Carpentry and Woodworking - Building an Entertainment Center Around a Fireplace!!!

Well my husband and I just bought a house and we have no idea where we could place out traditional entertainment center. One living room wall has doors, the second wall has a look through window to the kitchen, third is mostly windows, and the forth wall has a fireplace on it. The only thing we can think of is to somehow get the tv above the fireplace as that is the only spot that would seem to work. Unfortunetly we can't afford a plasma tv to mount up there, so we would have to build some sort of shelving. The fireplace takes up a good bit of the wall, but there is about 3-4 feet on each side so I was thinking of doing tall, narrow shelving on each side and then about the mantel bridging the two sides and creating a shelf to hold the TV. Do you think this idea could work? Do you have any better suggestions? Do you know of any websites that have ideas or plans on how to do something like this? Do you think since we have the thicker TV style the shelf would have to stick out too far, therefore the weight of the TV would not hold?

You have to consider the angle of heat rise on the fireplace. The mantle is probably sticking out as far as the tables will allow at present. For instance, a 12" shelf/mantel will have to be 21" or so above the top opening of the fireplace, and that is quite high. Taking into consideration a standard TV, you would almost have to go with an 18" shelf, making it even higher on the wall. Could you not build the cabinets on either side of the fireplace, and allow a space for your current TV, with the hopes of getting a flat screen later? At least with the flat screen you won't have to deal with the heat projection tables.

I had similar problem with my house. I ended up building built in book shelves on one side of the fireplace, and on the other side I built a base cabinet to hold the TV on an angle in the corner, with shelves above for the sound system.
A recent problem with this surfaced, when I wanted to buy a LCD flat panel tv. I could only get up to a 32", which would have been way too small. I ended up cutting out 1 of the upper shelves, and built a shelf on top of the base cabinet to hold the cable box and put the flat panel tv on top of that shelf. It fits perfectly.
My wife really wanted to mount the flat panel over the fireplace, and I wanted nothing to do with that. Too hot, and too high for me.

I have a similar problem, except that I'm not looking to build an EC but some built-in bookcases. I had built a whole wall of them in the front room of our other house, but haven't found a good place yet in this house. In the family room there is a fireplace in the corner. The front face goes almost all the way across wall-to-wall, except that it has right angles on each side perpendicular to the two walls, and it goes all the way to the ceiling. I had thought about building bookcases on either side of the fireplace, the depth of which would line up with the corners of the front face of the fireplace.

I realize this may be a little hard to picture, but does anybody that has done this have any pictures of it? I'm having a hard time imagining what it would look like.

Sorry, I didn't mean to hijack this thread. If I may throw my two cents in, IMO the only time a TV looks good above a fireplace is if it's a flat screen. Plus the TV would weigh quite a bit and you'd have to make the shelf pretty darn heavy. Plasma TVs are pretty expensive, but a projection LCD is cheaper. My 52" is only a little more than a foot in depth. That would lend it self better than a tube TV set I would think.