XBOX 360 Entertainment Center

My 15-year old son and I are pretty new to woodworking. This is our first project of any size and we did it in one weekend.

This project is intended to clean up the XBOX-360 mess that the kids make. The upper left shelf is large enough to hold an XBOX-360 either vertically or horizontally (the XBOX-360 runs hot and the more space around it, the better). The right hand shelves fit games vertically. The bottom left shelf will hold wall warts and the power strip for the cabinet. We are planning on putting a 1/8” hardboard back on the right side so games don’t fall back but the left side will have no back – once again to make cooling as best we can. Middle left shelf holds the sub-woofer.

Construction is from a single sheet of 3/4” red oak plywood. Finish is Minwax wood conditioner, Minwax Red Oak stain and Minwax satin polyurethane. Height is 34” and width is 36”. Construction was dados done using our router. Front edges are edgebanding veneer.

I don’t like the height myself. It’s just too tall and it is going to affect the design of our next Entertainment center . However, for a “kid’s playroom”, it’s just perfect. I can watch TV and not be disturbed by kids in front of me. Also, the Kinect needs to be installed between 2 and 6 feet from the floor and for the Kinect this height is a lot better than the typical 24 in high LCD TV stand.

We added a drawer in the place of the top right shelf. I had used the drawer front early on in the project as a test piece for stain. After we added the edgebanding veneer I did some more staining. The result is that the front of the drawer is darker than the rest of the unit.

As usual we overengineered the drawer. Used 3/4” pine for the box and bought heavy duty 14” drawer slides. I could stand in this drawer and it woudn’t come apart. Then again, with six kids maybe it will last?

-- Doug - When all you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.