Media end — design and build

Session decisions — what changed and why

• Top cabinets 570 → 500. The freed 70 goes to the middle band (1430 → 1500), which now carries the TV, the display grid, and the whisky nook.
• The party wall duct, 210×210, runs the whole party wall run — media end through the laundry end, on to the bathroom and the far end of the flat. It sits tight to the ceiling in the top cabinets. See ADR 0003. This also constrains the laundry end's top cabinets, which haven't been designed around it yet.
• The whole middle band becomes one irregular display grid — not just left of the TV. It runs from the left edge, across the fixed TV opening, through to the wine column. Modular (a handful of shared widths/heights combined asymmetrically), not freeform — buildable from repeatable rip widths. Mostly open; game consoles get a closed module for cable clutter. Exact module sizes are the one big thing still open — see below.
• Right column: robot vac dropped, one continuous door face. This also resolves a conflict already on record — the vac needed 51 depth against the run's 41. Gets a 100 kickboard (previously flush to the floor for vac access). "One long door" is two stacked leaves with a near-invisible split, not one ~2380 leaf. No venting needed — load is 1–2 8-port PoE switches in a 10″ printed rack; LED power supplies may also route from here.
• Bottom drawers: two-tier insert on the left 2 only, organising cards and small puzzles. The right 2 stay as single-tier board-game drawers.
• Whisky nook, corrected. These are gravity-fed spirit barrels on stands (rum, port), tap on the front face — not pressurised kegs. Barrel A 180⌀×290, Barrel B 210⌀×350 (both excluding tap). Stands: A 240w×250h, B 290w×280h. Side by side they don't fit the 420-wide nook (530 combined), so they split: Barrel B stays on an open, lit shelf above the drop-leaf; Barrel A moves to an open cubby left of the TV, drawn to the shelf edge to pour (no drip tray needed — always poured with a held glass, never set down under the spigot).
• Drop-leaf mechanism corrected. It's a flush door that drops down to become the worksurface (see the diagram above), not a flap with fixed shelving above it. Hinge arms/stays, no floor legs. Height ~1000 AFF (standing bar height). LEDs on a hinge/door-actuated switch, auto-on when opened. Interior sized for ~4–6 bottles + 4–6 glasses.
• Elevation bug fixed: drop-leaf was drawn low. The first pass put the door's hinge at the bottom of its zone (480 AFF, resting on the base drawers) instead of at the 1000 AFF worksurface height. A bottom-hinged drop-down door opens level with its own hinge, so the door had to move — it now runs upward from the 1000 AFF hinge to 1520, with barrel B's shelf filling 1520–1980 above it. The ~520 gap this left below the hinge (480–1000) is just another display-grid module, same as everywhere else in that band.
• Sonos Arc restored. Wall-mounted directly under the TV, spanning the TV opening — it was in the original design and got dropped in the rewrite.
• Elevation now has layer toggles (top-left of the drawing): party wall duct, TBD/illustrative grid, and dimension lines can each be hidden to see the resolved geometry more cleanly.
• TV beam relocated: it's a lintel directly under the top band now, not the top band's own floor. Same structural job (188 span, otherwise 40 mm sag), flush with the underside of the cabinets, not perched on the TV — there's still a ~140 gap of open grid between the beam and the screen. It carries the top band from below, the way a header carries a wall above a doorway. This stops it competing with the party wall duct for height inside the top cabinets — they now get their full clear interior everywhere, not just outside the TV bay.
• Kickboard fixed: it's one continuous strip along the whole 3650 run, wine column included — it had a gap under the wine section. At 3650 it's over the 2440 sheet length regardless, so it's 2 pieces either way; the joint is hidden at 2265, the existing seam between drawers 3 and 4, rather than cut somewhere visible.
• Base drawers: painted sage green, MR-MDF instead of birch ply. Whole drawer — fronts and boxes both, not just the visible fronts. A deliberate cost saving over building them from the same birch ply as the rest of the unit; means the drawer run is now on a separate material/sheet count from everything else (see cutting schedule). The two-tier organizer trays are shop-built (ply/MR-MDF box on a second, lighter pair of runners), not bought hardware — see the hardware page.
• Wine column also sage green, matching the drawers. Assumed for now: same paint colour, but kept as birch ply and just painted (not switched to MR-MDF) — the MR-MDF swap on the drawers was specifically a cost call on a big panel-area component, which doesn't really apply to this narrow, mostly-open rack. Flag if that assumption's wrong.
• Left column simplified: plain birch-ply box with regular open shelves, no doors, no irregular grid. Scope is just this one column (lego/plants/consoles) — the TV bay, beam, and whisky nook were already separately resolved and don't change. Dropped the closed console module too; fully open now. This also means the "irregular display grid" idea from earlier in the session no longer applies anywhere on the elevation.
• Whisky nook's lower gap (480–1000 AFF, below the drop-leaf hinge) is a plain open shelf, matching the left column's new treatment now that the grid concept it was originally justified against is gone.
• Base plinth steps out to 500, not 750 — and now covers drawers, wine, and overflow storage together, not just the drawers. The "match the laundry end at 750" idea doesn't work: there's an immovable wall, and a follow-up measurement found it caps the right side (pier side) at 500, asymmetric with the window side. So the whole floor-level plinth — drawers, wine column, overflow storage column — steps out to 500 uniformly; everything above 480 AFF (middle band, top band, and the upper portion of the wine/tech columns) stays at the entertainment run's 410, unchanged. See the revised side profile above. The wine and overflow storage uprights are now built as two separate panels (a shallow upper piece + a deep plinth piece) rather than one notched panel — see cutting schedule. The kickboard still steps out flush with the plinth front, full width, no overhang.

