Making the "Bacon Race" Theater - Page 3

I wish it would be done in a week! Early stages seem to move very fast. Things visually change so much. In my opinion once the drywall goes up the real project actually begins! I do work full time, so finding time to get things done is hard.

I did feed BIG, but my wife let me know that my brain flatlined when I came home and I just pulled into the garage like I always do and just walked into the house... not knowing, or even considering, that for once I had a passenger in my vehicle who had maybe a foot of clearance to get out of the car and around the little stairwell in there to get inside. I'm not used to having anyone in my car. Sorry about that BIG!

I'm still picking out pieces of fiberglass from my skin. I had some water-sandals type of footwear and now i have glass fibers stuck into the bottom of my toes. Way to go stupidity! It always wins with me. On another note I was wearing goggles and mask all day and I could still feel that damn mask on my face for about 6 hours afterwords

That is much closer to what I was envisioning. Actually what we ended up doing was that we have 3 HVAC units in our house. The 3rd only heats/cools the sunroom. We tapped into that with the theater. Every return and supply have dampers. However we plan to leave them open and have the fan on, thus recycling the air between the two rooms, and then cooling when necessary. In the winter we dont necessarily need to heat the sunroom since it is connected to the main level, but we can close the damper and run the 3rd hvac system to just the theater for cooling.

But that product there was exactly what I was hinting at before. Be able to remotely adjust the temp.

We got a lot of work done today, but since BIG was the one with the Camera, I'm going to let him do all of the updates.

Where I was born in Minneapolis and now live in NOVA... small world!

First layer of drywall should be completed today, along with caulking of the main theater room. We are going to leave the equipment room un-drywalled until we have finished running the wires into the main room.

I have BIG scheduled to come tomorrow to work with me on putting up the 2nd layer of drywall with green glue & caulking.

The first layer of drywall is actually easy. You can see all of the channels when you start. You put up a piece of drywall perpendicular to the channels. Once you put up a piece of drywall up to the ceiling, you can see where the channels are on the rest of the ceiling all the way to the side of that piece of drywall. It's just a straight line underneath at that point. (If you can't visually picture it, draw several parallel horizontal lines on a piece of paper in front of you and place your hand down over them hiding the left half of each line. You know where the lines are because they continue on the same path as the ones you can still see)

The 2nd layer of drywall can go either way. We used 1.25" screws for the first layer, so they dont go too far through and hit the joists and screw into the channel. You can either use longer screws (2" or so) of the same type and screw into the channel through the first layer or you can use laminated screws and screw directly into the first layer. With the green glue between them, BIG says that would be more than enough to hold them together. You just need to be sure that you don't have screws that are too long that will screw into the joists (Thus eliminating your de-coupling) or into the actual clips themselves.

At least they only used the 2" -WOOD- screws and not the metal ones. It only caused us to lose out on the screws. On the ceiling, that could have screwed us!

I have a lot of pics from yesterday to post, but can't do it at least until tonight.

So like BIG mentioned, on Wednesday, our 3rd party workers finished putting up the first layer of drywall and acoustical caulk in the theater room.

Thursday all 4 of us (Myself, our two polish contractors, and BIG) tackled layer #2, which was definately the Green Glue festival. That stuff definately gets everywhere! We put up a piece of plywood in place of a piece of drywall for the first layer where the projector mount or platform will go, and did our power hookup plus putty pads to seal it. (I have pics of this whole process to post).

Once the 2nd layer was well underway we let the polish guys finish the last half of the work while we worked on some parallel tasks. We wired our romex for the movie room & equipment room circuits, put in the boxes/etc (Almost all of which were in the equipment room). We put up clips/channel and ceiling insulation in the equipment room as well. By then the back end of the movie room's drywall was finished, so we cut the hole and hooked up the collar for the HVAC supply to the back corner of the room. This was later sealed with caulk. Having that air come in during work was a great bonus!

BIG and I sat down at the end of the day and had some fun with blue tape figuring out spacing and dimensions for columns, the riser, the steps, and the stage. We were going to go shopping for the materials but it was already 5:30 and we were tired.

Today the workers should be back and doing mudding and taping of the movie room. If we are lucky they will also get the drywall up in the equipment room but it isn't important for our schedule if they can hit that today or not.

Assuming all goes well, Saturday will be Riser & Stage day for BIG and I.

Thanks Jesto! I can't wait to see how it turns out either! And FYI, BIG has mentioned things he did on your build each day he has worked with me so far. I think the biggest topic of conversation is your drywall between your ceiling joists. I remember seeing that in your thread and praying I never had to do that. (My main level is all hardwood above so it DID cross my mind, I just decided against the work and time to do it)

On another note,
I am pretty sold on a 2.35:1 screen at 130" wide. And likely I will get the new Panasonic PT-7000U next month. (ProjectorCentral is supposedly writing a review on one they have on-hand right now and should have it up next week) I just want the CIH to be as painless as possible. It may be using a lens or the zooming method that is offered on the Pannys... not sure yet. But whatever I do, I want my solution be able to at least "support" 3D in both aspect ratios.

Fabric. Except for the center of the ceiling which will be painted and primed.

I know the picture posted was not our theater, but I can still explain it to you. That is Sandman/Ruben/SMX's theater. He used duct-board instead of metal or flex-tube ducting. Duct board comes in sheets, so when cut, two pieces can form a square tube. The holes cut into them are for the linear grilles he planned to use. The one on the side was a supply and the one in the rear was a return. After the soffits went up in his theater, those ducts were hidden in the soffit (Like we will be doing) and they constructed MDF casing to fit around each of the ducts, which was sort of part of the inside soffit frame.