credenza was a good guess. as soon as i saw the picture on craigslist, i was thinking that the dresser could make a good tv stand/media cabinet. here's what we've had for the past few years to hold our tv:

mike and i actually made this stand years ago to hold his old giant tv. the tv was very very heavy and needed a big substantial stand to support its size and weight. we constructed this using mdf and a piece of butcher block from ikea that had been part of a previous project fail (i tried to make a dining table for my apartment... that didn't work out). the stand was cheap and worked well - until we got a new tv. the flat tv just didn't look right on top of this giant stand. the stand was a lot deeper than it needed to be and didn't fit very well into the space. and the shelves that we had so carefully measured to fit the dvd player, receiver, and mike's video games did not fit the new cable box. we've been looking on and off for a new tv stand for the past few years but they are so expensive and we never found one that worked perfectly for the space we had and that fit all of mike's tv/dvd/xbox/whatever else he has.

we went and looked at the dresser and decided it was almost perfect for our new tv stand... except for one big thing. it didn't have shelves behind those doors like i had hoped, it had more drawers.

but we decided it was the closest thing we've found and we would make it work. we took the drawers out and tried to remove the runners - but they were very much glued down. i didn't want to completely ruin the piece in case we wanted to have drawers again at some point, so we decided to instead build up the bottom of each shelf. we were able to do all this with some wood scraps that we had around and only had to buy a few nicer trim pieces from lowes.

we had lowes color match some paint to match the stain and painted the bottom of each shelf since we weren't using stain grade wood. we stained the trim piece and the inside of the dresser to match. then we drilled a few holes in the back for all of the cords...

and the finished cabinet:


and look, all of the media equipment is nicely hidden away. i like how the door folds open. the door on the left has 2 more shelves behind it, even more storage.

and, the drawers are the perfect size for dvds - we can put them 2 deep. 3 more boxes unpacked! (we have a lot of dvds)

for you super observant people, we ended up moving the other speaker over next to the radiator.

mike "needs" all of these speakers, and i need them to not be such a big feature of the living room. i feel like they are a little less noticeable now, which is nice. the center speaker fits nicely underneath the new stand, so at least i got one out of the way :-)

i think the drawer pulls are my favorite part :-)