I have a big problem. Or I guess maybe I should say
that I have a small problem. Or I guess the most accurate thing to say
would be that I have a space problem. you see, a few months ago, we moved into this
new place, and, well, we love it here. lot of my furniture
doesn't really fit in the new living room. The QR table is way too big
and makes the whole space feel cramped. So I started thinking,
How can I redesign the space? And then it just kind of hit me. We're all doing living rooms
completely wrong and we're all wasting a ton of space
as a result. So today I want to completely make over this living
room, cram a whole bunch of tech in here and hopefully revolutionize
the way people think about home theaters. Sound like fun? Alright, let's get our hands dirty. The very first thing I had to do on this
project was just remove everything from the living room,
including this little freeloader. Nothing was spared. The coffee table gone, carpet gone. And unfortunately, my media console, too. As much as I love this thing, it's taking up needless space
and creating a lot of visual clutter. Plus, as you can see, my TV
didn't really fit on it anyways, But if there's no media console, well,
where does the TV go? That's where this wall mount comes in. By wall mounting the TV, I was able to push it back 6 to 8 inches and free up some much
needed square footage directly beneath it. I was also able to fix
the biggest ergonomic mistake most people make
when setting up their TVs. I set the height of my TV so that the center of
it was at the same height as my eyeline. When I'm sitting on the couch. That way,
I don't have to look up or down to watch it. It's just right there
in the neutral position. Next, I rolled out a new, much larger
carpet and under carpet pad and its inclusion in this video isn't just
an excuse to write it off on my taxes. It's actually going to be an integral part
of making this whole project work. Plus, its lighter color should help to make the whole room
feel more open and clean. With all of that taken care of. I temporarily reset up the living room
and took a second to appreciate just how much of a
difference I had already made Simply by wall mounting the TV We've regained some pretty significant
square footage, but it's also introduced a couple of problems. Like, what am I going to do with my ps5,
Xbox, and audio visual receiver? and also that coffee
table is just way too big. So let's head to the shop
and see what we can do about those. As you probably already
guessed, a new coffee table is the first order of business. And rather than wasting all that space
underneath it, I decided to fully enclose it and transform it into a high tech hub
that will power the restroom. the first step towards that goal
was ripping a bunch of three quarter inch white oak plywood. Now, a lot of people would just start
nailing together the box at this point. But I'm going to show you a little trick
that will take your index. Sheet good project to the next level. by cutting the series of rabbets
into the outside edges of plywood. I was able to create a box
that fits together like a puzzle. Not only will this make it stronger,
but it will also make the assembly a heck of a lot easier to. a little bit of glue in all the joints. Clamp it all together and then fire some pins into the corners
to hold everything while the glue sets. The last thing I did was cut a single solid panel that will be
the bottom of the coffee table. And then I dropped it
perfectly into place. I said, perfectly into place. There we go. All right, so that's our box made. I'm not going to install
this bottom on a just yet because I want to cut
a couple of things on it on the CNC. But first, let's make some legs. These legs are going to pull double duty. Not only will they cover
the nasty, raw, plywood edges of our box, but they'll also lift
the bottom of the table up about an inch off the floor
and give us a space to intake air from. By design here was really simple. I started with them
two inch by two inch lengths and then cut out a three quarter
inch by three quarter inch section. This is what they
look like when they're done. And installation was equally simple. I applied some glue and then PIN nailed
each of the four legs to a corner. And don't worry about the nail holes. A little bit of color match wood
filler will make those disappear later. If you look closely, you can see that
I'm actually using a little spacer blocks to elevate
everything as I'm installing legs And that's just because I wanted
to leave some room for an interior trim that will run the whole way
around the perimeter of the box. this little L-shaped piece of oak
will again cover some raw plywood edges and create a concealed cove
where it can install some heavy lighting. But we'll talk more about that later. For now, just like with the legs,
I applied some glue and then nailed my new trim in place. that is the main box done. And what we still have to do the bottom
on the sea and see, like I said before, I think at this point, I'd like to do
something a little bit artistic. All right. So this is the point in the project where
things take a bit of a stressful turn. And I think it's a great opportunity
to talk about today's sponsor, Betterhelp, trying to balance
