Flexy Media/TV Stand Build

My wife and I wanted to update our tv/media stand for quite some time. I built a really nice oak shelf with my cousin who was a cabinet maker back in 2007. It was fine, just the oak wasn't our style and the color wasn't our color anymore.

Previous setup, this was halfway through removing things from the shelf. I knew I wouldn't have time for a proper dirac live with bass control run, so was just inputting my old settings for distance and levels. The HTP-1 allows for direct input of REW filters too. Makes it super easy to input my old PEQ settings. It has 16 PEQ's for each channel. This can be run without Dirac live, before dirac live, or after dirac live. You can see a demo version of this awesome HTP-1 interface made by pinksoda over on avs forums here: http://jsoosiah.com/
The HTP-1 awesome has an awesome ability to use the input from either left or right signal and route it to every single speaker you have. No need to use asio or anything else that is limited to just the 7.1 base channels (they can't do heights). So many nice features with this thing!

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Since my wife wanted a new shelf (so did I), I took this time to make a shelf that can fit a vertical center channel speaker. Most centers are not actually good at being laid horizontal, but perform great standing up. Also since I had ordered a new Philharmonic BMR monitor for center, it works really well standing up.

My full system is now the following
Monolith HTP-1 pre/pro
Buckeye 6 channel 502mp for base layers
Buckeye 4 channel 252mp for atmos/auro height speakers
Philharmonic BMR towers for left/right
Philharmonic BMR Monitor for center
Philharmonic Mini Monitors for right/left surround
JBL In Celing SP6Cii for front/rear atmos

I first started off looking up ideas on what to build. I settled on a flexy shelf design using 5/8" black oxide threaded rod and matching washers/nuts. We also planned on staining it a gray color and then dry brushing it with white paint. This was made out of stain grade pine you can get from home depot.


I cut the bottom board at 66" wide and 20" deep and the other shelfs are 24" wide x 20" deep.

I originally had this brillant idea that if I clamped all of the shelfs together and then just drilled all of the holes at once, it would make sure all the holes would match up. Well in theory this sounded great, but in practice this did not work. Not sure exactly why, but it didn't work. I am guessing that by clamping them, any small warps in the board were removed, and then when unclamped, these made all of the holes not exactly match up.

Good news was, I drilled 5/8" holes and these were too tight with the 5/8" rod, so I had to drill them slightly bigger. I went with 11/16" drill bit and then just drilled one shelf at a time. This got all of the holes good enough that the washers would then cover any weird oblong holes.

Here is the first test fit after all of this, note, I still needed to cut out the 24" x 20" center shelfs at this point, but the left/right side was done.

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I then was trying out different stain colors and making sure we wanted it to look like for the final product.

Here were the stain choices, we used minwax water based stains as we knew we were probably going to dry brush it with water based paint.
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I first thought we wanted oyster gray for a weathered look.
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Well that was not the case, so we decided to try charcoal gray and slate. We were leaning toward charcoal gray when we looked at pictures. Good thing we tried them out because we ended up liking slate the best. We also were not 100% sure if we liked the dry brush white at this point so we tested it out as well. We ended up liking it the best with slate.

This was us comparing the charcoal vs. slate. Charcoal looked a little too old/weathered and had a little too much blue in it. Slate looked good, we almost just went with slate and no dry brush.
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Here was comparing no dry brush slate to dry brushed oyster and charcoal.

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Then we dry brushed the slate to see what it would look like. My wife was sad because she liked the dry brush with slate, which meant she had to dry brush all of the shelf's. She was hoping to not need to, but it looked by far the best.

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So now that we had our stain color and for sure dry brushing figured out, it was time to get to work on staining.

One coat of slate went on to each board on the top, bottom, and edges. Two coats made it too dark, that was tested and we didn't like it.

I originally sectioned off the long bottom shelf in small sections depth wise. I then had to sand this down and re-do it because you could see my start and stop points. I then sectioned it off length wise, so I would stain an entire strip of the length, and then go back and do the next strip. This allowed the strips to blend in with the natural grain and you could no longer see the start/stop points.

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Once the stain was all dry, it was time for the dry brush technique.

This my wife did. She wouldn't allow me to do it. I don't blame her, she is much better at painting than me (she was a theatre teacher and very good at painting differnt patterns/techniques/appearances).

She did all of this work, and she did a very nice job!


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Next, it was time to clear coat it. We chose a gloss water based polycrilic from minwax.

I put five coats on the top and sides. Four coats on the bottom.

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Finally it was final assemble time.

This took a little bit of patience. Leveling the shelfs and making sure everything was going to be at the right height was challenging. I learned that I should do it from the top down after trying from the bottom up and not getting the spacing a the top most shelf level. This resulted in some of the threaded rod to be poking out at the top. I didn't want this, so I leveled the top shelfs to have minimal threaded rod poking out or recessed. Then set all of my shelf levels based on that. I don't really care if the bottom is slightly off.

I also used flange nuts on the bottom and placed some felt pads on these. This way I can level the feet without messing up the shelf leveling.


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And here is the final product with the old center on it (polk cs2 series 2) and monitor 70 series 2. These old speakers were gifted to a friend that I know would enjoy them along with my old yamaha rx-a1000. I looked online cand couldn't get much over a couple hunded bucks for it, so figured might as well give them to a friend that will get a few more years of enjoyment out of them. They were really excited.

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And here is the final product with the new Philharmonic BMR towers/monitor in their piano gloss finish.

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I'm looking forward to the pictures loading.

Pictures uploaded finally. Had to use firefox. Chrome was still being weird.....

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Originally Posted by Jdunk54nl

Pictures uploaded finally. Had to use firefox. Chrome was still being weird.....

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I see them! It looks great you all did an awesome job.

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Originally Posted by Notloudenuf

I see them! It looks great you all did an awesome job.

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Thank you! I still need to optimize all positions of the left/right and potentially the subwoofers, but haven't had time yet. Will do some of that the next couple of days. I will post some measurements of everything to this thread when I am done.


Also, that original oak shelf was built by me and my cousin (he built kitchen cabinets for a living)

Cool concept, and very nice work! Purely as a matter of personal taste, I like all but the dry brush part.

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Originally Posted by Grinder

Cool concept, and very nice work! Purely as a matter of personal taste, I like all but the dry brush part.

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Thank you. We did the dry brush because it matches some of our other decor. It does look a lot better in person and it did help to hide some of the other grain in the wood, which we liked. But yes, we even debated if that worked with our personal tastes.

I look forward to seeing it in person this weekend!

Looks really nice.