I ran into some long time clients yesterday at the local hardware/general store. We were talking and they mentioned they were considering building a library next year and could I send them some pictures ... I rounded up a few and realized that rather then send them in an email, I would post them here with some comments and explanations. Most of the these projects were before I started writing this blog so there is not much in the choice of construction photos .... They are not all libraries, but exhibit some of the various book storage design possibilities ... Click the photos to enlarge them ... More pics later ....
This stained cherry library had some beautiful details...The soft lighting for the miniature decoys over the windows, a fly tying desk., a secret gun cabinet with lighted storage and opposite the wall shown above, a complete home office ... I have that picture somewhere ...
A classic natural cherry home office and bookcase circa 2004 I think. The clients and I got a couple design awards for this one, a portfolio award from Custom Woodworking Business magazine and one from the VWMA.
The opposite wall with a custom, built in fly tying desk ...
A mini library. This room was about 8 x 10 but we squeezed in two walls of floor to ceiling bookcases, a desk and a beautiful door with stained glass ...
This wall is adjacent to the one above with the door in between them.
Not a library per se, but a really fine cabinet full of stuff. Down lighting on each shelf, uplighting on the top of the case ... An incredible collection of objects and only a very small portion of the clients extraordinary all original decoy collection.
My largest project ever and my favorite drawings ever ... This was choice before CAD for me and I recently stuck these to the ceiling of the closet in my office ... If you enlarge this one, you can see the whole room. The photos below really dont do the room justice. For this project I had to take on a partner, Andrew Pate of Andrew Pate Designs in Cambridge New York for this one ... He had a much larger shop than I did at the time and more experience in long distance built ins than I ever want to have ... Yikes! What anxiety. Will this thing fit? Its four walls, floor to ceiling in a Upper East Side Pre War ... I mean, really ...
A. from drawings above ... Well it all fit ... It was a huge installation and four of us had to spend more than a couple nights in the city ...
B. from drawing above ... Lots of details ... The wood was cut from the clients Vermont land; dried in New York State; fabricated and assembled in Arlington and Cambridge; finished before delivery; and delivered to NYC and installed there ... It was also the year we moved from Arlington to Dorset .... Did I really do this? I guess.
C. Lots of details ... The stereo all pulls out; the vertical drawers on either side of the tv pull out and hold boxes of flies ... Not shown, wall d. above, and the fly tying desk and custom rod and reel storage. The arrow in the sketches above points to a view of the room ceiling if youre lying on the floor. There was a challenge there to make that all make sense too ... Wonderful clients, wonderful project ...
And, you can alchoices paint them ... This project we finished this summer and it actually has a blog link ... The Wall
The installation day
In the shop ... See the blog link for more info on this one
And here we have a totally minimalist approach ... live edge curly maple and fir supports ... All for now ...
A reader sent me an email looking for information on carving the pine cones on the bed in the post above ... I looked back and found that that was one topic I hadnt really covered in depth .... I think this was Wills first time carving them but fortunately I had saved a half carved sample cone with the layout lines shown so all he had to do was make the turning, steal the layout from the sample, find the right gouge and carve achoice everything that didnt look like a pine cone ... This time we actually took some pictures too ... It helps if you can find a nice fresh one in the woods that is just about to open to get the top right ... I think its too late to find one of those this year ... Click the photos to enlarge them ...
The top photo shows the horizontal and vertical divisions ... youll have to find (or buy) the right sweep chisel in your carving tool collection and then match the number of lines and divisions to the size/height of your cone and chisel .. Outline first as shown above in the top photo and photo above,
Then hollow out inside the outlines, getting smaller as you approach the top ... This is a learn by doing detail and no quantity of words will substitute for some trial and error here ... Have at it !!
Same deal for the spirals except the layout for those is shown in the original bed posts .
In this picture, you can just see a little of how the top of the cone is resolved to appear slightly open.
