Wood + White Entertainment Center...

 We finally finished up the project that we've been working on for the past 3+ months. Our TV stand is done!!! We finished it on Monday and I'm still giddy about having it in the living room...

Really, it's better than I thought it would be. It's always scary (for me anyway) to build something yourself. We are amatures at this for sure, but it turned out so great!

I'm still a little shocked that Trent agreed that we could do the white frame with the different colored wood doors. We have very, very different tastes in style. He likes natural colored wood, and is one of those people who thinks it's a sin to paint over nice wood. When I first showed him a picture of what I really wanted (similar to this) he said no way! So when I brought it up again when we got serious about building something and he said, "Sure, why not" I was really surprised. I kept asking if he was sure he was okay with it... and he said he was. So we drew out our plans and made it happen.

We wanted it to be very simple. Two opened slots at the top for the DVD player and current VCR we have (hoping to swap that out for something to play games on at some point here). We also wanted closed cabinets with space to store toys/blankets/games and some hidden drawers for DVD's. 

We've been going out to his dad's about once a week for the past 3 months to work on it. It took longer than I thought it would, but part of what's nice about building things with Trent's dad is that we get to spend lots of good quality time with him.

Trent cut the wood for the cabinet doors and brought them home for me to stain. Can I just say how much I love staining wood? It's kind of an addiction for me. I love it! I love taking something that I sort of like and making it into something I love with just a little stain. I went with Jacobean for the dark, Early American for the lighter brown, and made a homemade stain of steel wool soaked in vinegar for the gray/barn wood color (what I did was put a steel wool pad in a glass bottle and covered it in white vinegar for 24 hours. Then I took out the pad, wrung it out a little, and rubbed the pad onto the wood). 

Let me just show you how cool the vinegar stain turned out. These two panels are both stained with that, but they are two totally different colors because of the type of wood that was used. The wood on the left is a soft pine and the wood on the right is a hard maple. The hardwood came out GRAY! And the soft wood a light/dark brown. It was an awesome science experiment! Pretty sure this is my new favorite stain.

Simple knobs (that can be tied together for future baby-proofing)...

Simple hinges... I really think it's the simplicity of it all that makes it so pretty to me.

Here is our inside storage area.

I still need to fill in those spaces, once the boy decides to quit playing hide and seek in them...

I'm just so happy with how it turned out. We really needed to have some good functional furniture in our livingroom. It's nice to have something that looks great and provides storage that we really need.

 I love working on projects like this with my husband. Building something out of nothing for our family to enjoy.