{building our aquarium}

My husband is a salt-water tank enthusiast and he has a minor obsession with tropical fish! So when he wanted to get a large fish tank for our home, I got a little worried. Why, you may ask? Well, I was not so sure that ready-made fish tank cabinets have come very far in the ‘design world’ in several years. In fact, most budget-friendly tanks you can buy are a bit of a blast from the past (hello 1970's!), and were not in keeping with the rest of our homes décor (as you can see in this example here):

Yikes! While I am sure there are some incredible ‘designer’ fish tanks out there (built into the wall, etc), that kind of thing was not in our budget. So we had to get creative, and we decided to build one ourselves! This was a large undertaking, since the cabinet had to be able to handle a lot of weight, so we consulted a professional to help us build it and he did an amazing job: http://www.winchesterconstruction.ca/ Our starting point was to look at other similar pieces of furniture and gain inspiration into what we wanted this piece to look like. I searched magazines and websites and finally found a really neat mandarin-style sideboard from Crate and Barrel that had an interesting yet simple pattern:

We took this idea and modified it to fit our needs. Here are a few pics of the process, I was the unofficial supervisor (meaning I sat back and watched! Ha ha):

It might be hard to tell in the photos but we used an ultra-high gloss white paint (which would make wiping water spills easy and gave a more modern look). All of the front details were done with inexpensive strips of MDF. We found the hardware at Lee Valley Tools.