Project Monolith: Doors and Paint

The theme for this post would have to be "sometimes the best ideas get completely turned on their heads and you have to do a boatload more work to iron things out".

Okay, so it's not the most concise theme, but the statement stands.

Project Monolith is underway!

One expects to see Hominids learning to use bones as weapons...

After seeing a couple of different hobby desks based on old armoires or television cabinets (like this one, source unknown), I decided to make one for myself. With no real plan other than "Take the junk from the desk and stuff it into a custom, organized armoire", I set about making my own personal hobby nest.

Of course, the first step was finding the right piece of furniture to start with. I wanted something sturdy enough to handle day to day use, but handsome enough to function as a piece of home furnishing for years to come. So nothing cheap, and nothing ugly.
Then I got picky. I didn't want anything too beat up. I can salvage/re-surface/re-finish, but I wanted to minimize the amount of elbow grease needed before I would even start converting it into my hobby mecca. I wanted doors that swing open, not the more common type that fold back into the unit on rails. I also wanted something somewhat large, as a lot of smaller TV cabinets couldn't possibly contain the massive amount of materials I needed to store. Aside from all that, I'm partial to dark wood, as it fits into a more man-cave, den environment.