You’d think that, four months after we’d moved in, that the large renovations and changes were complete. If only. Much of our time the last little while has been spent in the garden, or on work projects. But August is creeping closer to us, and that doesn’t leave much time for us to finish off the spare bedroom.
You see, we’re expecting visitors. Something we’ve been looking forward to for over a year. And it wouldn’t do to have them sleeping in a room with no ceiling, one wall with the studs exposed, and a bare concrete floor. It also wouldn’t do to have the visitors sleeping in what will be the lounge as of next week.
So this week was spent measuring, and calculating, and buying tools and some of the supplies that I’ll need to finish off the room. The first step was deciding what to do about two key issues:
1) How to deal with the structural column in the middle of the wall between the spare room and lounge.
2) How to deal with the ductwork in the ceiling.
Issue 1 is caused directly by whomever part finished the wall between the two rooms. The wall should have been framed with 2x6s, not 2x4s, to give clearance around the column. But alas, someone was chea… errr, laz… err, not wise. So now I have to fix it. One of the options was to add horizontal furring (strips of wood) to build out the depth of the wall. But that would be fairly expensive, material-wise, and would need the electrical box to be relocated, and the door to be reframed to accommodate the thicker inner wall. So instead, I’m going to get two 2x6s and build horizontal walls next to the column – then cover with drywall to create a box around the column. It’ll look weird, but it’s the sanest solution now.
Issue 2 is an unavoidable facet of houses designed for central air/heat. The ductwork has to go somewhere. In this case, it’s mainly routed close to the ceiling in the basement, which is the least disruptive to the rest of the house. Because so much of the ductwork, electrical, and plumbing will be in this room, we decided to go with a dropped ceiling. This will let us access anything needing maintenance without having to break down drywall.
We have made it a bit harder on ourselves though. We want to maximise the ceiling height in what remains of the room so – when it’s not a spare bedroom – we can use it as our gym, with a folding lifting rack on the one wall. To do that we need a drop ceiling with the lowest drop possible. We’ve found a system that does that, but I’ll still need to build a bulkhead around the ductwork to maximise ceiling height elsewhere in the room.
With all of this decided, the next step was to buy and start installing insulation batts in the ceiling and walls of the room – both to help reduce heat-loss to the upstairs (which we already noticed the past winter) and to soundproof the room slightly. The insulation goes in pretty easily, which is nice. I’ll probably finish the install on Thursday.
Then it’s on to installing the drywall and boxing out the column. But first we’ll need to buy the drywall and 2x6s and get them home. Which will be interesting, since 4’ x 10’ sheets of drywall won’t even nearly fit in the CX5. Heck, they’re even a pain to transport on the half-tonner trucks in this part of the world. So we may have to beg or borrow a truck from someone, or just stump up and pay for delivery from the home centre that’s… 1.3km away. Once it’s here, the install itself should be relatively straightforward – with two people doing it, that is.
Building out the bulkhead could prove… interesting. My plan is to build part of the bulkhead with metal studs to make installing the vertical hang of drywall easier. Then the remainder is down to how to mount the drop ceiling in the gap between the wall and the vertical hang of the drop ceiling. I’ll be watching install videos on that product tonight to see if I can figure it out before it arrives.
Once all this install work is done though, it’s on to mudding and taping the drywall. Which is easier said than done, especially for a beginning like me, so I expect that process will take a few days. But once that’s done, and the final coat is sanded, I’ll be able to prime and paint the room. We still have paint left over from our earlier adventures, so we’ll only need to get more primer. Whilst I’m in the process of painting the room, I’ll also spend some time (since materials and tools will be there) finishing the painting accent walls in the lounge and upstairs
Then onto the ceiling. I figure getting done with the messy painting before installing the ceiling makes sense. Hopefully the process isn’t too crazy, but the only way to know will be to have the ceiling kits in my hands. Supposedly this ceiling kit mounts very close to the joists, so it won’t take much height from the room at all. We shall see.
The very last big process will be putting the flooring down. We’re pretty set on using wood laminate, since we like the look and durability of it. We were considering click-lock laminate, but if we’re going to use the room as a gym room, it might not be a great idea to have a floating floor. So instead we’ll go with glue-down laminate. That’s going to need some prep work on the floor, since there’s a nice crack in the concrete that’s going to need to be filled before the glue and laminate can go down. At least the slab itself is level.
The last few items will be mostly finishing items – installing trim around the window, around the room, and around the doors. And then hey presto, we’ll be done!
It’s going to be a busy month. Wish us luck.
PS.
All these references to imperial units? Not my first choice, but everything construction-related in Canada is in make-believe numbers. And it’s too irritating to convert the make-believe numbers to real numbers continuously. So for my own sanity, I’ll just quote their faux numbers.