The Project Blog

So I was putzing around the house today thinking “I’ll clear out my old tech crap and make a few bucks” … While cussing my now ancient Directv HD Tivo to make sure it still worked, it was complaining about no signal on a tuner.  Fair enough, I’ll just go move the wires around on the switch in the basement.  Hike down there, wander into the theater room where the multiswitch is located and was greeted to water on the floor!  The man cave gods were looking down on me because it had to have just started within the last day or two.  What is it you ask?  It would appear that one of the HVAC condensate lines has a leak somewhere along the run from the attic to the basement, yay!!  *grumble*

So 30 mins later, a gallon or two of slimy water was pulled out of the lines via shopvac and the dripping into the basement stopped.  Consider this your friendly public service announcement to suck those condensate lines out once or twice a year and for extra measure, toss some diluted bleach water down them to kill the slime bugs while you’re at it!  Glad I was reminded of this now and not after having the room finished!

Well, I guess I’m more of a ‘shock and awe’ personality because rather than continuing to do all the touch-up finishing work on the drywall in the bar and game rooms I decided to move back into the theater room and work on the seating risers because those are something massive you can see built vs correcting barely noticeable imperfections in drywall mud…  I started off with a google sketchup layout to see if my plan would even work within the area of the room between the doors as the original mockup I created shows.  The seating I’m looking at recommends a 4ft ‘wall to back of row in front’ layout and I was concerned I didnt have enough space.

The first riser is 2×4 only to have something to bot seats to vs trying to mess with bolting them to the concrete or some other method.  Every row behind that is 2×6 with the front of one riser resting directly on the rear of the one in front of it.  To support the rear of each row I cut some posts out of pressure treated 4×4.  Originally I thought I would just put a couple of braces across the middle of each riser and use 3/4″+ ply or osb and have all the strength I need but sitting there looking at the 8.5 foot platforms I decided I will build them out to flooring code and throw some 2×4 studs in 16″ on center.  The platforms will be secured to each other with liquid nails where the 2×6′s rest on each other as well as some toe nails and for extra over-building a few of those sharp evil mending plates.

I’m still undecided on painting them with a good epoxy for easy cleanup or carpeting them.  Also kicking myself for not planning just a little bit better so I had a bullnose on the front of the risers to hide some rope lighting.  Guess I’ll have to rig up something set into the face.

Next stop, back to Lowes to get some more 2×4′s and the ply.  Until then, here’s phase 1 pics.

Managed to scrap together a little construction time this weekend across a couple of days while the lovely wife had the kids off at the pool or elsewhere.  Most of the first day was taking the time to finally get all of my little construction waste piles all into a big ol box (which will probably find it’s way to a construction waste dumpster near the office, shhhhhh) and cloging the hell out of a shopvac filter 2-3 times sucking up all the fine dust on the floor because I was tired of the broom kicking up clouds that would just re-settle.

The 2nd day saw me getting inventive with my sander and 25ft vacum hose.  I set up the shopvac outside without the filter in it and attached the hose to the dust filter connection on the sander.  The neighbors had to wonder why I had a shopvac sitting in the back yard, running, and seemingly on fire smoking madly.    After hitting all the joints in the game room I got a little frisky and primed the walls!  It’s amazing how a simple coat of white paint will make a room look like… well, a ROOM!  I have some joints and imperfections to touch up that I think stand out better now that there’s some paint on the walls.  Let the fine tedious finishing work (on one room anyway) begin!

Once the game room is all touched up and ready for flooring and trim, I’ll button up the bar room, then it’s onto constructing the seating risers in the theater room and working on all the finishing touches in there!

After all was said and done, I ended up with 8 sheets of drywall leftover.  I believe I originally calculated 52 sheets would be needed and I got a few extra ‘just in case’.  So in the end I came in a couple under my original estimate without needing the safety net!  The leftovers will up on the outside walls of the ‘storage room’ to hide that mess from our guests when they first arrive in 2018.

On with the pics.

This is turning out to be the slowest basement build in history, hope I didn’t wake any of you up!!  It’ll be TWO years this June that I started sealing the walls.  Thanks goes to a massive fish habit that may have run it’s course AND the drain of having to get one of our two HVAC’s totally replaced…  Both of those things have been dampening the budget for this project big time.  geesh.

Anyway.  I’m down to literally two walls of drywall to go!  Plus a few small areas above windows, etc.  I think the only reason they call this stuff ‘sheet rock’ is because they don’t want people calling it by it’s real name (shit rock) in front of children.   I’ve slung every piece by myself so far!  Most of the joints have been mudded at least once and it looks like the huge bucket I got will get me right to the end with a little to spare!  I must say that there is a great sense of accomplishment when I stand back and see it all taking shape.  Pretty cool to walk across the basement from the stairs through cluttered studded rooms then walking into empty near-finished rooms!

Without further yapping, here are some more pics…

So 99% of the drywall is up as of today. First coat of joint compound is done waiting to be sanded down and smoothed out. I got out my trusty inaccurate tape measure and marked off the screen area and location on the wall and grabbed a chair and sat there and thunk. I had made some sketches long ago and they just were not going to be practical for what I was going for. I was also once again regretting the use of the very narrow room vs knocking down the divider wall between what will be the bar and game rooms and getting a wider theater room out of the deal. But anyway. I sat down and re-acquainted myself with Google Sketchup again and I think we’ve come up with something that will work reasonably well.

