Media Cabinet Design

2012-06-19

A stereo cabinet needs to have glass doors, so you can use your remote control from a comfortable distance. I spent a long time leading up to this project thinking of various ways I could make glass doors. Horizontal sliding panes of glass? Wood frame around the glass and hinges?

Reclaimed old wooden sash

Some time earlier I had salvaged some old window sashes. The old craftsmanship gets ripped out and replaced with the new craftsmanship. Windows today are more sophisticated and efficient, but there was something about the simple nature of the old sashes that I liked. They were just nice pieces of wood cut and fit in a certain way.

I thought about it for a while, then started to design a cabinet around the old sashes. Once again, this was a project to satisfy a need and use up some materials that were a burden.

I had several different sashes, but I was most interested in the ones that had mullions and small panes. Of those, I had two that matched and were about the right size, 24" by 36".

Since I had two of them, I got the idea to have an identical door on both the front and back, so that the cabinet would be reversible. I really imagined myself having a big living room with the cabinet in the middle so you could see through it. Of course it would be on casters so you could roller-skate it to any location you like.

Once I knew I was using the pair of windows, I knew what the width and height of the cabinet had to be. The depth of the cabinet was set by the full-size computer tower it needed to contain.

I knew I also wanted the cabinet to handle power smartly, so I planned for that.

I had one leftover drawer from the Dirty Drawers project, and that was the pencil drawer from the desk. I was able to squeeze that drawer into this cabinet, which becomes a handy place to store remotes.

The PDF set really tells the story of the design, and how all the parts fit together, so download that if you are interested in the details.

Click to download the PDF set