Still plugging away

Is it normal to have wine or beer every week night?  Because that's what I've been doing. I'm sorry to be so slow with the updates on our built-in, but I've been buzzed for the last couple weeks.  Happily, we now have cleats, shelves, and two coats of paint done.  The cleats took an entire Saturday of mitering, gluing, leveling, nailing, prying off and starting over, screaming (mostly me) and throwing things (me again), but they are done. 

We also ended up recutting a bunch of shelves that were not done correctly by Shaun's buddy, a huge bummer at $20 a board.  We had enough, but I was hoping to return the extras.  Worse, I had primed and painted all the old ones.  La-di-frickin-da. 

We spent a lot of time with the hand sander getting the edges cleaned up and making sure the shelves would have room to come in and out of the shelf supports.  Did I mention how much I hate sanding?  ps - I wore my painting shirt two days in a row because you all liked it so much.  And it was already dirty.  And I didn't want to look for another painting shirt.

We knew that all the edges of the unit had to be finished with something, because of unsightly things like this:

We decided to use plain pine 1 x 2's on all the vertical supports because they were the perfect width to cover these double boards, and we really didn't want anything froufy, frilly or otherwise decorative. 

The most dramatic improvement was the areas against the walls, where we had to shim everything to make sure it was level.  Before:

And after!

We used Loctite construction adhesive and our Porter Cable nail gun (1.5" nails) to attach all the cleats and the 1 x 2's.  We each logged many hours on that step stool with the gun, and it's a good thing it has to be pressed against something before firing, or we probably would've shot eachother across the room.  DIY or die, baby!

And this is what it looked like at the end of the day on Saturday:

Since then, all the shelves came down and received lots of paint lovin.  I've also caulked and filled more cracks than I care to remember.  But it LOOKS LIKE A BOOKCASE!!!  Next up is more paint for the cabinet portion, some finishing trim on the 'cabinet top' pieces, and figuring out what the heck to do about the crown and baseboard that cannot be matched with anything local because it's so old.  Of course.  

** To everyone who voted for me in the One Project Closer contest - I am so warm and gushy inside that so many people would do that for me.  THANK YOU! **