running multiple businesses. My personal relationships and trying to tackle these building
projects can often be very stressful and if I'm honest at times
can give me a lot of anxiety. But thankfully when I was younger,
I spent a lot of time working with a therapist to develop skills
to properly manage those feelings. And I think it's
one of the best things that I ever did. BetterHelp is on a mission to make therapy more
affordable and accessible for everybody. Finding a therapist can often be hard
and expensive, so what BetterHelp did was create an online platform where you can
be matched with a professional therapist and as little as a few days
by just answer a few questions. Once you're matched with someone, you can do sessions via the phone, webcam
or even live chat. If you don't feel comfortable
with the other options, heck, you can even text your therapist
if you need to. And because it's all remote,
you can do it from anywhere and you don't have to go to a therapist's
office. BetterHelp is a great service
and it can really help you take charge of your mental health. So if you want to sign up,
I put a link down in the video description or you can go to BetterHelp.com/ZacBuilds to get 10% off
your first month of BetterHelp. Clicking that link is a great way
to support the channel and really to support yourself. All right. Now let's get back to building this table
and I'll explain what I meant by doing something
a bit artistic. The easy thing to do here would have been
to just glue together a bunch of pieces of oak into a panel
that looked a little something like this. But I wanted to do things
a bit differently, and my plan called for some serious precision. So before I cut anything, I made sure that my table saw
was set at exactly 90 degrees. Then I started ripping
a bunch of strips of oak. Mine are an inch and a quarter wide. But honestly,
that's a completely arbitrary number. If you want to follow along at home,
you can make them whatever with you want. Eventually I ran out of Oak
and then switched over to Walnut. I continued ripping until I felt that I
had enough pieces for a complete tabletop. then it was time to prepare for the coming
mess. I cut a piece of vapour barrier
to cover my assembly table and then started working on my pattern. A full piece of walnut and a full piece of oak
bookended either side. And then I started filling in the middle
with progressively smaller pieces. So why was I so concerned about precision
earlier? Well, in the end, I had 24 rows of wood,
and even a small 0.1 degree of error would have compounded across all those
rows and made for a very warpy table top. thankfully though, everything looked good
and I was ready for a truly massive glue up rather than trying to be precise here,
I opted for a carpet bombing approach. I threw down a ton of glue and then
just spread it out using a roller. I did this because you only get like 20
minutes before wood glue starts to set up. So it was a bit of a race
against the clock and I had to make every second count. Once I had the glue evenly distributed,
I began rolling over all my pieces and then started applying the clamps,
which again, in the name of saving time,
I had pre-sized before applying any glue. So while we wait for this to dry,
why don't we cut the bottom of the coffee
table over on the CNC? Because that's where a lot of the magic in
this project is going to happen. This bottom panel is going to play
a big role in what separates this coffee table from every other
run of the mill coffee table. in the bottom of it. I have three things. First was this rather large air intake. This will allow cooler air to be sucked up
and into the bottom of the table. second was a bunch of small circular
cutouts that will help me to manage wires And then finally, we have
this small channel that goes the whole way around the perimeter
for even more LED lighting. Well, would you look at that? That is the bottom of our coffee table. Done. And there's all sorts of fun
cut outs in this, as you can see, for some fun stuff later. But first, let's talk about the table top,
So our glue is now dry and this whole thing is one solid piece,
which is pretty cool here. let me demonstrate. Yeah, there we go. See, Unfortunately,
the surface of it is a little bit rough. And obviously,
these ends leave something to be desired. So I think now we have to
clean this up a little bit. Trying to glue together a perfectly square table top is a fools errand. I always opt to just run my boards a little bit long and then cut everything square afterwards with my tracksaw it wastes a bit of material but trust me, its much better than the alternative After that was done, I had
to take care of the surface of my table. Small variations in the height of all those individual pieces
made for a very rough surface. True. I could have sanded everything flat
with the belt sander. But why do that
when you can just use a drum sander, which is essentially like a giant belt
sander attached to a conveyor belt. It took more than a few passes, but
what I was left with was a perfectly flat and smooth table top
that was ready for the next step. receiving a late round over with a trim
router to help improve ergonomics and make it a little bit gentler
