Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Watch New Yankee Workshop

When I was growing up, there was no HGTV or DIY network. I watched PBS on Saturday afternoons (if it didn't interfere with football season), and that meant Hometime, Bob Vila, This Old House, and, my personal favorite, New Yankee Workshop. I loved how Norm would take a piece of wood and transform it into an amazing piece of furniture.

Remember this thing?


Well, it looks a little different on the outside now... and very different on the inside. But before I get to that, let me show you what all it went through:

I took off the back, removed the shelves the drawers were on, and popped off the drawer fronts.


I sanded the daylights out of it with a power hand sander and Paul and I picked out some pretty complicated yet cool hinges, which required pulling out the router (Paul didn't seem to mind that too much):


Here it is with the drawer fronts attached to the hinges:


When I was sanding it, I noticed that the layer of paint underneath the gloppy white paint job was gold. Makes me wonder about this dresser's previous lives.


Paul, my amazing assistant, hard at work. Without his knowledge and his tools, none of my crazy ideas would be possible. THANKS, PAUL!!!!


I helped. Really, I did. See?


Reinforced the bottom - it's going to hold a bit of weight on that bottom shelf.


We mounted the top drawer because we didn't need it for the dresser's intended purpose.


Prime, paint, reattach the drawer fronts...


The hinges in action - had to add washers to account for the sliding.


And voila! New TV stand!


Sure beats the old one, right? It was over my sewing table, mostly to keep Jamie away from the computer (we don't have cable; everything comes through the computer or the Wii.)


And the reason we separated the drawer fronts and used the cool hinges was so that we could have pull-down access to the power button and the DVD drive on the front of the computer, like so:


*Whew*! Glad that's done. Of course, now there are five other projects in line behind this one! Here's a little mosaic of all the work that went into this one:



Also, I added this post to the DIY Showoff Blog's Project Parade - wanna see more creativity in action? Click the button below!