Here’s a teaser of the final product. But this isn’t what it originally looked like. In fact it looked very, very different.
My fist impression was that someone had left their garbage in the front yard with the hope someone would take it. The box sat there for several days because who in their right mind would want THAT.
It was an OLD TV. Like the kind I remember from when I was five. The kind you actually had to walk up to in order to turn the dial to change the channels.
This kind of TV that only had 13 or 14 channels and only half had a signal.
I was not initially inspired, thus I too drove past it on my merry way for several days. But I recently saw Beckie’s transformation of a similar piece on her blog Infarrantly Creative , which got my little brain churning. If she could do it… What’s to lose? So in the middle of a horrific rain storm, the kind we only get two or three times a year, I zoomed over to the curb on which this pathetic thing sat.
I’m the polite kind of scrounger so I ran up to the door, still in my exercise clothes, my hair barely brushed and in a pony tail, and rang the doorbell. They said I could have it for free as well as a gun cabinet they had just thrown in a dumpster in the driveway. See its transformation into a dining room hutch here.
The couple at the home were getting ready to move and getting rid of a lot of stuff. They were happy to help me load my finds into the back of my minivan. The only problem, particularly with the TV was that it was too heavy to get out of the car by myself.
Like it was full of rocks, REALLY HEAVY.
Not wanting to wait until my sweet Sports Addict got home (because he would think I had finally lost my mind), I decided to just start gutting it right there in the car with the hope that once it was gutted I could muscle the frame out myself.
After about a bazillion screws and cutting lots of wires it came.
Some of the guts
After about an hour’s worth of work and just a few scratches, I successfully extracted the shell from the minivan. Remember a lot of this was going on in intermittent rain. No worries though. My neighbors already know I’m nuts.
At this point I was just hoping this wasn’t a huge mistake. But if Beckie could do it…
Thus pushing ahead I used scraps of materials in the garage to make a box inside the shell. Since I thought it would be nice to use for piano music I decided to put in vertical dividers. I just hate it when books fall over into a pile and I’ve found vertical dividers on shelves really help with this. It also made sense since sheet music is often very tall.
Vertical dividers before getting their front edge trim
I also trimmed out the front to hide the plastic molding used to attach the TV to the frame.
Molding to hide the unsightly edges of the TV shell
So after caulking it was finally ready to prime and paint.
I didn’t put the back on until the end so I could paint from both the front and back. It made it easier to paint the interior. I used some Kilz 2 primer I had on hand and some “oops” paint I mixed together to get this lovely grayish-blue.
Once that was dry I went over the whole piece with a cream color I used on my roadside mirror. I just dry brushed on the cream color, highlighting the molding of the old TV shell and giving it a little bit of a brushed over look.
In the end my wonderful Sports Addict is no longer questioning my sanity, and I have a beautiful new hutch for holding all the piano music that used to be spilling over the top of the piano.
The best part though it that it was 100% FREE.
I didn’t spend a single cent on this. Everything I used was already in the garage either from old projects or left from previous owners of the home. Not only did I save at least part of the TV from the landfill, but I reused items that might have eventually been thrown away in the garage. Free and better for the environment. I’m just going to go pat myself on the back again as I admire my new living room furniture.
April
CAUTION: I’ve been told there is a part in some of these old TV’s that may hold a charge even if the TV has been unplugged for a while. Taking one of these apart could result in electrocution.
Here are some more great posts from the ladies of Home Hinges
Gun Cabinet turned Dining Hutch
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