Movin’ & Shakin’ It Up In The Family Room

While dismantling the did functional living room, I swiped another piece of furniture that we decided was better suited to the family room.

You know the one, it’s the amazing vintage buffet/bar that we painted white and then painted the hardware silver.  It’s one of my favorite pieces.

After living in the house for 6 months, we found that it wasn’t getting as much use (and love) as it deserved because the space is really perfect for a more vertical piece of furniture like a china cabinet (that we don’t have, but one step at a time).

We also weren’t feeling love for the placement of our media cabinet that we custom designed for the living room at our previous house.  It’s a great piece and we love, it, just not there:

It really felt too small for the very tall wall and clearly, we ran out of space for all of our gadgets.  We had been shopping for a media cabinet for our media room upstairs, and were having the same dilemma that we had when we wound up having our trim carpenter build this one to our specs: everything on the market was either too big or too small.  We wound up shopping in our own house and realized that this piece was perfect for the media room, and not for the family room.

So, we pulled a switch-a-roo.  The living room buffet came into the family room and the family room media cabinet went upstairs to the media room.  It hasn’t been set up yet, so I’ll save that reveal for another day.

To make the buffet into a media cabinet, I first had to drill holes for wires and ventilation.  The wires are an obvious one, but all of those gadgets get HOT in an enclosed space which can kill them.  We plan to add a fan or two to help ventilate the cabinet, but then again we probably have more gadgets than most since Jason is an audio nerd who feels that anything less than a dedicated, cooled closet for electronics is slumming it.

We had a 2-1/2″ drill bit on hand (they are called hole saws).  If you don’t have one yet, here’s a great set to stock the tool chest.  Next, the really fun part.  It took longer to re-run all of our cables that it did to move all of the furniture and drill the holes.  To keep electronics hidden you will need IR repeater or IR blaster to send your remote’s signal into the cabinet.  Fortunately, our new TV came with IR blasters so the TV remote can turn on our receiver & U-verse box.  Our next step will be to figure out how to set up our Logitech Harmony remote with this set up because we much prefer it.

Love this transformation!  The scale of this cabinet works much better with the room and the white really brightens things up with all of the white trim.

Here’s another look at the detail.  Spraying paint makes a world of difference on the final product and I do it whenever possible.  The hardware was painted about 6 months ago and still looks great.

Oh… and did you ever see the best part of this cabinet?  You know, what’s behind the lock?

That’s right, we now have a bar in the family room.

Now do you see why this is one of my favorite pieces of furniture ever?  And imagine, it used to look like this: