How to Make a Built-In Entertainment Center | I Like To Make Stuff

Hi, I'm Bob and I like to do things today. We are going to

make

some new

built

-ins in our living room. We had some old

built

-in shelves. These were made a long time ago. In fact, you can see what they were. Made to have a place for an old tube TV and I had to cut out a section just to fit our large flat TV in its place. This is the TV we are working with, so we put it in the 3D model so we can model. the shelves around it, but above the 4k TV we are also going to have the only 4k laser projector, this is the LG cinebeam, so we have to

make

sure we have a place down in the cabinets to hide this.

Now is the time to tear them out completely and rebuild them, make them modern and adapt them to our needs. At the back of this panel is another set of shelves and we will deal with them later. I'm going to worry about this, so I'm going to finish ripping them off and we'll go talk about the design and find out. I took some measurements of the actual space and then I went into Fusion 360 and made a rough model of what I wanted to look like and I gave it to Josh and he turned it into the actual model with really specific dimensions and layout.

This will help us determine how much material we need and how we should break it down to build it. We also work. in some of the specific needs for different things in the model, including the sponsor of this video, which is LG, they gave us this really awesome projector and we'll talk more about that later, but we wanted to have a way to hide that projector. on the cabinets, but we also wanted to hide a retractable screen that you can't tell right now, but a screen will come down and cover all of those cabinets. We also decided to make the shelves adjustable so we can move them up and down. and we made sure the left side was big enough for the TV and sound bar and that there was room behind it to run all the wiring for the gaming systems and everything else.

I also wanted to point out that we have the opportunity to build this in sections. take it outside and paint it and then install it in place and if you do that you don't have to worry so much about the walls being perfectly square and parallel, you can put all the pieces in place and then build a front frame to fill in all the gaps, this It's going to be a pretty simple cabinet, so we've got a lot of sheets to tear off, a lot of holes to drill, let's do it. I'm using pocket holes for this, which I know some people don't do.

I don't like it and it doesn't really matter. Pocket holes are something that cabinetmakers have been using for a long time. They work perfectly. In this case, I wanted to show you a quick trick here if you don't have one of the specialized ones. clamps to hold two pieces at a 90 degree angle. You can take a board like this and screw it to your work surface and then use it to attach your pieces. I finished assembling the four lower cabinets. Now these are extremely simple cabinets. Construction doesn't have a face frame, so I'm going to cover the face of this plywood with some edge banding.

We have a full video on how to do it. It's super simple, but the reason I do it is because I'm going to spray all of these cabinets white when you have the final grain of plywood, it's going to soak up the paint in a way that you really don't want, so by edge banding it it's going to give you It will give an even surface once I paint, I have the edge banding on the four cabinets and wrapped the eight doors that will go on those cabinets. The following is the surface that will be on top of them.

This is a long run, it's about nine feet, so we're making it with two pieces of plywood and we're going to have to join them together and to do it again we're going to use holes in the bottom to join the two pieces together and then once we've Once that's done, then we're going to start building the things that go on top, we did a dry fit of all the cabinets and the countertop and now we're going to start building these adjustable shelves and for that we're going to use this template and this is an easy way to drill holes at the same distance from the front at the same distance from each other, just place this on the piece and then drill into it, then use those holes as a reference so I can move it down and drill more holes, I drilled all the holes on one side and I realized that I don't really need it to be that adjustable, so for the others I'm going to skip every other hole, it should be fine, one cool thing about a jig like this is that you can use as many or as few holes as you want, then You use this reference pin to enter the hole you drilled and place the jig in the next position.

I have all those holes drilled in all three of them. vertical studs and to connect them I have a piece of half inch plywood and we are going to place them like this and we are going to use a corner clamp to hold them at 90 degrees, countersink some holes from the top and then drive in some screws, this is It's going to be A flimsy piece on its own, but once attached to the main assembly it will become stronger and all of this will bolt to the wall. I'm going to use one of the shelves here as a spacer to make sure I have the

center

piece in the right position, you can measure it, but I already pre-cut the shelf so I can use those too, so I started cutting the front frames now that they are solids. pieces of wood, not plywood, that will go on the front of these studs, now that we have the entire structure in place and attached, we can go ahead and cut these pieces out and attach them.

I'm going to do the whole interior. pieces and the last two pieces to make will be the outer ones, that way we can move them in and out to fill any spaces within the space that this all goes into. Now they're made fours at a time, so I start with a really long piece, one by four, like this, cut it to the length I need and then cut it in half and I get one and a half inch strips. I have all the upright pieces cut and then the long pieces, now I just have to make the pieces that go on the front of the shelves, the shelves will be adjustable so it will be a little awkward lifting those pieces out of place with a face frame , it will also be a little strange because some of the front frames are

center

ed on this piece, some have to go to the edge depending on what your space is like.

If you are building built-ins, you may have to adjust the front frames a bit to hide things. I'm going to go ahead and screw these two pieces together, although we have to take this up, it's going to be very long, but it will also make it a lot easier to go ahead and attach some of the face frames, so we should still be able to. take this entire top section and bring it upstairs so we can paint it and install it. I'm countersinking them a little so we can come back with some wood filler and fill them in before we paint all of this. a piece of plywood in a span this long will often fall over, especially if it is only half an inch long.

