Finally Finished TV Stand

It only took 1 year and 10 months (less than two weeks of actual working time in there), but we've finally finished our re-purposed entertainment center!!

It went from this:

To this; which looks exactly as I had Photoshopped it in my original post**!

First my husband pried he top of the entertainment center off the cabinet. Then he took a sawzall and cut off the side walls (solid wood) and the back of the piece (press board). He then re-nailed the top layer on the bottom of the cabinet. Paint came last - a coat of primer across the entire cabinet, 2 coats of black spray paint for the bottom of the hutch (inside and out) and three coats of white for the top. Then he hand painted a layer of polyurethane to just the white part of the cabinet where our kids are most likely to color or scratch or bump.

The new piece is much larger than what we had been using so we had to get rid of another piece we had on the left and the toy basket on the right... for the past nearly 2 years we had been using our entry-way shoe basket (seen in the background here):

Our original plan was to move the DVD collection off the bookshelf to the cabinet - but quickly realized the kids liked the cabinets... and would LOVE playing with the DVDs. So we decided to use it for toy storage instead. In hindsight I wouldn't have painted the inside of the cabinets because they can be easily scratched without poly... but we decided to use cloth baskets to minimize the scratching. 

I have to say I'm absolutely in love with this new piece.  It could have been easily used as a window seat or welcome bench itself - but entertainment center is the best use of it for our room right now. Half our toys are hidden away now. And it only cost us about $20 in paint!

**Here's the full original post about my re-purposing project:

http://eastsixth.blogspot.com/2011/04/short-sweet-my-new-entertainment-center.html