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..

I took advantage of some nice weather a couple weeks ago to finally replace the back (laundry room) window. I replaced the front windows a couple of months ago. The back window was 40″ x 24″, and had a slider on the outside, with a hinged flip-up window on the inside.

One issue I had was that the top of the window was actually above the gas and water lines, so once I added a ceiling to the laundry room, the window would have been above it. Since I was replacing the window anyways, the new one is shorter, at 40″ x 18″, and otherwise exactly identical to the front windows. This also meant I would be left with a 6″ gap at the top of the window, so I started by building a new frame. I used tapcons to anchor in the side pieces to the concrete, and then put a piece across connecting the two. This will also serve to anchor the new window in place.

It’s a bit hard to make out, but there is a bit of a lip (about 3/4″ wide) in the concrete, centered below the piece of 2×4 in this photo. They obviously poured the concrete with the old frame in place. I decided not to chip this out, and instead to just center the window on it and fill it with foam to insulate.

I put the new window in, and anchored it to the concrete with a couple of tapcons on each side, and a couple of wood screws to the wood above. I used a piece of 5/8″ OSB to fill in the 6″ gap on the outside. The black wire you can see in the photos is my cable line, which previously went through the window frame. I mostly kept it connected while I was working because I was listening to an online radio stream at the time. What can I say - the regular radio stations here suck.

I used a piece of flashing, which pretty much fit perfectly, to cover the OSB from the outside. I just glued it on with a construction adhesive, and then went around all the edges with some caulk. I also put some low-expansion foam in both the front and back of the concrete lip, all the way around the window.

On the inside, I put 2″ of rigid foam board against the OSB, and then sealed the gaps all around it with foam. I should also point out that having learned what a pain it is when the foam hardens on the window surface, I used painter’s tape to protect the window frame. I highly recommend doing this, as it made cleaning up the spots where the foam expands out very simple. On the front windows, I only had a couple places where it hardened onto the front, but it took me a long time to scrape it all off.

After giving the foam a day to harden, I added some framing to the interior wall to fill in the top part of the window so I have something to attach the drywall to. I also took another can of some other foam (which was for gaps 2″ or less - I really could have used the 2″ or greater, but this was all I had on hand) and went over all the wood pieces and everything that felt cold. I likely will take another can (maybe 2) and do this again. Nothing is cold now, but there is not really that much insulation above the window compared to the rest of the basement. Also note I stapled some cardboard along the bottom, to prevent the foam from falling down into the window.

Once this was all done, I used some of the same all-PVC trim to fill in the gaps from the outside, and used some exterior caulk to seal everything up. I probably could have done a better job here, but it was very cold out and I was rushing to get it done. If it looks terrible in the spring, I’ll probably redo some of it - but for now, it keeps the cold and water out, and that’s what’s important.