Bookcase number 2 well under way

After several weeks hiatus from the Great Bookcase Finishing Project (partly because a hideous heat wave made working in the garage untenable, but mostly because I needed a breather from, well, breathing the fumes of stain, shellac, and poly), I'm back on track and making furious progress on the second -- and definitely final! -- bookcase.

This one is going a lot faster than the first, due to experience and to changes in the sequence I'm following. First time around, I finished the five loose shelves completely (sand, stain, shellac x2, sand, poly, sand, poly), before moving on to the carcase and repeating those steps twice for two different positions of the case. This time, with one bookcase out of the way, I had room to set up a table for finishing the shelves at the same time as the first "positioning" of the carcase, plus I covered more of the carcase in the first position. Much less switching from one step to another, lots less drying time overall. The upshot is that shelves are almost finished -- due to the double-sided nature of the shelves, it was easier to do just the first poly coat: side 1 coat 1 while doing the first coat on the carcase, side 2 coat 1 while doing coat two on the carcase -- and about 2/3 of the carcase is completely done.

All that's left is to flip the carcase over onto its other side and run all steps on the left outside, right inside, and the back panels, doing the second coat of poly on the shelves when I do the poly on those parts of the carcase. (Also need to do the face frame, but I'm thinking I'll do that separately at the end; yes, I'll have to run all the steps again, but that'll all be pretty trivial.)

And then, dear readers, it goes in the living room and this bloody project will be done!