My First DIY Project - Part 4

So after I fiddled around with the paint and finally figured out how I wanted it to look, I went ahead with my second and third coats, as well as making any touch-ups in areas that I messed up.

Now that all the pieces are painted, it was time to reassemble the whole cabinet and add any finishing touches that I wanted. This did not go smoothly at all.

My first problem was realized after installing the board for the radio and turntable. It was about 1/4 of an inch thicker than the original piece that I removed. This meant that the radio would not attach properly and essentially wasn't going to work. I then spent about 4 hours carving into the plywood in order to make the board thinner around the bottom of the hole for the radio, without making the hole any bigger.

Finally, after hours of laying on my back on the garage floor, getting sawdust in my eyes, nose, and mouth I finally got the radio to fit in perfectly.

Look! It works!!

Here is the nearly completed cabinet, reassembled and in the garage. I bought new handles for the faux doors from Home Depot because the old ones are ugly and cheap looking. Plus the silver handles go nicely with the charcoal and cream colour scheme. Originally, I had wanted to get a cream/white cloth to go behind the grills on the front, covering the speaker holes, but I couldn't find any speaker cloth that wasn't black, and it looks fine as-is.

I drilled a hole into the board to hide all the cables for the turn table. Also, I realized that there is a "Tape In/Out" plug on the back of the cabinet, meaning that I can now play music from an iPod/cell phone/anything with a headphone jack, which is pretty sweet. 

So, that's basically the whole thing. It seems as if I'm finished with this project. For now. I have plans to fill the inside of the cabinet with egg cartons (to help with acoustics) and in the distant future I'm thinking of turning it into a full entertainment unit to use up the wasted interior space (put in a Blu-Ray player, Xbox, etc. and wall mount a tv above the cabinet). Thanks for following along! If I have any updates I'll definitely share them. Finally, if you enjoyed this little project, or think the finished product looks nice, please feel free to Pin it, tweet it, Facebook it, or whatever other social media thingies there are.

 

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3