ENTERTAINMENT CENTERS
14 July 2008
"Movies’ Homies"
For people like my partner Joe and me the only choice for a home theater or entertainment center that makes any sense at all is to simply buy the wood and start sawing it up. The wages for something like that are a little slim, but if it’s a project the wife especially wants, well, that sort of thing bears all kinds of dividends. And there is also the enjoyment of using daily the item one’s made oneself.
For the people who are most likely to be reading these blogs, though, the choice is not as simple. For a lot of us (and I have to admit I was always in this category before we got the house and I started developing some woodworking skills) it’s a matter of budget. For the first half of our marriage the TV was small, and it sat on a simple wooden cube that I’d bought and refinished. Well, time marches on, as does the entire field of electronics. Going out to the movies has become more expensive, not to mention annoying with the proliferation of commercials they now feel compelled to run prior to the movie itself, and the upshot of it is more and more people are electing to simply stay home. Hey, big screen TV, surround sound, perfect freedom to stop the movie at any time and get another beer—what’s not to like? So, the only question now remaining is where does one put that big screen TV? In the beginning, just plopping it on the floor seemed good enough, but there are so many ways of doing something else with that space that we now find ourselves wanting just a little bit more than we have. And that brings us to the subject of these blogs.
There are so many companies and people doing this that it’s hard to know which to choose, but Furniture From Home is a company that has been around some thirty years, all the but the last four years as a traditional company that operated from a brick-and-mortar location. For the last four years they have been on the Internet, shipping their products around the country.
The items we’ve shown here range from $1099 for the simple bookcase-and-shelf surrounding the large screen TV to $4323 for the unit atop this blog. An entertainment center that can be shipped anywhere in the country has advantages and disadvantages. The price is normally a bit less, and if one does business with a company like Furniture From Home, one finds that their products can be customized to an astonishing extent, which just leaves us with possible freight damage and the necessity of "some assembly required," but in all honesty these factors are easily mitigated.
Still, as a cabinetmaker I have my own preferences—and decidedly biased reasons for them!—and looking at some of these units, especially those at the upper end of the price spectrum, I cannot help thinking that with just a little larger expenditure, one could obtain not a customized base product, but an original.
Joseph
NEXT: "For a Few Dollars More"
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