My parents have had the same furniture in their house for the last 34 years. Not heirloom pieces, mind you — just the stuff they bought a long time ago that has managed to survive until now — and it drives me up the wall. At my place, the furniture landscape is in a constant state of flux, and I like it that way. Enter one older Ikea-style entertainment center that needed a change.
It was almost an afterthought to take a picture while I was tearing it down to create something different in my spur-of-the-moment burst of ret-conning carpentry. Basically, it was a full entertainment center with glass knick-knack shelves and an older 27-inch CRT TV tucked in the center — state of the art, circa 1993. And in a straight-up digital age, it had to go.
What’s funny is that instead of destroying it, shipping it off to a resell place, or passing it along to a newly-liberated teen looking to populate her studio apartment with more than a giant spool, I reckoned that my rickety junk could be elevated to minty fresh awesomeness with just a nail gun, some glue, and a little hacking here and there.
So, I hacked off the supports and the upper unit and slapped the top onto the very worn TV shelf. 50 nails later I had a hutch whose biggest feature was no longer a perpetual motion issue at the drop of every stiff breeze. It now looked pretty damn modern and was infinitely more serviceable to the needs at hand. Will this work for every dilapidated unit infesting living rooms the world over? Of course not, but it’s a mighty cheap way to stretch what you’ve got into what you need.
This solution, $0. Just sayin’.
