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Change your basement into a first-class Home Theater.
Page 4 - Building the room
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| Lets get back to our basement.... |
| Building the walls
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Here is a good advice. Left the heavy and difficult stuff for a professional contractors. This include building subfloor, putting up dividing walls, electric, drywall, trims etc.. The professional contractor make this about hundred times faster, with less personal injuries and in fact also a cheaper since he will have far less material loss. In fact a good contractor can have your room ready in about a week. On this page you will find a few steps which needs to be done building a brand new room in basement.
First thing you have to decide is where to put dividing walls, if your basement is unfinished. Then tell the contractor where you want the electrical boxes and lights. A subfloor is a great idea, it makes the room warmer and also in case of eventual small flood in the basement the carpet is still few inches above the concrete.
Before contractor puts up the drywall, put any cables or special boxes you want for video and audio cables.
Put more cables than you need, for example put 2 video cables instead of just one in case of problems.
Put an extra isolation material where the wall touch the basement concrete.
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If you are mounting your projector on a ceiling, let the contractor build a strong plywood on the ceiling above the projector for the mount support before he puts a drywall on the ceiling. You will then use long screws through the drywall to the plywood to hold the mount and projector.
Add an electrical box and cables near the projector on the ceiling.
If you never done these things and still think you can do it alone, take my advice and hire contractor.
Never attach projector just to drywall without support. It will probably hold just about one hour...
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Soon the walls are up. The contractor has to put the skeleton and drywall around any obstacles such as pipes or various furnaces. He will also mark important places for valves and then later create access to them.
A good contractor can put the subfloor, walls and ceiling in few days, then he will patch the gaps between drywalls and sand it to a flat wall.
Watching the contractor do this on ceiling would be probably the part you would really agree that his money are hard earned.
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If you want a little exercise, then at this moment you can give your contractor few free days and prime the walls with prime color. However if you never paint raw drywall, let me tell you that this is quite a exercise. You have to do 2-3 coats of prime and even small room can take many hours for unexperienced painter. The ceiling is a killer and at the end your hands and back will hurt.
After a prime is done and dry you have to make a trim. These are the thin boards around doors and windows and also kick-board around the whole room on the floor. Again a good contractor can have it done in half a day.
The floor trim is important for wall-to-wall carpet.
First an underlayer foam will be put on the subfloor (the quality is very important). Then the carpet will be laid on the top, cut and the edge pushed between the gap of subfloor and the trim board.
But of course the carpet is the last thing you want to put in the room! Don't put anything yet.
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