The kickboard is doing structural work

• Ceiling 2480. A birch ply sheet is 2440 long. A full-height upright would be 40 mm too long for any sheet — you would be scarfing or buying oversize stock for every vertical.
• The 100 mm kickboard makes the carcass 2380, which comes out of a standard sheet with 60 to spare.
• The kickboard trim itself runs the whole 3650 mm of the run, wine column included — it was drawn with a gap under the wine section that shouldn't be there. At 3650 it's also over the 2440 sheet length on its own, so it's 2 pieces regardless. Joint hidden at 2265 (the drawer 3/4 division), rather than cut mid-face somewhere visible.

The TV opening beam, relocated

• The TV bay is 192 wide with nothing under the middle of it. An 18 mm ply shelf there would deflect about 40 mm; acceptable is 5.3. A ply box section 100 deep brings it to 0.3 mm.
• It no longer sits inside the top band as its own floor — that was the original problem, since it meant competing with the party wall duct for the same height budget there. It's now a lintel directly under the top band, flush with its underside, carrying the top band's weight the way a header carries the wall above a doorway. There's still a ~140 gap of open display grid between the beam and the TV screen below it — the beam sits with the cabinets, not on the TV.
• Consequence: the top cabinets now get their full clear interior everywhere (duct only, no beam) instead of losing an extra 100 above the TV specifically. The trade lands on the open grid strip between the beam and the TV instead, which was mostly slack (85″ TV headroom) rather than functional storage.

Panel materials, locked

• Carcass: 18mm birch ply / 18mm MR-MDF — agreed baseline, unchanged. Full spec in ADR 0004, which applies to the laundry & pantry end too, not just here.
• Doors split by role, not uniform. 12mm for the small top-band doors (364×500) — standard practice for a door that size. 18mm stays for anything tall or load-bearing: the overflow storage door (a 1190mm single leaf) and the drop-leaf (it's a worksurface people lean on, not just a door).
• Back panels added — previously excluded ("batten to the masonry"). Now 12mm throughout, split by visibility: birch ply where the back is actually seen (left column, whisky nook's barrel shelf and lower shelf — all open), MR-MDF where it's hidden behind a door (top band, base band, whisky nook's drop-leaf interior, overflow storage), and MR-MDF regardless of visibility at the laundry end, for moisture near the washer.
• Drawers (fronts + boxes) drop to 12mm MR-MDF, from an implicit 18mm baseline. The integrated finger-pull groove will be shallower at 12 than 18 — noted, not a blocker.
• Box beam: birch bottom skin, WBP ply top skin + ribs. A CLS-timber core was seriously considered for cost, but there's no structural upside once the skins and depth stay the same (99mm CLS vs 100mm ply-rib — a rounding difference, not a structural one), and cheap WBP hardwood ply on the hidden top skin + ribs (£24.18/sheet vs birch's £126) closes almost the entire cost gap on its own. Stuck with one material family (ply) throughout rather than mixing in solid softwood.

Things still open before cutting

• Laundry end top cabinets need the same duct check. The 210×210 party wall duct runs through there too and hasn't been designed around yet — do this before that run is cut.
• Whisky nook interior finish — mirror-backed shelves vs plain, and a premium wood lining (black walnut or European oak) for a "hidden premium feel." Deliberately deferred; LEDs and shelves are committed regardless.
• Sage green paint spec — exact colour/sheen not yet chosen, just the family (sage green) and where it applies so far: the drawers (MR-MDF, whole drawer) and the wine column (birch ply, painted).
• Who is building it — the sheet count, the box beam, and the drop-leaf hinge hardware are different conversations for a joiner than for the two of you with a track saw.
• Exposed ply edges or lipped. Birch edges are the look, but they need sanding and they mark. Lipping in solid birch is more work and more durable. Now also applies to the 12mm door edges, not just 18mm — doesn't apply to the drawers, which are painted MR-MDF, not lipped.
• Finish — hardwax oil, lacquer or clear matt on the birch ply. Affects how the ply yellows and how the whisky nook copes with spills. Separate from the drawers' paint finish.
• TV bay back panel — not decided. It's open (visible) like the left column and whisky nook shelves, so the same birch-where-visible logic would apply, but the TV covers most of it and nobody's confirmed it needs one.
• MR-MDF price — not yet confirmed against a supplier, unlike birch (~£126/sheet) and WBP (~£24.18/sheet), both priced from builderdepot.co.uk.
• Drawer runners — 731 wide and full of board games is heavy. Specify by load, not by price. The two-tier inserts are a separate, second (lighter) runner mechanism per drawer, shop-built rather than bought — see the hardware page for the runner spec.