on the hands. Now that we're done with the top,
we can marry it with the bottom. Except we're going to have to kind of fix
a little mistake that I made earlier. I want this top to be able
to raise off of the bottom. And in order to make that work,
I got these lift top hinges. But that trim piece that I installed
earlier on the inside, well, it's kind of in the way. that trim prevents the hardware from
sitting flush against the side of the box. So in order to fix that, I had to add
a small spacer block on either side. And don't worry, I'm not just relying
on glue and nails to hold it in place. I sized the mounting screws
so that they would go through the block and into the plywood,
making a nice strong sandwich. According to the specs for these hinges,
they should be able to support up to 150lbs. So theoretically, that should be plenty
for our coffee table top, And anything that happens to be resting on
top of it with last couple of screws in place, it was time to give the whole thing
a test and just see how it worked. too. Let's see. Oh, yeah. That's nice. I think we're in business. Now, let me show you a little detail
that I kind of left out before. I'm sure many of you have probably noticed
that I have these little wood spacers in every corner. And that's because when this closes, I want it to sit a quarter
inch up off of the base. And that way, air can circulate
through and up out of the box. And that is going to be very important for some of the stuff
we're going to be doing later. for now,
let's get into a little bit of finishing. Today we are going to be trying something
a little bit new or at least new for me. If you've been watching any woodworking
videos in the last five years or so on YouTube,
you've probably seen a ton of this stuff. It's Rubio monocoat I just haven't
really given it a fair shake before. So I bought a bottle
and we're going to test it on the project. I think the first thing
that you have to know about Rubio Monocoat, is that
the name is basically a complete lie. Everyone I've talked to says it works best
if you apply at least two coats of it. And the lies don't stop there either. I got the white tinted version
and if you look on their website they say that
it looks like this on White Oak. And I think that you can see in real life
it really doesn't. At least not on the white oak hardwood. It kind of gets there on the plywood. Overall, I am still pretty happy
with how it turned out, but I don't know how it gained this reputation as the gold standard
for woodworking finishes. Woo hoo. Okay. Rubio monocoat. That is not bad looking at all, It's got a little bit
less sheen to it than I expected. that being said, I actually kind of really
enjoy this matte finish that it has. now that that's the way. Why don't we start
putting this thing together and start
putting some of the electronics into it? Wood shims are never a permanent solution. So in order to keep the top elevated
that quarter inch above the base, I installed these rubber
and felt pads at each corner. This gives us our ventilation and helps to make sure that the top
doesn't slam shut when you close it. After that, I screwed everything back together
and got ready to add a bit of lighting. one of the first kind of techie
things that I want to install in this coffee
table is a little bit of LED lighting. remember earlier
I made that L-shaped channel that went the whole way
around the perimeter. Well, that's going to give us the perfect
place to put this LED strip light. And then that way, whenever I open up
the coffee table, it'll be illuminated And also, it's going to provide a little bit of accent
lighting in the rest of the room, but I'm getting a little bit
ahead of myself. So first,
why don't we just start installing these? as a general rule of thumb. I do not trust the double sided tape
that comes pre-installed on the LEDs. But thankfully, I was able to thread
the strips under the spacer blocks, and they also came with their own
reinforcing plastic clips. So fingers crossed they hold up long term. Once they have made it all the way around
my trim piece rather than ending the run. I actually turned it 90
degrees and went up the side of the box. Then I covered that section with
a piece of wood, which seems a bit odd, but I wanted to take the rest of the strip
and thread it up through and into the bottom panel. Now, unfortunately,
this is the part of the project where I accidentally wasted
a bunch of money. The bottom panel was a tight fit,
so when it didn't slot right into position, I decided to give it
a little love with the mallet. And I think right about here
I ended up crimping the LED strip, which happened to be stuck
between the bottom panel and the box. and also I cut the strip a bit short
here at one of the predetermined termination points. And I didn't really like how it looked. So off camera, I ended up buying another
set of LEDs and replacing this entire run. So yeah, just be careful with your LEDs
and plan out where your termination points are going to end up
before you start sticking anything down. Okay, let's give this a little test. Test run. Yeah, let's give this a little test run
Oh, hey, there we go. Full unicorn vomit. Yeah, that looks good.
