Before & After

I've always loved before and after photos of things. I have a bunch that I need to get posted but the latest to our collection is our entertainment center. It was given to me when my grandma passed away a few years ago. It was beautiful, had lots of storage, yet, it was massive!! Our neighbors had a very similar one that they "modified" a couple of years ago and we had considered doing the same thing. It was hard to think we'd be taking apart something that was in such nice condition. I knew my grandparents had paid a lot of money for it and it's hard to find furniture these days that are made to this kind of quality. But as we were moving furniture around this weekend we started talking about it....again. We couldn't make more than $50 or so (at best!) on Craigslist if we tried to sell it. Even if we did sell it, we'd still need to come up with considerably more to buy an entertainment center that we could use as well as this one. But if we cut it down to size (like our neighbors had done to theirs) we'd be losing the quality of the piece and how we saw it, the "value" of the item would be lost. BUT, it would serve our purpose and it would be what we needed. So after weighing all our options, we decided to do it. Ultimately, it hadn't cost us anything, it would still be useful to us when we were done, and it wasn't going to cost us a thing to convert it.

As the photos show, it came our beautifully!!! I love being married to a Handy Man!! Once we put it back in our living room we were SOOO happy we did it. And of course started asking ourselves, "why didn't we do this sooner!?" And if you're familiar with our living room before, you can tell the amazing difference it makes!!
(Granted the "before" photo is the photo I took before we redid the living room back in March, but it gives you an idea of how different that wall looks with the entertainment center cut down. LOVE IT!!)