Times change and we no longer use a receiver, disc player, etc. in the house. This gives me an excuse to build a new cabinet to hold those things associated with how we watch TV and listen to music today. This also gives me a great excuse to steal the existing media cabinet out of the living room and spirit it away to the shop. It will live on as my PC and stereo cabinet for the shop and the outdoor music system. I'm shooting for something like this.
This has full SWMBO approval and will be walnut. It will hang from the wall about a foot off the ground. The front panel is a fall front door for access to bluetooth stuff and maybe an eventual cable box if we ever decide to get cable TV.
I pull some promising looking stock from the racks. When trying to match material I find that a couple of swipes with a hand plane and a squirt of mineral spirits will get me a pretty good idea of which boards match and which don't.
I enjoy plotting out where I will pull my parts from.
I generally do this with chalk as things often change before I get all my parts sources selected.
I break things into manageable pieces with a jig saw and start milling things.
I leave the top and bottom till I am closer to final assembly. The balance of the parts don't look like much but, it is a smaller piece at about 16" x 18" x 42".
I plan to make the floating panels by veneering up some of this reddish walnut I have been hanging onto.
Often I will want a board with figure running some way other than the way the sawmill yielded.
The answer to this is a bandsaw and a jointer.
With a reference edge running along the grain like I want I just rip the blank at the tablesaw. I go ahead and rip a lot of the other blanks to the max width of the parts that will eventually come from them.
I then crosscut most of them to length. I rip those crosscut parts that require it and get ready to do some joinery milling.