Build Log: Entertainment Hutch

This is our first time being in a place that might justify having a second TV (not just for the sake of having a second TV) and because we’ve only ever really been in places where one TV made sense, we didn’t have much by way of furniture, accessories or organization for the second TV. Being the secondary setup, it was it’s mostly just me piling crap haphazardly in the general direction of the TV - my wife’s been pretty patient about this being a total mess! Since this is a secondary setup and intended to be a quick in-between-projects build, I didn’t want to make it too fancy or expensive.

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Quick Links

• Goals and Objective

• Step 1 - Left Cubby

• Step 2 - Right Cubby

• Step 3 - Bringing it Together

• Milestone

• Mixups, Surprises and Lessons Learned

• Featured Gear

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Goals and Objectives

This entertainment hutch is intended to be a quick project that let me use up some material I had lying around and to make a home for a bunch of crap in our living room. In particular, I wanted to have a somewhat dedicated space for our robo-vac to park so we’re not tripping over the base station all the time. In our space, we happen to have a cable passthrough already installed in the wall for a TV so I wanted to leverage that to keep things as tidy as I could. I also wanted to have a cubby for my subwoofer on one side, a UPS on the other and to try and keep the cables manageable — all without buying a receiver.

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Step 1 - Left Cubby

The left cubby was the easy one: I had already built a similar enclosure when making my second wall-desk. In fact, a long time ago, I had stumbled upon the very same set of speakers at a pawn shop for $60 so I had an extra set kicking around. Well, I had this second set at work, but we all know what happened to going into the office. Having the same set at home made it easy to mock out and size the cubby in person.

Laying everything out

The manual says that the robot vac needs THREE (3!!) feet of clearance on each side in addition to six feet in front of the charging base.

Three feet! Thankfully, it’s works perfectly fine with 15-20 inches of clearance, otherwise my entertainment hutch would be a bench…

Working with materials on hand

The main body of the hutch would be made from this offcut from my bed-frame build

Notching out for the baseboard

I cut a generous notch in the back so that the cabinet could slide right up against the wall. Speed-square and jigsaw make for a surprisingly clean cut!

More scraps

The cross braces were ripped down scraps I had lying around;

Cutting notches for the braces

The orientation of the braces helps to keep the cabinet ridgid. Could totally do this with pocket holes, or glue and pins but this wasn’t too much more work and felt more sturdy.

Cutting out an opening for the subwoofer

After drilling a couple holes and running through with the jigsaw to hog out the bulk of the material, I came back with a router to clean up the cuts and then again it a nice roundover from both sides

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Step 2 - Right Cubby

The right cubby was a bit complicated: I originally started with just a side panel and a way to mount the UPS high up: this way, the bottom portion of the panel would be ‘clear’ so I didn’t have to make the entire thing even wider to accommodate the robovac, but then I thought that might not be very ridgid, not to mention super tippy. So I added another panel to make a box out of it but also had to cut out a large opening so that I could actually install/remove/use the UPS. But by making this its own ‘box’, I had the space below the UPS which would come in handy later.

Laminated 'shelf'

A couple scraps of ply laminated together to make a stronger shelf for the UPS to sit on.

Cutting triangle braces

It’s not a particularly long cantilever, but the UPS does weight a lot

Assembled

Glued, pins and screws, this shelf is pretty beefy

Cutting the access hatch, part 1

First we drill some holes so the blade can get through

Cutting the access hatch, part 2

Then we run the jigsaw to hog out the majority of the perimeter

Cutting the access hatch, part 3

Using a router we template out the rest of the perimeter and cut a clean box. Not shown: after I got the box cleanly cut and went to apply a roundover, I put it down and grabbed the wrong router (one with a straight bit) and cut into it — so I had to enlarge my opening…

Trying to figure spacing on the UPS

In a boneheaded move, the hole-spacing is not marked on the UPS itself (Spoiler: 6.5” which is listed on the very last page of one of the instruction PDFs).

Here, I’m testing out the hole-spacing on a piece of scrap before committing to the actual good piece.

Good fit

Definitely paid off to have the just right: the UPS can be supported by the slots (only 1/2” screws so not a whole lot of weight capacity) as well as by the little shelf.

Laying out the shelf

The speed-square helps to keep the shelf somewhat level

Laying everything out

I decided to make a bit of a sealed cubby between the UPS and the base… for reasons. On the flip side, this does make the cubby pretty ridgid

Pocket holes to the rescue

Since this entire ‘second panel’ was a bit of an afterthought, I used pocket holes to assemble this.

In the house

Mounted and in the house, now we can figure out the final spacing and get this put together. You can see that I cut out a cable pass channel as well.

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Step 3 - Bringing it Together

I thought the hard parts were behind me, funny enough, getting everything wired up in clean way was nearly just as much work!

Gawd it's a mess

I started this before I went back to the office to pick up my speakers so I used an old soundbar.

Rough-wired in

It’s still a trainwreck, but at least all the bits that should be connected, are.

Cord management

The disaster of cords on the previous picture meant that I need to add some kind of a cord shield - so some scrap plywood with a couple of cord passthrough holes to the rescue.

