A number of weeks ago, I moved our big TV from the basement to the living room as Andrea and Jacob tend to watch TV in the living room, and the one that was there was a little small to watch when subtitles came on. Equally, for some strange reason, Jacob’s video games would not resize properly on the XBox One S to fit the screen. Not quite sure what that was about. Anyway, I moved it upstairs.

As part of the planned reorg for a bunch of things, that also meant I moved the old TV downstairs and I’m going to attach various video game systems to it…an old Playstation 1, an N64, Xbox 360, possibly a computer system running RetroArch, and if I can get it to work, the old Wii. Unfortunately, my old TV stand isn’t really conducive to that kind of setup. For one thing, it sits very low to the ground. Which was fine when the TV was bigger. Now that it’s a small one, not so handy. Equally, there wasn’t enough space underneath for the various game systems. I could likely run 2-3 okay in it, but 4-5 connections? Not so much. Plus I have to find room for a DVD player and my VMedia box.

So about 4-6 weeks ago, I went shopping online, checked out various stores in Ottawa, found a decent enough TV stand at JSYK, they had it in stock in Orleans, so I jumped some hoops, tweaked my schedule, and off I went. It was one of my first real outings with my full mask running to a “new store”. I’d been to Staples, groceries, Shoppers Drug Mart, but this was my first outing ever to a JSYK, let alone to Orleans and figuring out pickup from the back of their store.

$179.99 regularly and technically it’s a “sideboard”, not a TV stand, but the dimensions were good and enough shelving in it to handle all of the equipment. I think.

And it is has been sitting unopened in the basement ever since. I opened it on Friday, unpacked a bit of it to get a feel for the build on Saturday, and today I dug in amid a bunch of other chores for the day. Andrea helped me with the middle section of it, which was great, I really needed a second hand for those stages or I’d probably still be going.

The quality is okay, although it was missing a dowel for one connection (I used an extra one from another build project that came with extras from Amazon) and there was supposed to be a little “holder” for doing the finishing nails so you don’t risk mashing your thumbs trying to hold them, but it was missing too. No biggie for either one, I adjusted.

The unit is together, and other than the fact that I’m missing the power cable cord for the TV, it mostly works. Except remember how I said it’s technically a sideboard, not a TV stand? Welllll, that also means that there are VERY few ways for cables to go out the back. In my defence, it DID show photos of it in the pic of having a TV on it. Anyway, it likely means I’ll have to cut some little box holes in the back of the unit (it’s just simple particle board) to let the gadgets connect. But it’s together and done. On to other issues for the basement.

Today I choose to assemble a new TV stand for the basement, giving me a setup for all the gadgets to be together.

What choices are you making today?