We got to underglow on the side. We got it in here. It's
not the brightest looking right now. But then again, you have to remember that
this is a really bright light. I've got a ton of overhead lights,
windows, skylights. This is more of, like a nighttime thing. It's not meant to illuminate
the whole room. overall, I'm very happy with that. And now I think we're ready to move on
to do a little bit of cooling Those of you who saw my laptop
cooling pad video may remember that. Not what NF A20. what this is, is just well,
a really big computer fan. But the cool thing about it is because
it's so big, the blades don't have to spin that fast in order to move a lot of air,
which means that it's basically silent. So we're going to take this guy, we're going to install it
right about there, and it's going to draw cool air
in from the bottom and exhaust hot air out the top, keeping all the electronics
inside the coffee table. Perfectly cool. just for fun. I actually crunched the numbers on this,
and just one of these fans is capable of replacing all their inside the table
every 6 seconds, which will be important because LEDs aren't
the only thing going in there. So now the next thing we have to do
is install my AV receiver. Now, this thing is pretty neat. Not only does it power by surround sound
set up with all my speakers getting screwed into these ports here,
but also it acts as an HDMI hub so I can take a whole bunch of inputs,
plug them into this, and then have only one HDMI cable
running from this to my TV, which is going to be really key later on. Theoretically, this should be very easy. Just open the top, grab the AV receiver
and lower it into position. next we have to install my PS5
because obviously I've got to have my games in here. However, we are going to run
into a little bit of an issue because yes, the ps5 is too tall. I got a solution though. And this is why
I think everybody needs to know how to weld in order to mount my PS5 inside the box,
I decided to just fabricate a custom bracket for it
that holds it horizontally. I won't go into too much detail
on the process here, but if you want to learn more,
I've got a whole video all about how to get started in MiG welding, and I'll link that down
in the video description, After the welding was done, I drilled
some mounting holes in the steel, cleaned it up a bit outside with an angle grinder,
and then sprayed on a coat of black paint. Oh, and then to keep everything matching
nicely, I cut a piece of white oak. Finished it with a Rubio
and then screwed it to the bracket. The result was this cute little shelf
that sits directly above the receiver and perfectly fits the PS5. Oh, man, I am pumped on how that looks. That looks so good. So at this point,
I think we're basically done building stuff, but
we are still far from done this project. I have a lot of surprises
left to pack into this day. So what do you say
we change locations back to my living room and start getting this thing
set up a little bit? So as you can see, we are back at home. The new coffee table is in place. The old one has been relegated
over there to the corner. However, we still have a lot to do. because all of this stuff over here
has to go in there. And as you can see,
there are an absolute ton of wires here. And I don't know about you guys at home,
but I hate wires and I don't want to be able to see
any of these by the time we're done. Oh, and also, there's a little problem
from earlier that I have to fix. Unfortunately, a slight miscalculation
in the height of the fan led to it being a bit too
close to the carpet for my comfort. So I added these adjustable legs
that will allow me to raise the whole table up
about a quarter of an inch. Not ideal, but we'll talk more about that
and other things. I could have done better at the end of
the video during the post mortem analysis. On the plus side, at least these legs will allow me
to level up the table on uneven floors. Oh, okay. Now, I had to pull apart
this entire room again. Yippee. The final location of the table is
going to be important for this next step. So I marked it out
with a little bit of tape and then cleared
out all the furniture again. So the first thing I'm going to do here,
and it feels very wrong to do this, is to cut a hole in this
brand new carpet. This plan was conceptually very simple,
but practically turned out to be a big pain in the butt
utilizing the thickness of my carpet pad. I planned to hide
all my wires under the carpet now for the second wires
like the HDMI in power strip. I cut a channel into the carpet pad,
but for the much thinner gauge speaker wires, I just laid them down
and then taped them flat. The tricky part was actually getting the wires through the carpet
and then up into the coffee table. Protip
if you're going to follow in my footsteps, get much longer wires
than you think is necessary Because I didn't have much slack. I had to kind of taco the carpet, pull
the wires into the table, and then somehow get the carpet to lay flat
with either of the layers bunching up. This was easily
the hardest part of the whole project and honestly kind of broke me
a couple of times. I'm just going to live
under here for a little bit. Ahhh f*** me. Okay, Keep going. But eventually I got it done
