Waking up to the carpet pulled back with the sub-floor exposed gave me a little bit of motivation to get something started for the day! I started with mistake one: measuring the height from the carpet…
I grabbed some breakfast, recruited an assistant to help remeasure the rights height of by base and began ripping stripes from a sheet of poplar I had in the garage…
Having a nail gun saved soooo much time this second time around. I squared everything up and used 2″ brad nails to keep everything together. Once pieced together I went back and used some screws to to make sure these puppies weren’t going to fall apart on me (overkill maybe but I’d rather play it safe).
With the base in place I grabbed some shims to level everything out….everything seemed to be off so I took my time to make sure on this part. I started with the base because I was super confident in my measuring skills and since the height of this piece was crucial to looking right with the fireplace I took the least likely route I’d mess up on measurement 🙂
After placing the base down and leveling it I remeasured the base to cut the top from 3/4″ poplar plywood. This stuff has super strength…again, maybe overkill but my biggest fear was that I would make all this effort convincing <ahref=”http://allegralove.com”>Allegra to let me build this, build it and when she put a book on it, it came crashing down…haha.
I thought I would accomplish more in half of a morning, but with the little set back, it took more time that I expected (pretty common).
Once installed, I took a step back…looked at my progress….and sing a little victory tune in my head “dunna….dunna, dunna, dunna, eigh eigh, eigh”.
I’m half way done with this project. now ready to build the shelves things and finish phase one.