When I’m not working on props or sets for shorts, I like to be creative with other projects. Being an aspiring filmmaker I love films. My boyfriend shares this passion with me and has an extensive DVD collection almost as impressive as my own. Although I love films, I didn’t want DVD’s on display in the living room, or even in the editing suite. I find it looks cluttered and distracting. I think unless I had a house where I could have a big dedicated film library, or large cupboard, I don’t really like to see the dvd cases.

It’s not like book shelves (our next big project) where there’s a variety in size and texture. I have some books, well a lot of books, many editions of the same novels, with the most beautiful spines and it’d seem a shame to not have them on display. So Craig’s making a library wall. With a sliding ladder. Ever since I saw Disney’s Beauty and The Beast I had unrealistic expectations for a home library. However, there’s an awkward room in Craig’s house. It’s where the old kitchen used to be before the extension and now it’s just  a mismatched storage room/home bar, very unappealing to the eye and it’s one of two ways visitors can walk into the kitchen. I tend to avoid walking through there. We decided to rip out all of the cupboards and make the room bigger, in the process adding a library wall for all of our books. More on that in a later post, but it’s going to be pretty epic with what we’re planning.

Back to Dvds. Craig really wanted his film collection to stay in the living room. I have spent a while making the living room very peaceful and bright. A relaxing space (aside from the TV). We came to a compromise, if we could find a beautiful shelving unit (with doors) they’d stay. Originally I wanted a white French armoire style book case, but I couldn’t find one with doors. I’m also really particular with french style furniture. Some of it looks very cheap and mass produced to me, the ones we did like were super expensive. It seemed a little ridiculous to spend so much on a DVD cupboard. We want french armoires for wardrobes one day so we’d rather spend money on those.

One day, whilst our weekly visit to Homesense and TK MAXX (We go before Grocery shopping each week), I found 4 carved wooden panels. I’m really into carved wood and balinese style decor. We already have carved wooden panels on the wall so I knew we shouldn’t buy any more. But then it came to me.

‘Dude, come check out these panels’. I shouted across the shop. Ever so elegantly. (when i get excited I forget my surroundings.)

He dug them. I said ‘could we make these into doors?’, he said ‘yep, easy’.

 

So that was it. We bought them, went home later that night and drew some sketches. A year passed before we got around to working on it, the panels sat in the office until then, but it was definitely worth the wait. I love the final product. I love that we made it (well, mostly Craig and his skills). We ran our of Annie Sloan ‘Old White’ and a stockist wasn’t open near us for a few days so we bought Rustoleum ‘chalk white’ as we were eager to finish the project and knew we’d be sanding and distressing it anyway.

So, here’s the DVD cupboard we made. One of a kind and really pretty and interesting in my opinion. We’ve since bought a few more panels to make a stereo cabinet for Craig’s turntable and vinyls, and a new DVD unit as the black gloss shows up every speck of dust and it’s not nice seeing all of the electrical wires and games consoles. I love SNES, don’t get me wrong, but in this house we have every console known to man (although need to find my Atari still), and unless we have a games room, we don’t like having all the consoles on display. We really don’t like clutter (the guys would be shocked at me referring to their games as clutter).

I’ll be blogging the making of the library wall, vinyl cabinet and DVD unit as we already have the panels for those.  For now, here’s  a few photos of our latest project.

 

Thanks for stopping by. Please leave a link in the comments if you have a blog, i’d love to check it out.

Much Love,

S

xx