At Home with John and Debbie

My cyber-stalker writes in an email:

“Telly sold, floor channelled out, dust out of hair. LCD HD on the wall or on its nice shiny stand, floor tiles possibly laid, what about a Blog then?”

Oh alright then. The tiles are down and look smashing. The walls and alcoves are painted, and we’ve mounted a semi-abstract batik we bought in Bali prominently, where it looks rather good.
The TV sold successfully — I ended the auction early when I noticed that a friend was the high bidder, and he seems pleased with it.

The fancy new TV is lovely, and about half a cubic meter less voluminous than the old one, making the room feel a lot more spacious. Currently it is standing on a coffee table, above:

• A surround amp
• A TiVo
• A Freeview box
• An Xbox
• A centre speaker
• An ethernet switch
• A WiFi bridge
• A horrendous mess of wires

Believe it or not, this is now our minimum home entertainment setup. The TiVo and the Freeview box, between them, provide us with timeshifted terrestrial TV. The Xbox is now our primary DVD player, but we also use it a lot for streaming music, films and TV programmes from the computer. Both the TiVo and the Xbox are wired to the Ethernet switch, and the WiFi bridge lets them reach the Internet. Phew.

We spent ages looking for a TV stand that fits our exacting requirements:

• Wide enough for the TV
• Narrow enough to fit between the alcoves
• A good fit for equipment
• Allow the centre speaker to reside directly below the screen

As the search progressed, the possibles got more and more expensive, until we were looking at furniture that cost more than the TV, and still wasn’t quite right.

Then we visited “Woodie’s” in Warwick, where it turned out that we could get a sideboard, a TV stand, and two speaker stands made to measure, for less than a TV stand alone from John Lewis. The only drawback is time. I think they’re due in another 4 weeks or so.

The work isn’t over. To fit with the new look, we’ve been painting our beech-effect shelving gloss white. It looks OK, but it’s laborious. They should finally be dry: next thing is to try and fit them into the alcove more neatly than they were before.

And then, as winter draws in, we’ll be wanting a rug…

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 10:38 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.