Shelves are coming along!

I've been working a little bit each day on the shelves, and with a big push this weekend, I have 99% of the building part done. 

Where I left off is when I had the base cabinets pretty much done, other than the base molding.  I had installed the cabinets, painted (and painted and painted - 1 coat of primer and 3 coats of semi-gloss top coat). 

Dale had applied a skim coat to the wall to even them out, I sanded and primed.  Then I had 2 sheets of plywood cut at Home Depot to 11" wide, and I started on the right side, to be sure I could work out all the problems before I had to make everything fit.  We knew we wanted to run the coffered ceiling edges along the front of the bookshelves to integrate them, so I had to leave 5.5" for the end panels, and that left me a rather short shelf over the doorway.  I decided graduated sizes of shelves would work best, so I got to work building the first set of shelves, and anchored them in.

In the meantime, one of the coffer beams was slightly out of place, which we didn't realize until we took down the plastic and stood in the kitchen, then it was apparent that one of them was a little bowed.  So we took that down and reworked it. 

This is what I got done yesterday.  I still had the facing pieces on the front of the shelves to add, to cover the plywood edges and to bulk up the look of the unit.  But this morning, we decided we should take a break and go to the Rose Bowl Flea Market --

Hoping we could find some interesting stuff -- amazingly, we ended buying only a bag of glazed almonds!  Nothing the whole day!  I saw stuff I liked, but just wasn't inspired to spend the money.  We did enjoy looking, and we'd packed a lunch so that was nice to sit under a tree and chat and eat our sandwiches halfway through. 




But when we got back, I got back to work and finished cutting and sanding all the edges, then got them glued and nailed up:

Fill, sand, paint, and so.much.caulking to do!  I ran out this evening, so I need to get more in the morning, but I have 3/4 of it all done.  Just the last set of shelves on the far left to finish up.  Then I can prime and paint.  And now we can finish these boxes on the ceiling, with the two rows of molding (and more caulk! and more primer! and more paint!)  But it's the home stretch now.

I have a busy week at work, so I won't be able to work much on these until the weekend, but I am hoping to get a little done every day again, maybe a coat of paint for an hour or so a day.  I did manage to get the baseboard molding in, so it's just the cabinets and that last set of coffered boxes to finish.  The fireplace is looking really bad now -- I've just slapped paint here and there on it while I'm working on the shelves, but Dale is going to do a nice coat of plaster over the brick and maybe he can get that done this week (along with finishing up the wall with the sliding glass window.  Who knows, maybe we can move furniture back in here soon!