# Beautifying my media center



## JohnJSmith (Apr 25, 2010)

So I started with this:










It was a huge entertainment center a neighbor gave me when he moved. He built it himself, and it was a really solid piece, but it didn't fit my gear well. I recently rotated my room 90 degrees and put all the gear on a different wall, so I took the opportunity to get rid of the hutch.










That cleaned it up significantly, but it was still too cluttered looking with all of my home networking gear in the center spot, so I made a cover for it today.

I glued and nailed together a square frame out of 3/4" x 1.5" wood and then painted the inner surfaces flat black.










I then stretched speaker grill cloth over it and stapled it down.










The result:



















I'm considering making two more to cover the left and right openings entirely. I just need to make sure the remotes will work through the grill cloth and that the Xbox won't overheat. If it won't work, I might just make some false backs to hide the wiring.


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## Jasonpctech (Apr 20, 2010)

Neat, you could always get some back venting 120mm fans and use some dacron blanket padding to filter them. I doubt your going to create a overheating issue with that much surface area. Really looks good. On the filter note, I have folded up metal window screen like a old nintendo cart sleeve to make fan filters. Just screw one side of the mesh sleeves to the fan and drop a dacron cookie in. Cheap and super easy X-Box health insurance.


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