Let there be light....

...And cabinets, too!! When we removed the paneling from the walls we found the outline of what used to a built-in cabinet surrounding the fireplace. Apparently at some point some brilliant mind thought it would be a good idea to remove them. This had to have been in the 70's - only in an era that had Nixon AND disco could this have sounded like a good idea.

Proving you can't stop a determined idiot with power tools, I went next door to our neighbors and measured their built-ins. Like mad scientists going at a UFO, I reverse engineered the cabinets and made some from scratch. The cabinets are made from plywood with simple rabbet joinery. The faces are made from poplar and assembled with pocket hole joints using a Kreg jig. The finished cabinets were then mounted to the wall. Once that was done I had to work on the mantel. I started with a frame of poplar sitting on top of the cabinets. Spanning the distance between the cabinets is a 2x4. The top is a solid single plank with simple cove moulding.

The final step was to make use of the electrical receptacles we found under the paneling. We ordered up a pair of scance lights from School House Elecric. The frosted glass shades throw off just the righ amount of light and combined with the chocolate brown wall really warm up the room.