Alcoves are the areas around the fireplace a.k.a. nooks. They are actually pretty useless space most of the time but work well with little inbuilt cabinets.
I had great intentions of building my own custom cabinets out of MDF. But seeing as I don't have a proper wood shop .. yet .. I decided to buy them. As you can imagine, getting custom built cabinets typically cost an arm, a leg, and maybe some fingers and toes. I managed to find a hybrid called DIY Alcove Cabinets which cuts the cabinet to measure and flat pack ships them. It's DIY but in reality, it's just like Ikea flat packs with a bit of extra steps.
Anyway, photos of the assembly below.
So just like Ikea furniture, I got a bunch of flat panels and a box of random kit. Instructions were online .. I would have like to see it in the box too. Minor gripe.
Putting things together was pretty simple - screws and dowels
Caitlin and Ashley were very entertained by the assembly (in my head at least) .. In reality, they were more like, "what are you doing with our TV?!!"
My second grip (and I only had 2) was that the cabinets were not built high enough to accommodate the skirting underneath. My goal was to make this seamless with the rest of the room. I gave them the details/height for the skirting but evidently it was missed.
Not letting that get in my way, I made a couple of 36mm shims by screwing together a couple bits of floorboard. Care this is why I don't throw away scrap wood.
With my shims in place, the cabinets were put into position and very importantly, leveled. Next the fillers at the side were installed and the doors test fit.
Finally, the top was cut to the shape of the alcove.
Test fitting the skirting to make sure I got the correct height.
So that was the left one .. easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Next came the cabinet on the right. This one was a bit harder because of all the cable-ey thingies.
I also had to finish off the network cabling. This was on my very long to-do list but figured this would be much easier before the cabinet went in place. So some quick networking was in order.
The skirting behind wasn't at all necessary but hey, for all that was involved I put it in anyway.
Now the fun part of cutting out the back to provide access to the cable-ey stuff.
First try .. and almost
Second try with a little more cut out.
The other fun part was cutting a hole in the top to let the cables exit for the TV. I bought one of those ring things to make it look neat, but I still needed to cut out a 50mm hole. This wasn't as easy as I would have though as it had to go through about 50mm of MDF. I thought my hole saw was going to start a fire it was working so hard to get that hole cut.
And finally, the kids got their TV back. And I got a, "oh that's nice, now get out of the way!"from the kids.... with this discerning audience, you take what you can get I guess
Left side with skirting (sans doors)
So there you go, sort of DIY cabinets. I had to use tools at least to put them together so I guess that counts.
