Bookcase for my girls

When we moved to this house while our twins were in the NICU, we made the decision to give up a formal dining room so the girls would have a place on the first floor to play.    My wife is a teacher who is working with our girls until they go to school, so she did an amazing job of setting up the room after I painted it.

She wanted storage from day 1.   It's now about day 955 and I thought it would be a good time to get started :)

She wanted a low bookcase because these girls are born climbers and anything higher than 3 feet would become a new conquest.

So, I planned to build a 36" high, 24" wide, built-in bookcase.    I chose to build it out of 1x12 poplar since it's easy to work with and takes paint well....so they tell me.     I adapted a plan from Fine Homebuilding to meet my needs; http://www.finehomebuilding.com/how-to/articles/bookcase-breaks-rules-built-in-modular.aspx?ac=ts&ra=fp
Day 1: the first day for me is always drawing out the plans.   A new step that I added from the FH article was to use a "Story Pole".    If you haven't done this before you NEED to do it.   It makes any kind of shelving work much easier.    A scrap of 1/3 works great for this.   As you are determining the overall height, shelf heights, molding, etc. you mark it all on the story pole.   Then, when you areready to cut you transfer the marks on the pole to the wood work.   Since I was making a built-in, I had to make sure the baseboard would come up to meet the bottom shelf, and that the to top of the top shelf would be covered by the molding.  
Day 2: transfered all of the marking to the wood and used my DeWalt sliding compound mitre saw to cut the sides and shelves to length.    Next transfer the marks from the pole mark the shelf locations.    Then I put the dado blade on the table saw and cut 3/4" wide 3/8" deep dadoes in the boards to recess the shelf edges into.   The FH article suggested this was a waste of time and that you could just glue and screw, but my kids WILL climb on this thing so I went for the extra strength.   Plus, if you mark and cut well it makes it simple to put the shelves in place for glueing and screwing.