Built-In Living Room Storage Is More Accessible Than Ever With This DIY Hack

Living room built-ins are an incredible home feature, often offering wonderful closed-door cabinet storage underneath your television and open shelving above to display your family's treasures. But custom cabinetry can come with a steep price tag to hire out, and DIYing cabinets from scratch, while more affordable, requires a lot of time and skill. So what are your options for creating your own living room built-ins if you don't have the budget or woodworking expertise for either of those options? Jeannie Harris, also known as @harrishomediy on Instagram, shared how she used stock upper cabinet boxes to create a beginner-friendly DIY living room media console that packed a ton of storage into a small footprint.

By swapping lower cabinet frames for upper cabinet boxes, Harris reduced the depth to 12 inches, making it ideal for concealing many small storage cubes (perfect for organizing and stashing kids toys in a family room) without eating up much space in the small room. Because she was able to use stock pre-assembled cabinets, it made the job more budget- and beginner-friendly. You could buy unfinished or primed units to paint or stain a custom color, or opt for pre-finished options you simply need to install and enjoy. So grab a tape measure and head for the hardware store's stock cabinet aisle to build yourself an easy DIY living room with built-in shelving and cabinetry that looks and functions like you shelled out the dough for a custom entertainment center.

To DIY this, measure the TV wall to determine which width of upper cabinets to use. If you plan to use 10- or 11-inch cube storage containers, choose boxes with enough interior clearance to fit the bins, likely 12 to 15 inches wide depending on the frame width. Standard upper cabinets come in several heights, but 30 inches is perfect for accommodating two storage bins vertically. Since you aren't using lower cabinets with their own integrated bases, select a framed or inset-style upper cabinet, as the face-frame surround will bring the cabinet door up off the floor enough for clearance. Frameless upper cabinet boxes would have the cabinet door sitting directly on the ground.

After your stock upper cabinets are purchased, measure, mark, and cut your baseboard with a multi-tool to allow the cabinets to sit flush along the back and any side walls. Alternatively, float your cabinets on the wall above the baseboard. Secure the cabinets to the wall with a wall cleat per its instructions or with an appropriate anchor system for your substrate, depending on if they're floating or sitting on the floor. Once installed, add base shoe trim for a clean finish at the floor (unless floating) and a painted or stained wood top. You could stop there, enjoying the new streamlined family room storage in your build-in console. Or you can construct upper open shelves or hack prefab bookshelves to surround the TV, adding custom trim to bring them to the ceiling.

In just a couple of hours, you can easily create your own living room built-ins for a fraction of the price of custom or time versus building from scratch.