So we finally got around to getting at least one wall of the den/office completed. When we moved into the new house last year I had just thrown the computers on the floor with a couple pieces of particle board which sort of made a cheesy desk and called it good. Far from aesthetic but fully nearly functional. After drafting up one the largest makeover projects I might have ever taken on (see last pic below), I scaled it back about 90% and got to work. Only two weekends later it’s done, or rather, 1/3 done to be more accurate, since we have 2 more walls to finish before we’re done. But are house projects really ever done?
Step 1. Build a desk. Not just any desk, but a desk for 3 computers. Why 3 computers? Don’t ask. Maybe it’s because that’s how many will fit along the wall, or because that’s just how many I have, or because that’s how many this family needs to stay functional. Whatever the reason, this desk was going to be huge. Though honestly, it wasn’t about the desk, the desk was, or rather is, temporary, a stop-gap until I can do a real built-in. I built it mostly from wood I already had in the garage, namely particle board, MDF and 3×1 common pine strips. It’s nothing fancy, but it was enough for me to get the project started one Saturday morning without a trip to Home Depot. I won’t go into the details of the desk. It works fine for now, it’s also more functional than my “desk” before and now it’s at least somewhat aesthetic and fits the intent and new style of the room. I will say that my wife did a bang-up job painting and distressing it, considering what she had to work with. If nothing else, it was good practice for some of the other furniture she has plans to re-finish.
Step 2. Add the wainscot. In this case, we did a board and batten style wainscot. Google it and see what comes up if you want ideas. There’s no end to what or how you can do this look. I suppose it’s not really a wainscot but then again, this really isn’t a blog. I created this look with strips of 1/4″x3-3/4″x98″ pieces of pre-cut MDF from Home Depot. they sell these pieces for various house projects will no real single intended use. I found they worked awesome for doing the battens as they were the right width and thickness and all machine-cut so the edges were perfect. Most people don’t use a board/batten this thin, as the look it creates is more flat, but I wanted a clean edge all the way down to the baseboard, which is just over 1/4″ at the top, and I didn’t want to do a chamfer where the different thickness pieces meet up. I’ve seen it both ways, this way worked best for me.
I cut one of the strips at about 2″ and ran it the length of the wall on top of the existing baseboard (which I did not remove) to give it some added height and to create somewhat of a bottom rail. The total baseboard height is about 5″ from the carpet so it looks a little better and gives a nice clean edge for the battens to run into. Next I cut seven boards at 39″ and placed each one on top of the 2″ bottom rail above the baseboard. I took the 1-3/4″ piece that was left over from the bottom rail and added it to the top along with a piece of the 3-3/4″ making the top part, the top rail, 5-1/2″ wide. Then to give the molding some depth, I routered a custom top rail to go over the 1/4″ piece and ran it the length of the wall. Since this piece ran into an existing door casing (that was only 1/2″ deep) I ended up doing a 30 degree chamfer to bring the 1″ top rail down to a 1/2″. It looks fine to me, though a real craftsmen would probably scoff.
The battens are nailed and glued to the walls, since I didn’t space them on the studs, and the top and bottom boards are glued and nailed only at the studs. I puttied the holes, caulked the transitions, primed and painted using our original trim house color “Swiss Coffee” in a semi-gloss. The wall finish between the battens is not smooth, it still has the hand-trowel texture as does the rest of the room, but since this was a retrofit job, I didn’t have the spacing to add a flat board and I didn’t trust my mudding skills to try and smooth it. A professional would have smoothed the wall, but for this budget renovation, the texture is a non-issue and really doesn’t look as bad as you’d think. Again, I’ve seen it done both ways. Smoothing it is preferred however and I will reconsider this option as I move through out the house with this style.
Step 3. Paint. So after painting the board and batten white, it only made sense to apply a fresh coat of color to the wall above it. Our last office we painted a dark/deep blue but this time around we wanted something a little lighter, so we went with a blue-gray midtone Behr color called Silent Tide from Home Depot. This color is beautiful and went on the wall perfectly. The contrast with the white looks awesome. It makes me want to add a wainscot to every room in my house, just to get that contrasting look of color midway up the wall. It’s so neat, so clean.
So that’s about it, I’ve nearly hit my thousand word mark, which means I’ve written too much. I added the desk I had built (which covered most of the wainscot, bummer, oh well) and set up the 3 computers. And there you have it, how to spruce up an office with some color and style and only 1 trip to Home Depot. There’s plenty of other, better, tutorials out there for creating this style but I’ve never seen it done with so much computing power in front of it! Anyway, check out the pictures below for a complete start to finish on this project and if you like the look, let me know in the comments below! Thanks again for checking out Dan’s Blog For Whoever.
This past weekend I built a small under-cabinet mount for our XBOX 360 Kinect. This sweet little shelf moves the sensor from above the shelf in the entertainment center (in front of the center channel speaker) to just below the shelf and tucks it neatly out of the way. The wire is more hidden now too and it looks much less thrown-together than it did before. I don’t think this post needs much detail, as the pictures pretty much speak for themselves, but I’ll add some words for anyone looking for a quick fix to clean up their Kinect integration into their media center.
Last year we bought a new home, while the details of that little adventure are better left for another post, I did want to share some of the work we have done in the backyard in order to make it a more kid-friendly place to play. Now the house was everything we could have wanted, but the backyard left a lot to be desired. There was plenty of space, it had potential, but there was nothing back there but dirt, rocks and one of the hugest piles of sand I’ve ever seen outside of Zuma Beach. The first thing on the list of things to do in the backyard was – put in a play set.
Several years ago I threw together a cheap HTPC based on an 
Last month my 13-year old Sony 5.1 receiver finally quit. The very same receiver that had been the hub of my home theater since the dawn of the DVD era. I was bummed to have it break since I wasn’t really in the market for a new receiver. The Sony DVD player that was just as old died a couple of years ago and the XBOX took over as my stand-alone DVD player. I hadn’t looked up receivers in years, so I had no idea what kind of new options I would be in store for. So I got online and started doing some A/V Receiver research to see what I could find. After several weeks of debating between a Sony, a Denon and a Pioneer unit, I finally decided on the 
If you’ve ever wondered if that old Pentium IV computer you’ve got collecting dust in the closet might just make a great media hub capable of full 1080p, you may be surprised to find that it’s got just enough horsepower to actually work. That’s what I discovered last night after installing a Samsung Blu-ray drive into my 3.4 GHz Pentium HTPC and watched Back to the Future in full 1080p with perfectly fluid playback. Something I didn’t think would be possible with such an old CPU. But I’ve finally made the jump to Full HD and I’m totally blown away. The detail is amazing, the colors pop and the picture just looks outright gorgeous. And I managed to get it all for less than the cost of a decent stand-alone player. Here’s why I finally caved and how I got my system up and running.
Here’s some quick specs on the machine I’ve got running Blu-ray right now. I bought it used for $50 several years ago and have been using it as an HTPC in the master bedroom for the last year. It’s an HP Pavilion dc7100 running an i915P chipset and a 3.4 GHz Pentium IV (Prescott 550) with 2 GB of PC3200 DDR400 memory. I’m running Windows 7 32-bit that gets a WEI of 4.4. A 320 GB Western Digital hard drive takes care of recording space for TV shows using 
