TV Stand Build Process

8/4/2021

I've been thinking about replacing the TV stand in our lounge. Carolyn (my other half) doesn't like the colour of the one we have at the moment and the design and construction makes it very obvious that it is mass-produced budget furniture. This is the old TV stand:

I think this is going to be a very slow project: I think it'll take me a long time before I even make the first cut in the first piece of wood as I'm very much in the thinking stage, but I thought I'd start writing down my thoughts in case anyone wants to offer any interesting suggestions!

As of now, I don't really know what I want, so I expect the design ideas to go through several iterations. Thoughts so far:

• It'll be made of oak, to match my side table.
• It'll have some drawers. It's likely that I'll go for two full-width drawers, but I might go for one full-width drawer and two half-width drawers; I'm not sure yet.
• It's going to be sized to fit my current 32" TV. I have no aspirations of getting a TV any bigger than this, so I'm sticking with that size. The width of the TV is about 800 mm, so I'm going to make this about that size or slightly bigger.
• It's not going to have any shelves for DVD players, Sky boxes or whatever. I pretty much exclusively use a Roku (which is stuck on the back of the TV) for anything I want to watch.
• I'd like it to be a corner-type TV stand with the TV at 45° to the walls (as at present, but with the unit sitting parallel to the TV unlike at present). At the moment I can't decide how "extreme" to make this: it could be triangular in principle, but I think that would look weird, so it'll probably end up as a truncated triangle. I'm not sure how much to truncate it or what that means for drawers.
• I'm currently thinking the drawers will have runners underneath rather than on the side. That should help with the fact that if I want to make the drawers as big as possible, they'll have to be non-rectangular.

I'd originally been thinking that, rather than having conventional drawers, I'd do something fancy with the drawers pivoting out from one corner rather than sliding on runners/rails/whatever. I'd even wondered about making the two drawers pivot in opposite directions. The more I think about it though, the more I think I'm biting off more than I can chew with that!

This is what my CAD model looks like so far. I'm sure it's going to change a lot before I start cutting wood (and I haven't even started modelling drawers etc), but you've got to start somewhere.

The colours are random to make it obvious where the different pieces of wood will join; in practice it will all be oak. I haven't started to think about that angled join on the sides (whether it needs any support) or anything in the way of rails for the shelves and top. Dimensions of this model are 820 mm × 340 mm × 500 mm as that seems a sensible outline size.

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