Sunday, March 18, 2007

Nothing is easy

We are approaching completion on the sewing room project. With Kyle and his girlfriend visiting for the weekend, we needed to get the stored furniture and the TV out of Megan's bedroom and back in the sewing room, and set the tv/dvd player up for viewing.

We'd been thinking about permanently relocating the tube to the sewing room, but in setting it up, we realized it took way more floor space than we wanted to allocate, and was far too prominent. As we discussed where to put the TV and DVD player, my eyes kept straying to the small closet next to my sewing closet. I said to Dan, what about putting the tv in the closet?

We both loved the idea, as we really don't want the tube to be the focal point of any room. All looked likely, we had a small table to set the tv on, and there was a nearby outlet already... but the tv was 21 inches wide, and the closet door opening only 20.5.

By this time, we really were sold on the idea, so we thought briefly about looking for a narrower tv, then abandoned that in favor of simply removing the trim to set the tv in the closet. Of course, if we were going to leave the door open, then we'd need to paint the closet, so, Saturday morning, I crawled into the closet and gave the walls a coat of teal, and the floor a coat of taupe. Once it dried, we set about removing the trim. Now why one would use 3" nails to tack on some simple pine trim I don't know, but we did eventually manage to remove the trim, albeit with the assistance of some colorful language. I suppose we should be happy the previous owner didn't use contact cement with the giant nails.

Finally, the trim was off and we set the small table in, being careful not to mar the freshly painted floor. We'd found a nice heavy duty extension cord with a low-profile plug, plugged it in, bundled the cord neatly, plugged in the tv and dvd player... and it didn't work. More colorful language followed. I rustled up a new cord, but then had to remove the warning tags. You'd think you were handling nuclear waste, not merely using a simple extension cord judging by the number of safety tags on the cord. Tags removed, we plugged it in , and at last, the set-up worked. We put trim back in place, which is currently staying in place via friction, no 3" nails necessary, put the door back on and voila, a hidden tv. We love it.

The final step -- the door to the sewing closet. Late this afternoon I carefully sanded the door, and we painstakingly measured for cutting the angled corner, even going to the trouble of making a cardboard template. Dan made a perfect cut with the circular saw, and we brought the door upstairs, confident that installing it would take just a few minutes.

WRONG! Nothing is easy. The door is square, but the door framing is not. AUGHHHH!!!! Bang head here....

TO BE CONTINUED.....

1 comment:

Petunia's Gardener said...

You presented this so much more nicely than I would have done. This ALWAYS happens when we undertake a project. Love the closet TV! A great idea. When we moved to this house, we left our TV in the garage because we didn't know where to put it. It was a great summer with no TV. We joked about watching movies in the garage like at a drive in. Finally, winter came and we wanted to rent movies. In it came. We do have it in a small side room rather than a main room.

Hang in there, with that door!