and managed to get all of the wrinkles out of both layers of the carpet. so they whoop, right? I managed to get the wires to the wall, but I still had to get them up to the TV
into the plug. Well,
that's where my tower speaker came in. They gave me the perfect cover
to hide the wires. All it took was some cable management clips on the backside
and a little bit of careful road it. I also installed a small power strip
to power the TV and the bias light
that I installed a couple of days prior. This thing is insanely cool. Basically, it's a ring of LEDs
around your TV that extends the colors onto the wall behind it, creating
an even more immersive experience. and I'll show you
how it all works in a second. On the left side. I hooked up the second tower speaker
and then ran the wire from my center channel up across the back of the TV
and then down right in front of it Mounting the central channel was a bit
daunting at first, but then I remembered I owned a 3D printer,
so I made my own custom French cleats
and then hung it directly on the TV. Next, I decided I wanted somewhere
to put all my various game controllers. So I got these fold their mounts and then
screwed them to the inside of the table. And speaking of screws, you know whats Super annoying those keyhole mounts
on the back of power strips. Here's an easy way
that you can locate them. Simply mark
the hole in some painter's tape and then transfer
to your mounting surface. I then connected everything back to my AV receiver and installed it
alongside my custom Xbox series Z. My yet to be modified Ps5 and my Nintendo Switch Pro. Now, I'm sure many of you were worried
about dust getting sucked inside of the table, so I also opted
to install this dust filter over the fan and it's on the inside too,
which makes it easy to clean. finally, after three long months
of not being able to enjoy my surround sound set up,
I reconnected my rear speakers. And because I made the speaker
stands myself, they're designed
specifically to hide the wires. Can you tell I have a phobia of wires? A few little touches later,
and I was finally ready to answer a couple of final questions. Well, it was a bit of an ordeal,
but we finally got it all set up. And, I mean, come on. Look at this place. It's pretty seamless. And I mean that in both terms
of how it looks and how it all functions. Let me show you how
all this stuff plays together. First of all,
the fan at the bottom of the coffee table. How do we make sure that it isn't
just running all the time? Well, it's plugged into the USB port
on the front of the receiver, and the USB port is only powered
when the receiver is on. And thanks to the wonders of HDMI,
CEC the receiver automatically turns on whenever anything else in
the chain is also turned on. So whether I start the ps5 from
the controller or the TV from the remote, everything that needs to be on
will automatically do so. And that means that outside
of the initial setup, I never have to interact with the receiver
or its annoying remote ever again. No Megatron necessary. Megatron doesn't say urban freewheelers. It says sofa masturbators. I also love
having the lighting inside of the table. This is especially handy
when you're trying to find something in here at night. And because they're smart, lights will integrate
really well with my whole smart home setup so I can control these lights
from my phone, from the button inside of the case,
or even with my voice if necessary. And if you're not sold on the whole need
for speed under glow thing, well then you can turn off those lights
individually with the app. And speaking of lighting, this bias light is like the best thing
that ever happened to my home theater. It's especially great when you're gaming. I can highly recommend
it, and I will include some links to it along with everything else
in the video description. And outside of all the tech stuff,
this whole space just now fills or open less cluttered
and just cleaner overall. So I think that's enough for the good. Now, let's talk about some of the bad
in the postmortem analysis. there's a couple of obvious f*** ups. Like, had
I made the legs a half inch longer than I would need to add
those legs on the bottom of the table. And had I position the cutouts on the bottom of it
a little bit better, well then I would have had to buy
a new LED strip. But honestly, I think the biggest one
is just cable management. There's a lot of wires in here,
and I think either a false back or a false bottom to hide them
all would have made things a lot cleaner. bottle. And then one last thing. I think maybe a second carpet pad
or maybe just a thicker one, because if you're looking for it,
you can sometimes feel some of the wires like, yeah,
I think right here is the HDMI cable. I honestly might go back
and do a little bit of carpet tape over all of these
to keep them down a little bit better. All right. That's it for me in this video. My next video is either going to be
a customized, modernized Nintendo 64 or a custom ROG Ally Pro video. Haven't quite decided,
but either way, you're going to want to get subscribed
so you don't miss either of those videos. And I'll see you in the next one. Peace.