The seating we’ve chosen (i.e. been forced to go with due to room width) is more commercial vs recliner/couch style. I’d found a berkline model that would work, but for the level of use it wasn’t worth the extra $1,500.

Going to end up with right around 4ft deep rows with each row going up 6 inches. We’re still debating final wall finishings, we’re going to attempt to find some fabric or draperies to hang floor to ceiling between the columns to help kill reflections. Also so as not to have an extra echo chamber behind the last row we will hang a curtain wall there too with an additional step down for rear access.

Enough rambling, on with the sketches!

The running theme here seems to be I cant measure   I walked the walls the service line would follow between the main and sub panels no less than twice.  Took into account a foot of slack on each end, was generous around corners… Twice I came up with 50 feet.  When I bought the wire (Alum 4-2-2-2) just to be safe, I purchased 51 feet….  Well, between my apparently metric tape measure and goofing on the sub panel end to the tune of a 6 inch cutting of the wrong wire to be shortened, I *almost* ended up short on the main panel end.  Luckily the 100a breaker found home in the lower right side of the main panel and the ground line reached over to the left… barely.

But in the end, I have a fully functional sub panel feeding 7 circuits.  Only had one out of 23 or so outlets wired wrong which seemed to upset a breaker (Did it on purpose to test the breaker, honest!), overall not bad for my first shot at fully wiring 3 rooms!

My employer closes down between christmas and newyears, so I hustled up and got the inspection on wiring done, passed that with flying colors (all 30 seconds the inspector spent looking around…!)

So it was off to my second home, Lowe’s, for more supplies (disclaimer, I *do* own stock in Lowe’s as a result of my hobbies!)  Home came 58 sheets of drywall on their $20/90min rental truck.  Thanks to my little brother we got 4 sheets (2 packs of 2) to the basement before we realized it was going to take more than the hour we had the truck so it all ended up in the garage.  A couple of days later I enlisted another friend (as my brother disavowed any relationship after that particular bout of manual torture) to get the rest down the basement.  Big props out to Jeff, we knocked it out in a little over an hour.  We would have had it done in half the time had I not needed to stop every 4th or 5th trip to fight off the urge to vomit.  I fly a desk for a living, and I’m NOT going to quit that to go into the drywall business any time soon that’s for damn sure!

I’ve been the sole slinger since so as not to lose any more relatives and friends and it’s going reasonably smooth.  My publik skool maff continues to fail me however because no matter how many times I measure for an outlet box cut I’ve still missed all but 2 by at least 1/2 an inch… I tried the trick of chalking the box for one of the lights but apparently bumped the panel way before it was up in place and as you can see in the pic, that cut was off by about 3 houses.

Beings I have to have all the wiring run to get my rough in inspection done, that meant accelerating the bar room. When we last left it, I only had half of one wall drylocked. I’ll say that that stuff will keep in the big 5 gallon bucket for a pretty long time! It has been over a year since I last opened it, and after a good stirring (read: after spraying the $h1t all over the place) with a bent up coat hanger in a drill, the rest of the walls were coated. I had just enough left over out of the whole bucket to do about 1-2 more square fit, the man-cave gods smiled upon me!

After another lumber trip (thanks for use of the van wifey!) and a side trip to borrow a kickass nailer from a friend of mine, the two walls went up with ease! Yes, that is a level, and yes I used it!

Been a while since I’ve updated, but I’ve been busy while silent.   Shortly after getting the insulation mostly in, I obtained an estimate to have the subpanel and all circuits done.  What started out as a plan do do ONLY the theater room has now been transformed into finishing the theater and the two adjoining rooms which will become a bar/concessions room and a game room… grrr.  The reason this happened is beings I want this all done to code and to be inspected by the county (in case anything ever happens that an insurance company can weasel out of payment by pointing at wiring not done to code) it’s easier to get one permit done and do it all at once.. Fair enough.  What I wasn’t expecting though was a quote for nearly $3,000 for all three rooms!  So armed with a newfound basic understanding of the US electric code, I laid out the plan pictured below and submitted it to the county and obtained a permit to do the work myself!  I haven’t totaled the numbers yet, but after purchasing all of the needed materials I’m in it for well under $1,000 even though I used twice as much wire as I’d estimated

So I got down into the basement this weekend to sling some more fiberglass. Last time I vividly remember stating to all afterwards “next time I’m going to wear a mask”… This time I vividly remember stating to all afterwards “I really should have wore a mask!”. But I digress.

I ended up slinging insulation on all 4 walls of the theater room beings I was going to have extra… Not so much I ended up where I now need another roll or two to completly finish, grrr!

Though it did go much faster this time beings all the studs I put up were 16″ on center vs the seemingly random spaced studs the builder placed on the exterior walls of the rest of the basement. I slung 12 rolls worth in the same time it took me to get through 6 last time!

As they say: “Pics or it didn’t happen!”