Hoke’s Ramblings

Finally, after years of waiting, a blog entry worth reading!

A while back I bought a TV cabinet at an auction. The only problem with it was it had grotty broken slats on the display case door, which I didn’t much care for. I broke those out and replaced them with a pane of glass. Much nicer, but if you don’t keep the inside neat, it looks terrible.

While it’s all very nice and geeky organising your DVD catalogue online, if they’re just tossed higgledy-piggledy into the display case, they’re pretty hard to browse, and aren’t all that nice to look at.

I had the notion that because the cabinet was slightly deeper than three DVD boxes, a bunch of appropriately sized steps, so that the DVDs could be stacked behind one another in layers, would go a long way to neatening up my cabinet.

So I whipped out my trusty tape measure and measured up the cabinet, and DVD boxes – taking my LOTR extended editions into account too! I then went to Builder’s Warehouse and got them to cut up a plank of 20mm SA Pine into slats that I roughly thought would do the job. I’m a tad embarrassed to say I botched the measurements of one of the planks, so I’m not going to be showing a side view of the finished product, but here’s a Sketchup rendition instead:
Obviously you’ll need to adjust the width to match your needs – in fact I made mine way too snug and couldn’t actually get it into the cabinet once it was varnished, so some disassembly was required.

Everything is screwed together from the top, so that no screws are visible from the front. Basically three screws along the front of the horizontal slats hold the front panels in place, and then two screws on each side keep the horizontal slats on the L-shaped braces.

I (actually Lina) gave it a couple of coats of coloured varnish to make it match the cabinet. As I said, I botched the measurements, so I wasn’t planning on showing the finished product, but Lina said if I didn’t, no-one would ever get to appreciate her varnishing job. So here it is:

After that it was just a matter of alphabetising, and squeezing them all in! It looks like I’m going to need to put in another shelf above the top level, but for now I’ve returned the LOTR boxes to the entrance hall bookshelf to give the rest of my collection some breathing room.

While putting all the discs in alphabetical order I noticed some interesting coincidental juxtapositions, like “Hot Fuzz” next to “Ice Station Zebra”, and “The Silence of the Lambs” next to the “Sound of Music”.

I also realized that a heck of a lot of movies start with “S”!