yup, its still coming down. Here is the great wall of snow in front of our house. We didn’t even have to shovel it that way, all drift.
here is mount sladden that started accumulating in our back yard…
Mount Sladden is forming some harsh peaks…
Our table and chairs are officially snowed in. 
This morning I woke up to find that Nine News decided to preemt the today show to bring us details of the giant storm that has hit Colorado. We were supposed to fly out to London today and were up very late getting all packed up and ready. Our flight at 12:30 was already cancelled but we quickly got ready to head to the airport to hop an earlier flight. We dropped our dog off at boarding and then were driving with horrible visibility – I called the airport on the way to find out that all flights were cancelled – we decided to turn around and head home. Here are some photos that we took at lunch time (only a few hours after the storm started). We are estimated to get between 12-24 inches in the denver metro area.
Since our flight was cancelled we have to get rebooked – the first flight we can get out on isn’t until Christmas morning. We were were set to return to colorado on the 28th – so no we are deciding if we will make the trek. It’s a crazy storm! It is fun to be snowed in, but we wish it wasn’t while we were trying to fly.
here is the current visibility….
our table and chairs being covered in snow….
snow drifting on the patio…
When we left our intrepid decorators, they had completed the wiring and installation of the cans and spot light and painting the room. The next step in the grand project is the installation of built in book cases. For this we went to Home Depot and procured 10 (yes ten) sheets of 4×8 MDF… now I think MDF stands for “Medium Density Fibre” but as far as Mandy and I are concerned, I think it’s “maximum density…” because lord knAs promised (though not as quickly) the followows that stuff is heavy! I even had to have Mandy help me load it onto the cart even though she was pregnant (I know – bad husband). Somehow, I later figured out that I could manhandle a sheet myself as long as I had gloves on.
The goal with the built-ins was to have the deep blue wall show through the stark white frame of the bookcases. Every face of the bookcase should also be the same width of 1 1/2 inches (double the thickness of the MDF).
So I set about building four MDF boxes that would make up the bottom set of deeper and taller shelves. Each box was assembled with double rabbit joints that were created using a router. You would not believe the amount of sawdust that routing MDF generates, it’s almost as if MDF is a highly compressed composite of sawdust itself! I think we’ll be finding sawdust in our garage for years to come!.
Once the boxes were assembled, I used a drill to attach the shelf in each one. Then I pulled each box into the library and set them on the 2×6 ladder frame to lift them off the ground a bit. I attached them with bolts and then attached the face frame of 1×2 pine. The final step of course is the wood fill the nail holes and sand sand sand before we started painting.
Meanwhile, I assembled the upper book cases and made the 10 shelves that would go into the two towers. To ensure accuracy and consistency on the shelves, I made a little frame on my work table into which I put the MDF lengths that I had already cut so they would be exactly the same length and width. Most of my cutting was done with a skill saw due to the unweildiness of the 4×8 sheets of MDF. But to ensure a straight line I clamped guides to the sheets to run the saw along… brilliant I tell ya!
Mandy was then kind enough to help me with some of the final assembly of the book cases, giving her a critical opportunity to get into the photos with her pink tool belt (this was during her October month of pink).
With the lower bookcases assembled in the library and the upper towers in the garage it was time to start painting. We chose semi-gloss aspen white to match the trim in the library (also known as McStain white because all the houses in our McStain neighborhood use it). We first used a couple of coats of white kilz primer because primer is our best friend when it comes to painting. Following that we did at least 3 coats of the white paint to make sure it would last. Once the paint had dried and hardened, Josh helped us hoist the two towers onto the base bookcases. They looked great, but there was one final step to finish up the job: the crown moulding. 
The crown was there to attach the top of the book cases to the ceiling to give it a clean look from floor to ceiling as well as make the whole room look a bit more classic. We chose dental crown (which happended to be the most expensive we could find and the hardest to deal with) because we liked the art deco feel of it. After hearing about Scott’s challeng
es a few years ago doing Crown, I felt it would be wisest to wait until Kevin’s visit a few weeks later to get my primer on the best way to make it right. I satisfied myself with marking the line on the wall where the crown should lay.
Of course Kevin had great tips on how to make sure you’re cutting the right angles and also how to make the right joins (the corners on dental crown have to line up pretty perfectly). We spent quite some time going back and forth from the library to the garage to get the crown cut correctly.
Kevin did most if not all the installing of the crown but I think next time I’ll do it at least half as well as he did with all the advice and gotchas. I filled int he nailholes and did the final touchup on the crown and we were done… a remarkable makeover for a previously bland room. We got a nice big plant for the room and put back all the books we had (which turned out to look quite pathetic in the much larger bookcases) this time at least organized and alphabetized. 
We’re ready for more books… and we’re looking for some nice baskets to put in the big bottom shelves where we can store childrens toys out of sight when that room becomes more multipurpose!
For those of you who have visited our home, you might have been unimpressed by the first two rooms in our house designated as the library and formal dining room. Part of the problem with moving into a house with “room to grow” is that there are a number of rooms that you rarely use or need and therefore sit there empty and unpainted while you focus on the rooms you actually use. The photo here shows how the library was, with the exception of the recessed cans that I have finished installing in this picture.
The problem in our house is that the library is one of the first rooms you see in our house and can be seen from the street. We’ll talk about our overhaul of the dining room in a future post, but I wanted to show off our new library which involved a number of different subprojects including installing lights, a built in bookcase and crown moulding.
The first step was to get some lighting in the room. In keeping with our fairly minimalist/modern style, we thought recessed cans. Given how straightforward the recessed can installation in the office went, I thought this would be a piece of cake. When we were purchasing our house, we had the builders put a couple of switched circuits up in the ceiling, so all that was left was to cut some holes and tie the wires together. This turned out to be one of th
ose learning experiences in the standard way houses are built.
Our office is on the 2nd floor and so the ceiling just has 2×6’s and insulation lying on top of the drywall, but then crawl space above that. So fishing wiring from one can to another is pretty simple as you can just loop up through the insulation and over the ceiling jambs. The library is on the first floor and so the ceiling configuration is quite dfferent. There are floor joists that span from the 1st floor ceiling to the 2nd level floor every 16 inches with no holes to run wire through.
As you can see from the picture (with ceiling joists and planned cutouts added in) we had to punch through a total of four ceiling joists and then thread wire through these holes, all through a 4 inch hole in the ceiling. With a good 12 inch long 3/4″ drill bit I managed to drill through the joists from the holes. Then using a wire fishing rod, some twine and a coathanger we fished the string through one joist, captured it from the other end with the coat hanger, pulled it through and then used it pull the wire back through the two holes. There were a total 
of four joists that needed to be drilled through and feed wire, but once they were done and the wire fished, the rest of the light installation was a piece of cake! I installed four cans for ambient light and one spot light for the picture area between the book cases.
Once the lights were in (and a pair of speakers in the prewired spots) it was time to get to painting. We have found that the secret to painting a room, especially in a bold color, is to use tinted primer – always. It will save you at least a couple of coats of paint everytime, and primer costs less! We chose a deep, dark blue for the library. The sort of blue that reminds you of the ocean under a slightly threatening sky, that causes you to think and reflect on life. Honestly, we just wanted a good contrast to the white of the trim and bookcases and I love blue – it’s america’s favorite color don’t you know?
So this post ends with the room lighting completed and the walls painted. The next post will document the conclusion of this most excellent project with the construction and installation of the bookcases and the crown moulding, including hot tips from Kevin Richau on how to make sure you get your crown angles cut perfectly!
