Changing our Change of Plans, Plans

I should just make one final declaration that we are never allowed to declare any sort of plan because things never actually go according to plan (but that plan will probably change). Because only 3ish weeks ago we said that we were going to work on the TV room but not completely finish it before we moved on to the bathroom and laundry room (all before finishing the front room of course). And, well, we've changed those change of plans, plans. But you know, as Heather said we're really blowing through this room, and frankly, there's not a ton left to do, so we thought, let's just finish it now.

But, there's also another factor playing a role in why we want to finish it now: we love TV. And movies. And sports. Which all means that our TV is on a lot. I know there are all sorts of statistics about why you shouldn't watch a lot of TV, and I might be a total lame ass for admitting it, but I really like watching TV. I also exercise a lot, eat well, work on the house all the time, and go out and about on fun adventures. So really, this is the only flaw :) The one thing we were going to leave to do until after we finished the bathroom and laundry room was building the hutch that will sit in this alcove

But let me tell you, with all the TV, movie and sports watching we do, moving our TV and other components out of the room and littering them all over the house...


...while we move into the temporary living room of my art room...

...well, it sucks.

And if we stuck to the plan, we'd move all this stuff back into the TV Room when the floors are done, but go through the whole process of moving everything out when we build the hutch months from now, so we figured we should just knock it all out now because we want our comfy couch and ottoman lounging back.

We only came to this more logistically sane conclusion two evenings ago, so we're in the beginning stages of planning what the hutch will look like. But first we took measurements of how large the alcove is (depth and width), how large the walls are that extend on either side, and how big all of our individual components are

Then after talking about what we wanted it to look like - how many columns of shelves/drawers, how tall, how many doors, how many drawers, etc. - I drew up a total rough plan sans measurements

After Chris and I talked about some more specifics it was time for me to break out my beloved graph paper and draw up our first plan for the new, marvelous hutch/entertainment center/built in cabinet

So here's the general idea:

The hutch will be around 30ish inches tall. We're still debating what the top will be (three cheers for stone! But hellooooo more expensive). It will be stained. We went back and forth on this for a while and Chris was not pleased with me because making something paint grade is a whole lot easier. But, this room has such great stained wood trim and I'd really like the hutch to follow along with that so we came to the conclusion that the face of the hutch will be stained, and the inside of the hutch (masked by doors and drawers) will be painted. This way it makes construction so much easier (masking things with paint = simple, making something perfect for stain grade = frustration of the century). Because we haven't built a ton of stuff, we're a little nervous building doors and drawers good enough for stain grade so we resolved that we can handle all the face frames and structure, but it would probably be best to buy already constructed doors and drawers, so we've been perusing the Rockler catalog

And here's a detail of the hutch plan so far

It will have 3 columns of doors and drawers. The center column will have an opening at the top and our center channel speaker will sit inside. The area right below will have double glass faced doors and house the receiver, TiVo and DVD player. The left and right columns will have matching drawers at the top (a little shorter than the center channel speaker) and our remotes, current DVDs and other fun stuff will be inside. Below the drawers will be double doors (no glass this time) and inside will be things like our turntable, CD player, PlayStation, sub-woofer, etc. Those 3 columns will take up the width of the approximately 72" wide alcove. But the hutch will extend past the alcove about 8" onto either wall jut out (here's another pic to jog your memory of how the space looks)

And in those small areas we'll have open shelving.

Sound totally confusing? Here's a really lame rough drawing I made in Photoshop

So what do you think? Don't you get sick of our always changing plans? It keeps us on our renovating toes :)