Library Progress: First Three Cabinets

Bathroom sink cabinet

Sample kitchen cabinet built in 1996

While waiting for the room to be advanced in construction far enough with all the rough in work, windows, electrical, and fire proofing foam which was sprayed before the insulation and drywall installation, I decided to design and build the two sink cabinets so that the plumbing could be completed.   The bathroom cabinet was fairly straight forward with the exception of altering the top row of drawers to extend a few inches out beyond the lower section.  This was a small detail that I had only seen before in my Dad's kitchens, who used to build his cabinets right in the house.  I someday still want to build a set of kitchen cabinets that have this look and feel. In fact, I still have an experimental sample upper and base cabinet I built back around 1996 with an updated version of Dad's design. 

The other sink cabinet is also straight forward with the exception, two small sliding trays to hold dissecting tools in the drawers. 

Then I started drawing what I ended up calling, "The Mother of All Base Cabinets."  This cabinet has 16 drawers to hold 3 by 5 index cards. ( To be used for reference notes, not a book index) Four file cabinet drawers below and on the two wings, glass doors.  Later I added a shadow box cabinet with glass top for displaying smaller treasures.  The poplar secondary wood to hold the small drawers in place became quite interesting to build just by themselves.  Keeping in mind the sketch on the long wall.  The challenge was to build something that you feel will blend well with the overall feeling of the room.  It doesn't have to be the exact same everything, but it needed to somehow tie in.  This can be a tricky thought process.  Sometimes it becomes more work thinking than the working part.  But hey, what's a brain for? 

In progress

The Longest Wall

So, here we are, 2700 hours later, 10,000 pieces of walnut, most of it challenging.  I thought I would share with you some of my thought processes as we go through this first sequence. 

 Another line Krenov said, "We must be able to do the complex well, and yet arrive at, and preserve, simplicity."  Well, I don't know how simple this room appears...I guess it is in the eye of the beholder, but this process of building a room for books and other things has been a great journey, at times very spiritual, and at times the lowest because of the overwhelming amount of work and problems to solve.  After some years of building things, you kind of have an idea of what you are in for.  You can usually see most of it in your mind before you start.  That wasn't the case here.  And that causes trouble.  I remember sitting in there the first few weeks and was crushed with the question, how are you going to do this physically and mentally?  The answer came in a sort of a funny way, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."  So that is what I did.

Construction of this room started February 2007.  The first decision was determined by the size of the room as drawn up by the architect. 

This was an addition to a comfortable home with one side which allowed for a room about 17 x 27 feet.  The room steps down from the main house two feet to achieve a 12 foot height to the ceiling.  In addition we could fit a bathroom area about 10 x 10 leading out to the pool, and also a nice walk-in attic that was originally intended for extra storage but evolved into a great almost tree house feeling sort of room for visiting kids and grand kids.  I made rough sketches of each area in the room and discussed the  possibilities for each space. 

 I started looking for new ideas for inspiration, what might look good for the ultimate design and how it would blend with the overall feel.  I looked at pictures in books, magazines, furniture, houses, design, woodworking, art and watched a few movies that I remembered seeing the interior of a house or a piece of furniture.  I tried to find pictures of beautiful libraries on film and looked for ideas there.  Then I found the source of inspiration for this room.  It was in the movie "The Illusionist" The movie is set in Vienna, Austria, but this library was actually in Prague.  It was filmed at the Konopiste Castle, built at the end of the 13th century, which was bought and renovated in 1887 to be the residence of Arch Duke, Francis Ferdinand and his family, whom you might recall was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914.  It is said that this incident ignited World War I.  Anyway the private library in that castle in the film gave me the inspiration for the starting point of this room.  The feeling was very comfortable but not too out of reach for a man who doesn't own a castle. 

I first sketched out the longest wall in the room.  We looked it over, altered it and made a few more changes until we nailed it down.  Looking back, the drawing becomes very critical for me.  Now I have something to wrap everything else around.  Everything else afterward ties into this idea.  It becomes to me, my most important breakthrough moment and relief.  The overall look seemed to flow.  Most of the options were thought out.  Proportions, book sizes, accent lighting, and layering with moldings.  The thinking was how to blend the rest of the room with the main wall. 






Left Side










Right Side

Walnut Library

"There are known-knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known-unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown-unknowns; the ones we don't know we don't know."- Don Rumsfeld

What if you decide to write a story about your latest project, and you wanted to include in your story the thinking part and the sequence that goes into it? But right from the beginning, you constantly become reminded of other things kind of related to building a library, but kind of not. Then you come up with these small side-line topics and do some digging into each, with the resources that are available to you. But then you worry, that somewhere out there you are missing this huge amount of important information that later might make your efforts appear dreadfully....... dreadful. No, distracted. Something reminds me of something else, and that reminds me of something else. I say to myself, "Pull yourself together-Man!" This isn't brain surgery. Well, in this case, it is, sort of. Focus, stay engaged. Can you write things this way? Or will it cause people to worry about you? Oh well, I am going to go for it anyway.