"A Cocoon of One’s Own"

One of the things I promised my wife when we got our house was that I would customize every room of it, starting with the master bedroom, where I made an entertainment center to her specifications.

As you can see from these pictures, the master bedroom is actually a two-room suite. The vanity I’ve described elsewhere is in the sitting room, and when I was designing the entertainment center for her, I noticed that the first thing she did each morning was flip on the radio in the receiver (which was on small table at the time). Entertainment centers of this style almost always consist of an unbroken façade of drawers and doors, but I wanted to make this as user-friendly as possible, so I put the receiver on an open shelf, so she wouldn’t have to fumble with doors to turn it on and off. (For more on entertainment centers, go to CFT411.com.)

But the main reason for a custom piece was not that open shelf so much, as it was the challenge provided by the site. It was difficult to take the picture I wanted to show the relationship of this entertainment center to the bed, as it is in one corner of the room, which was all the space we really had for it. But that illustrates why a custom project is more than an indulgence at times. Nothing I could have purchased and brought home ever would have fit into that corner with the precision of a built-in cabinet.

Looking at the molding around the base now, it looks like a perfect fit, which it is, but it took an awful lot of work to make it so. That particular corner of the concrete slab this house sits on was not poured well, and it slopes front to back and side to side. The only way to correct that problem was to install a separate toe kick. The finished cabinet sits on the toekick, and the whole of the base has been covered with the base molding that makes it appear as a cabinet that just happens to perfectly fit the space it resides in.

Also, because the cabinet itself is eight feet tall, it had to be attached to the wall, but the unit itself is a simple rectangle spanning a corner. The solution to that dilemma was triangle-shaped supports in back, the legs of which were screwed to wall studs, and the cabinet itself was then screwed to the hypotenuse side. The gaps that would have appeared between the cabinet and wall with a purchased cabinet are not in evidence here because I made and installed molding on either side of the cabinet to hide the gaps and give the piece a more finished look. Finally, I should point out that this is not a "walnut-finished" piece. It is made of black walnut, which I finished with a hand-rubbed oil finish.

One of the people we showed it off to was very short, and looking up those eight feet, she mumbled, "Boy, that’s sure a lot of walnut." What Christine most likes about watching TV back there, though, is that it’s cool in the summer, warm under the covers in the winter, a cocoon of her own anytime.

Joseph