Cottage Style Media Cabinet

So the other day I had a minor epiphany moment.  A few months ago, and by a few I really mean about eight, I designed and Colby built the most magnificent media cabinet known to man.  I may be a little biased there.  It’s just so dang amazing.  Then I finished it with a seafoamy paint, moved it into place, and stocked it.  What I didn’t do was provide you with a proper blog post to commemorate said accomplishment.  And I didn’t realize this until last week when I was trying to link my favorite furniture project (said media cabinet) to the Furniture Friday link party at the Miss Mustard Seed blog (one of my personal favorites) and found that this post was the only post about the media cabinet and it was (le sigh) not my best work.  So now we’re going to go back in time (imagine a little Wayne’s World dream sequence here “diddle liddle la diddle liddle la diddle liddle la”).  Here’s the media cabinet that Colby built (pre-finishing) from the first blog post:

And here’s what it looks like now (excuse our dusty floors…remember….sanding….le sigh):

And how about one more a little closer:

As usual, I dreamed up the design, Colby drew it up in Google SketchUp and then built it, and I finished it off with a few coats of glossy paint then some protective poly.  The best thing about building your own furniture, at least in Angie’s world, is that you can completely customize your piece to suit your needs.  This was what we used to have for a media cabinet:

COMPLETELY dysfunctional!  Do you like how the cable box is stored on the speaker?  Or the massive cable chaos?  Ooooh…ooooh…or the DVD disaster?  How did we turn this mess into a perfectly organized and oh so gorgeous media cabinet?  We paid attention to details as we customized our cabinet.  To combat the DVD’s we designed the shelf height/cabinet width to efficiently organize and store our massive collection:

Joe Dirt is Colby’s favorite movie FYI.  We incorporated some cord storage behind the components of the top shelf:

The whole cabinet interior was actually designed to perfectly fit everything we already had:

We even added some fun hardware to the piece for some extra pizazz that really fit the Maine Cottage cabinet style:

The favorite part of the whole cabinet, other than how it oozes uber organization, are the doors:

Isn’t it cool how the door only has one grill bar vertically positioned.  But then when you close the doors it looks like a more traditional cross section:

This is by far one of my favorite projects we’ve done to date.  It’s such a pretty piece and it’s full of functionality.  It really cleaned up our living room and turned it from college kid-ish to Home & Garden Magazine cottage chic.