Okay, so I’ve been a bit lazy with the blog lately. Things have only been happening in the last few weeks though, but I’ll make posts to work through it all. I finished putting the rest of the drywall up (which I started in April, wow..). Nothing special, a bunch of cutting and screwing involved..

After this, I started taping, with the help of my Dad. Now, this is where the big delay comes in, and why not a lot was accomplished since April. Attempting to tape was a bad idea. While I don’t mind doing small amounts of mudding/taping, I learned that 1) I really do not like doing large amouts of it, and 2) I’m realy bad at it. We did actually get it all taped (although my dad got sick part way through so I ended up finishing it on my own a few days after we started), but then came time to sand. I hate sanding, much much more than taping. This meant, after about a bit over 2 hours of sanding (a couple sessions, sread over a week), and realizing at my pace and with the amount of mud on the wall (Did I mention I’m bad at taping?) I figured it would take me at least 5 more hours - and this was just the first coat.

So I did what I should have done at the start, and I called in a pro. He cleaned up my mess and had a new coat on in about 4 hours, and then came back and did a couple more coats. Each time, it took him about 3-4 hours to sand and put a new coat on. I will not show you pictures of my job, but here’s the final product:

With the help of my friend Matt, I finally started getting the drywall up. It’s a nice change, things are actually starting to look like real rooms now, instead of just framing, wood and wires everywhere.

I haven’t done a lot of drywall (a couple of wall sections, and more recently the headers for the upstairs closets), but I think we did pretty well. There were some complicated cuts to do. You can also see in this picture how the drywall is covering the window completely, and I started to cut it out. This method is supposed to make a stronger wall around the window (as opposed to having seams at the corners), even though it does mean there is quite a bit of waste.

One other thing I did was insulate the wall between the main room, and the laundry and furnace rooms, to try and reduce noise. Since I’m not drywalling the interior walls in the furnace room, I put up some plastic sheets to cover the insulation. The media wiring going to the TV is behind this, so if I do need to change wiring it’s just a matter of pulling the plastic back, and then stapling it back down when I’m done. The plastic is the same stuff I used under the footers of the exterior walls, made into a larger sheet with tuck tape.

I’m not drywalling the ceiling, as I’ll be putting in a suspended ceiling instead. I’m hoping the acoustic tiles will be okay for damping noise from upstairs, but worst case I can take tiles out, and put insulation above it.

One other thing I’ll note - I was originally going to use Roxul insulation instead of fiberglass, but when I bought this insulation to put behind the electrical box (before the real insulation was put in), there was no Roxul in stock, so I had to go this way. This insulation is just the left over stuff from that project (which is like 80% of the bag) so it didn’t make sense to trash it and buy new stuff.

It’s been a while since I posted, partly because I haven’t gotten a lot done in the last few weeks until just recently. I did get all the media wiring installed, however.

I’ll be mounting an LCD TV to the wall, and so I put in a recessed media box to hold all the cables. There’s also a 110v plug inside this box.

I really like the idea behind this (as opposed to putting keystone jacks behind the TV) since it means one less connection for all the wires, the excess wires tuck inside the box, and it’s easy to add to later. To make sure of this, I put in two 2″ x 5′ lengths of conduit, which is actually 2″ PVC central vac piping. I like this stuff because it’s mostly rigid, but bends enough to install it in the wall, and the actual pipe is very thin - which means for a 2″ outside diameter, I have 1 7/8″ inside diameter.

The open end is right beside the furnace, which I’ll be able to get at since I’m not drywalling the inside of the furnace room. The same wall is where the back of the jacks are, so it will be easy to add new wiring/jacks as needed in the future.

To the TV, I have two HDMI cables, one component video, one composite video, and stereo RCA. I also have wiring for 5 speakers. I’m not buying into this 7/9/whatever channel stuff yet - I thought about it, but I don’t know how the room will be set up exactly, so it’s too hard to predict where speakers should go. If I do need to go that route, I can run wires since it’s a suspended ceiling, and I have drilled 1″ holes in the tops of all the headers so I can drop wires down into the wall cavity. For now I’m happy with my 5.1 channels.

There are also two Cat 5e network drops, and one RG-6 coaxial cable, which all go back to the patch panel in the crawlspace.

I also ran cables over to where my desk will go - one set of component video (which can also be used as composite video, stereo RCA or digital audio), and one HDMI - which terminate beside the rest of the jacks for the TV. The idea here is that I can have my computer on the TV, or play music through the main sound system, or whatever. Also at the desk is one RG-6 coaxial cable and four Cat 5e network drops (which again go back to the patch panel).

I’ve also finished up the electrical at this point. There are two separate circuits for plugs in the main rec room, one circuit for the laundry room, and one for the bathroom (which is shared with the upstairs bathroom). There is also another circuit dedicated to the lights. I personally hate when the lights in a room are on the same breaker as the plugs, as it means whenever you’re doing work on something electrical, you have to run power for lights from another room. It’s pretty trivial, but since I’m redoing all the wiring, it’s not any extra work to do it this way (besides installing maybe one more breaker).

Now that all the wiring is in place, I’m finally ready to move on to the drywall..