Installed

The back cover plate has a bottom lip. On the back side it runs flush to the wall giving a nice seal and on the other side, I can use the other half of the lip as a shelf rest.

Mostly assembled

I added a couple bits of scrap and slide slid a piece of plywood as a shelf. I used strategic trim to make the entire surface appear to be double-laminated.

Making a door

So to cover up the right side, I wanted to make some kind of a door that could easily come off. I didn’t want to use magnets or hinges. To start, I cut a relief where the center brace would ride on.

Cutting a catch

The panel would sit on the center brace but now I wanted it to not fall off (gee, who would have wanted that?!) I decided on a gravity catch

Like this

I cut a relief on the right (top) side so that I could actually slide the door inti place. I drilled for a simple door pull I had lying around

Washers to the rescue

I didn’t have a short enough machine screw to make this happen so I padded the back side of the knob with washers (and had to use a forstner bit to counterbore the brace (not a big deal since you don’t see it)

Voila!

This gives me access to that bottom space just by lifting the door out of the way

Friction fit shelf

The middle shelf is just resting on two plywood offcuts — the hardest part here was sizing the plywood so that it was the same width as it was thick (a square, essentially). This way you get both the contrasting edge pattern and you don’t risk splitting it when screwing to the cubby sides.

Very clean

So here, I ran HDMI extension from the switch into the cubby down below. Here is where I connected the “cluttery devices’ (Fire stick, Chromecast. I have USB power slipped down into that cubby too and it’s super easy to access since I can just pop the door and it’s right there (on the floor)

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Milestone

When I went back to the office, I grabbed my speakers — the living room TV setup is good for now

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Mixups, Surprises and Lessons Learned

By far the hardest challenge was being constrained to working with that initial offcut of plywood as the primary material for this build:

• The width of the offcut dictated how deep the overall shelf could be

• However, the size of the UPS dictates how big the opening for it needs to be

• Which ultimately means the amount of material left after cutting out the opening was fairly small

On the front side, this doesn’t have a huge impact - the plywood offcut I used as the shelf support only needs to support a screw… but on the back side (where I biased my cutout), this determines the front-to-back placement of the cord cover … and I could totally use another inch or two to shove all the cords!

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Limited space behind the cord cover

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Finicky front panel

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Cable cut outs could be bigger

The remaining gripes are mostly fit and finish:

• The front cover was a bit of an afterthought, I couldn’t really make a super clean door for it and, due to the way I had to cut a relief on the back side, it exaggerated the tendency for it to warp

• I made the cable cutouts prior to assembling (and didn’t have all of the cables handy) so it was a bit of an eye opener when I started feeding cables into/out of the cubbies that I was totally maxing out the capacity of the meager pass-through (I actually bought thin HDMI cables to alleviate this)

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On the A/V side, the big challenge I have is that, I have no way to remotely control the volume: instead of buying a receiver, I used a HDMI splitter with a built-in audio extractor - this lets me directly hook up my computer speakers (but my speakers don’t have a remote). My current cheapo TV does have an audio-out that I can connect the speakers to, but it is not linked to the TV’s volume setting (and I don’t have a headphone jack which would be tied to the TV’s volume control). I snaked a 3.5mm stereo cable up through the wall in preparation for a future TV upgrade that will have a headphone port.

At some point, I think I’ll want to replace my cheap little Android Kodi box with something more performant that won’t choke up parsing through my NAS or playing 4K HDR x265 content. Since this is intended to be a secondary setup, I don’t think I’ll go with a full blown HTPC as I did in the basement, but it’s definitely something I’ll revisit after I upgrade the TV.

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Featured Gear

The bones of the setup is pretty plain:

• Cheap 1080P TV we had before I upgraded the main TV setup downstairs

• Google Chromecast Ultra and Amazon Fire Stick 4K

• A cheapo Android Kodi Box (AMLogic S912 , 2GB RAM). Officially, this decodes 4K60 HDR10 in H265, but reality suggests otherwise

The bits that might be a bit more unique:

• APC Back-UPS 550 which is strong enough to keep everything running through a power blip; I used a CableCreation right-angle outlet saver to reduce the footprint to the wall

• Mounting Dream MD2617-CA fully articulating TV mount; I probably could have got away with a tilting mount, but I was familiar with the installation of this one specifically (since I just installed it for the main TV) and the extra articulation comes in handy if I ever want to do anything behind the TV (like run a stereo cable up)

• Logitech Z-2300 speakers which are sadly, discontinued however, the modern spiritual successors (Z623/Z623) are a good stand-in.

• A 3-source HDMI switcher with audio extraction (both 2.1 and 5.1) with a remote; I used thin HDMI cables (2’/6’) in conjunction with couplers to make HDMI extensions - this allowed me to put the Fire and Chromecast out of sight underneath the UPS

• SofaBaton smart universal remote to try and keep the amount of clutter in the living room to a minimum

• Our faithful robo-vac, the Eufy 30C; there are some newer models now but this model goes on sale regularly and does everything we need (for now!)

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