Monthly Archives: August 2008

Wired for sound

  By jaguar | August 25, 2008 - 2:40 pm |
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The family room is going to double as my home theater.  As such, the tv and speakers will be taking a central role in the room.  The big main speakers will be sitting on either side of the tv, but the placement of the rear surround speakers was something of a quandary.  Normally I would just put them on either side of the main couch.  However to the right of the couch is a doorway.  That meant that the left rear had to be moved all the way to this wall.  The speakers are rather large (as bigger speakers provide better sound) which also complicates the placement.  To that end I’ve made a little cubby hole for each one to sit it.  This will allow the speaker to only stick a few inches into the room, as well as hide the wires for it.

Taping the Drywall

  By jaguar | August 22, 2008 - 1:50 pm |
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This is easily my least favorite part of any remodeling project.   Turning those nice sheets of drywall into a finished surface ready for paint is a tedious, messy job.  First you have to put some joint compound down and then embed the paper tape.  Then you have to cover the tape, and the screws with a few coats of compound.  Ohh and unless you’re really good you have to sand it after each coat.   Which puts a nice coat of white dust throughout your entire house.  It sounds easy enough, and doing it for a small area is pretty easy.   Scale it up to a whole room though, and its a pain, particualrly when half of its on the ceiling.

Fixing my car

  By jaguar | August 21, 2008 - 8:44 am |
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The family room is the second big house project I’ve undertaken, and I’ve realized that when I get going on a big project I tend to neglect the other little things that go wrong with other parts of my life.  For instance my car has developed a few minor problems, that I’ve put off until finishing the family room.   Well finally a big enough one came along that I had to take care of it.  The window regulator on the driver side door broke, meaning that the window wouldn’t go up or down.  Which of course was a problem since it was currently down. Happily, its quite easy to fix, with the new part being about $100.  While I was at it, I decided to replace the very worn and cracked shift boot, as well as the center arm rest.  All the work I’ve done on my car has been quite easy to do, thanks to the excellent design of my 325i.  As such after a couple of hours I had everything swapped out and looking good.  I didn’t need to run and get any special tools, or spend hours trying to get a rusted bolt off, which seemed like the norm any time I remember watching my dad to work on our cars.

Sheetrocking!

  By jaguar | August 13, 2008 - 11:35 am |
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This past weekend Jess and I spent most of our free time hanging Sheetrock.  This is a great step because the room is finaly starting to look like its getting close to being finished.  Of course this also means that I’ll soon be doing lots of taping, sanding, and spackling, which is the least fun part of the whole process.  We got almost all of the walls done, and would have been able to finish, except we ended up being one sheet short of drywall.  Although I had orginaly bought what I thought was five sheets extra, that was before our plans included the skylights, which ended up using three sheets each.  I’ve used 1/2″ drywall for the whole room, attachign it to the studs with 1-5/8″ drywall screws.  I started using just a cordless drill but after a short time I bought a Bosch drywall gun.  Certainly one of the more useful tools I’ve bought recently, it makes sinking the screws to the perfect depth a cake-walk.

Wiring the Lights

  By jaguar | August 11, 2008 - 3:32 pm |
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Once we figured out where to put the lights, I had to go and wire them all.  Wiring is something thats really easy to do if you have the right tools, and everything is easily accessible.    Happily after doing it a few times, I’ve gotten the right tools, and although everything is technically fairly easy to get at, the 100+ degrees in the attic made things significantly less pleasant than they could have been otherwise.  Other than the heat, the only other difficulty was getting all of the switches wired.  This box has three switches, which are hooked up to 5 wires (the skylight lights are on a separate wire from the ones over the fireplace) and that ends up being alot of wires in a rather small space, and they all need to go to the right spot.

Lights

  By jaguar | August 5, 2008 - 10:46 am |
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Lighting the family room has proven to be a real challenge.  The new skylights and window do a great job of letting light in during the day, but at night we obviously need something artificial.  With the skylights taking up a rather large portion of the ceiling and the ceiling also being rather low, that limited our options for light placement.   I’d been hoping to get some sort of fancy indirect lighting fixtures, and mount them inside the skylight tunnels, making it seem like natural light was shining down even at night.  However this abstract concept that I had floating in my head didn’t really seem to exist out here in the real world.     Although Lowes and Home Depot have a pretty good selection of lights, we initially couldn’t find anything we liked there.  So I hit up the phone book and it turns out there is only one other lighting store in my area, and after a quick trip over there we found that they didn’t have a significantly better selection than Lowes.  I then hit up the intertubes, and although LightingDirect.com has a vast array of lighting options, without being able to see them first hand we didn’t want to get anything.

Fortuantly we started thinking about lighting pretty early on, and that gave us plenty of time to mull over our choices.   We finally decided that a shallow ceiling fixture would look ok, and provide the most light.  We also found these wonderful little 3″ recessed lights at Lowes.   We decided to mount three of them over the fireplace, and two in each skylight tunnel (see the picture below).  They are adjustable, and that meant we were able to aim the ones in the skylights so that they hit the opposite wall and reflect down.   Each one takes a 50-watt halogen bulb,  which combined with the center light, makes the room nice and bright.  The best part was that these recessed lights, including the bulb and the the trim (it all comes together) were only $12 a piece.   The only bad thing is that they aren’t airtight, and they aren’t IC (insulation contact) rated.  This means I’m going to have to do some extra work to insulate around them.

Insulation, the final chapter

  By jaguar | August 1, 2008 - 1:00 pm |
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In an effort to make the family room as cozy as possible, I’ve used some Great Stuff expanding foam to seal the walls, some fiberglass bats to insulate the walls, a giant pile of cellulose to insulate the ceiling, and some rolls of fiberglass to insulate the skylights. This is the last part of the insulation, and also probaly the most worthless, but I’m doing it anyway. After bolting some wooden furring strips to the brick wall to hang some drywall to, I noticed that there would be a 3/4″ gap in between the drywall and the brick, a perfect spot for some more insulation! This time I’ve used foam board insulation, which has a nice foil backing to help reflect the heat into the room. The foam only adds a few to the R-value, and considering the brick (which is an excellent insulator by itself) is in front of a insulated 2×4 wall, this was undoubtedly overkill, however it was only a few bucks to put in, and it was easy to do.