I'm going to lift it with my finger so it's flush with the top of the front frame and then I'm going to drive in some nails. Do this all the way down and just lift it into place as I go for this piece, it goes centered on the three quarter inch piece of plywood, which means it sticks out on each side three eighths of an inch, so I made a little spacer that I can put it back here so I know I'm going to nail it and it's going to be centered on this back piece, putting the front frame on the shelf as well, but in this case it needs to be aligned with the outside edge. on one side and then sticks out a little bit on the other side so it can go behind the front frame up here, after selecting the hinges we wanted to use Josh made a quick jig so we could drill the holes in the right place. consistently among all cabinet boxes, we also use a jig made specifically for hidden hinges to drill the holes in the back of the doors, as always we will have a link in the description to a list of all the tools and materials we use to this project, we have one set of doors now we just have to repeat the same process to place the rest, but first I'm going to move on to this, we call it the shadow because I don't have a better name for this, but basically this is where the TV will go .

We're going to make a frame that goes behind the TV and it's just to cover the outside shape but still leave a hole right in the middle behind the TV so we can run all the cables and

stuff

, so I'm going to make a little frame again with some pocket holes that will fit perfectly into that opening and then we can adjust it back and forth depending on where the TV ends up. In setup, we put all the pieces here to dry and put them in place to make sure everything looks good. We ended up having to take one of the shadow pieces out of that frame I was talking about because it wasn't tall enough. instead, we'll put a taller piece there and then mount the brackets for the sound bar directly to it so that the sound bar is right here above the TV.

We also had to make sure the TV was the right size for that shadow. and everything looks good, so the next thing is to figure out where to put this top bar. We were going to put in a small piece of molding, but now we realize that you can actually see through this into the back room that we don't want. that, so we're going to end up making a box to hide that and then the screen will be mounted here behind this wall so that it falls in front of all of these things, it's going to be amazing.

I made these cabinets to height so we can put all the gaming systems in here and this projector will fit in here so whenever we want to watch a movie you can just pull it out and plug it in. We are starting to install everything. These pieces now and the countertop that goes here is only a three-quarter inch piece, but it looks like it's taller from the front, so we're going to put some spacers on top of the cabinets to make sure that it's raised so that from the front edge you will only see the front frame, there is a small gap on one side of the cabinet so we just put a spacer in and it turned out to be a half inch so it works great.

We have to go back and paint that when we're painting all the trim and everything else, so we have the two exterior pieces attached to the studs so that all of this is sturdy now and in place, but these two are free floating, so I have to making sure they're square with the table top here and then making sure they're evenly spaced so that the shelves I made fit between them. I'm using the shelf as a spacer to keep them apart and then I also put a level on this side to make sure it's perfectly connected so we decided to cut a section off the bottom of this shadow piece and it was already assembled so I'm standing in the middle so that the space Right here what we just cut is so that the TV stand can slide through here and that way we can push the TV back a little bit more.

Sometimes on newer TVs the stand on the back is much larger than the stand on the front, so this will take into account one of the next steps is to mount the screen now. We were originally going to place the screen on this surface and then cover it on the front. After tearing all this off, we realized that there is actually space behind it. so we're going to place the screen up here, the problem with that is that there's nothing up there to mount it on, so to mount it we're going to use these metal brackets and we're going to cut them to the right size, place them here.

Mount the screen on the bottom and then make a cover on the back here so you don't see the room through it, so we have to measure and cut them. This video is sponsored by LG and the reason I am putting a retractable screen here because they sent me their new LG Cinebeem 4k projector. This is a laser based projector that can place a 4k image on the wall up to 150 inches, it has 2500 lumens of brightness and lasts around 20,000 hours, many 4k projectors are quite large and this one has been designed in a special way so that It's about half the size of other projectors in its class and the interface is really great, it has smart apps built in.

Bluetooth output and also has HDMI ports, USB ports, a LAN port so you can connect it to your network. You can control it with a USB mouse and keyboard or the remote control that you can point at the projection to control all the interface

stuff

. What I think is really interesting about this projector is that it can be used in two different orientations, you can place it like a tower and project it on the ceiling or in any other direction, but you can also place it on its side and get the same projection e Even better than that, it has a handle, you don't have to mount it on the ceiling or a table, you can hide it when you're not using it, in fact you can even take it to a friend's house.friend. home, if you wanted to, the image is incredibly sharp, clear and bright.

I've been very impressed so far and can't wait to see some big movies at our house. Stay until the end of this video and we'll do it. I show you it in use on my new screen without any image manipulation. You'll be able to see exactly what it looks like in space thanks to LG. This is the screen we are going to use and these were the original mounting brackets that came with it. with it and instead of removing them and replacing them, we'll just tie them together, but we'll mount them from the front so this fits here and then I'll just trace the holes that came with it so that I can make new holes in the bracket.

I wanted to show you a quick test of the projector in this room. Keep in mind, it's one in the afternoon, there are a lot of windows on that wall, and we're not going to adjust this footage. not at all, which means my face may be a little dark. I wanted to show you how bright the projector is in this space. It looks incredible. I'm really impressed with it so far and I can't wait to see a bunch of movies about it, we'll have links to them in the description, if you want to watch them now let me open this screen and show you the shelves.

I'm really happy with how these shelves turned out, it's pretty simple. project, but it really makes a big difference in your living room, of course, it's amazing to have the screen and the projector, which is great now. I usually ask you what you think about these projects, but I'd actually prefer to hear what you say. you learned from this project, if there is something new that you chose from this particular video, let me know in the comments because that will help us make better videos in the future. If you are new to the channel, we have a full There are many other types of videos for you to watch and if you are not subscribed, do so and ring the bell.

That's all guys, thanks for watching. See you next time I went into Fusion 360 and trans translated the The left side was big enough to hold the TV. What did I say? Damn.