and start building.

This is just part of what John drew.  It shows all the dimensions and cuts that were needed.  The important thing is that a portion of the stand had to fit inside the fireplace, cover the remainder of the fireplace, and still fit on the 2' stone hearth.

Measuring the boards.  We used oak veneered plywood for the majority of the shelf, then solid oak for the trim.  After we bought the random sized oak boards, John drew them in AutoCAD and figured out how we could get the most trim pieces out of each board.

Here's my attempt at getting a 360 degree panorama of John's workshop.  It didn't really work as you can see that some of the pictures didn't blend together  But it's super nice.  The tool we used the most was right in the middle, the table saw.

Cutting the boards for bookcase shelves.  The great thing about the table saw is that it cuts every board nice and square.

This is just a small amount of the rough cut boards we needed.

This is a time lapse video of john and i cutting the boards on the table saw.  I used the GoPro camera since it has a wide angle lens. 

Building a Wood TV Stand
 
 http://youtu.be/GwzbDWhpNok

We used biscuits and glue to connect the pieces together.  This was great because it didn't show any screw holes.  And for the TV stand, the biscuits and glue were very strong.

Here's a close up view of the biscuits we used.

Here's the upright pieces, with the grooves cut in for shelves and table tops.  Those grooves were also cut with the table saw, just not at full depth.

Assembling the center shelf.  This is where the stereo receiver will go and the TV will sit on, so it had to be pretty strong. 

Gluing up the pieces, took lots of clamps as you can see.

Here it is from another angle.  Luckily John had a bunch of 4' clamps and those aluminum bars to get good even pressure on the base frame.

And here's the center stand assembled.  At this point i was like, man we're almost done.  John said more like only 10% done. 

Next we started working on the book shelf ends.  These are the upright pieces.  The groove in the middle is for a support shelf.

The upright grooves though are for metal shelf holders.  The cut-outs are so that you can add metal tabs and adjust the shelf heights.

Then more measuring for the oak trim that was needed.  The solid oak was good for the edge where you could see that it was solid oak.

Cutting the biscuits for the book shelves sides. Same as before.

Here was us starting to put together one of the book shelves.  It was important that these were square or else the shelves wouldn't fit.  And we needed the extra long pipe clamps for this.

That meant more biscuits and glue. 

Then more clamps and glue to assemble everything.  We had to let this sit overnight for the glue to dry.

And the next day, this was the basic framework of the shelf.  One of the hardest parts on the build was that middle shelf.  A series of cuts had to be made vertically and horizontally for it to fit correctly.  

Then we attached the oak trim to the sides and front.  We used biscuits here too.  And it's a good thing because when i later carried these i was lifting from those edges.  If they weren't attached well, i might have cracked them off the shelf.

At this point we could see what it was going to end up looking like.  Still needed was the doors, shelves and the large square back.  There would be a board in the middle that would cover up the fireplace and be able to attach a wall mount TV stand to.  It's the big board leaning up against the wall.

At this point i had to go home for the weekend.  We did all of this in just 2 days.  Then luckily John ended up finishing everything else up himself.  It was a ton of work.  We had everything pretty much cut out but there was lots of things that needed to be done.  All the difficult stuff like making sure the doors fit into the openings.

Then a few weeks later Katie and John brought all the pieces over and it was Karrie and my job to sand and stain/paint all the pieces.  It wasn't fun.  It took us several hours and days. The worst part was getting back into the corners of the TV stand.  It meant lots of awkward angles to sand and paint.  Here's what it looked like after the sanding and first coat of paint.  Still a dull finish.

This picture was taken much much later.  Actually i took it just last week.   This is all of the parts of the stand ready to be put it back together.  The reason we had the TV stand apart is because we just got done redoing the family room.

And this is what it looks like all together. We ended up not going with the TV wall mount, just sitting the TV on the center shelf.  And you can see the speakers and the computer as well.

Here it is in the family room with some of the furniture put back.  The whole TV stand fits nicely and doesn't look big at all.  It fits perfectly over the old fireplace.  And the stand itself turned out great, it looks like it cost several hundreds of dollars.  No one believes we made it.

Max didn't help.

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