The Stonewater Cinema Build Thread - Page 4

Hmmmm..... I bought 45 sheets of 7/16" OSB to skin the whole room (excluding soffits). Because the price of OSB recently went absolutely crazy - from $4.50 per sheet a year ago for 7/16" to over $12 per sheet - I felt like I didn't want to spend much more at that time. The 19/32" OSB a bit more than $20 per sheet (here in our area) and would have added another $250 to the cost.

Perhaps I can return the OSB and move to a second layer of 5/8" drywall since it is so much heavier per square foot than 7/16" OSB and still slightly heavier than 19/32" OSB.

Ted - to your point I may even want to consider doing three layers of 5/8" drywall and Green Glue just in the Infinite Baffle chamber. I certainly don't want to do three layers for the whole room. The soffit construction details are still being planned as a lot hinges on whether I go with veneered plywood, acoustic fabric or a painted surface.

I will be using 7/8" channel, but not the clips. This time around I am going to try the Kinetics Noise Control Wave hanger which I (embarrassingly) purchased just over three years ago when I saw an inventory of "extras" being liquidated by a contractor, otherwise I would have bought your Whisper clips without question.

Perhaps my solution to deal with two layers of 5/8" drywall, Green Glue, a perimeter soffit AND 3/4" MDF (for the fiber optic star ceiling) all suspending off these clips and track is to narrow the spacing to 12" OC. I'll have to consult the engineering specifications in the next few days I guess.

Thanks for the input.

Fred - THANK YOU for the well-articulated message. I understand exactly what you mean. I tried to describe this in my first post, but it is my goal to "cherry pick" and collect together some of the Art Deco themes and styles that I like and mash them together into one cohesive and well-thought-out package. Like you, I prefer clean lines and geometric shapes with a slight nod to classic design. I prefer the flowing curves to hard edges, but hard edges do have their place. The lobby of the Paramount has a lot of clean lines and nice style ideas whereas the theater itself is over the top and not my taste. The geometrics in the Tiffany lamp are nice, but the stained glass ruins the look for me and feels like a Craftsman / Frank Lloyd Wright style vs. Art Deco, despite their description.

The pictures you pulled were great. I hadn't seen the Venetian bar redo, but when I was pursuing REAL backlit stone and went shopping at the stone distributor for Onyx or Alabaster to backlight...this is when I discovered that I needed to win the lottery first. Let's just say I don't have Venetian money - lol! I like the idea of letting the alabaster speak for itself without the metal. But I would like to flush out the idea here in the forum, perhaps with some small mock-ups before moving forward or killing the idea of the metal work. My goal is to land on a design that mostly lets the alabaster speak but allows the metal work to add to the conversation for both the columns and the front of the theater door. If the metal doesn't look right I have no trouble eliminating it.

As for finish, I hate Gold, Brass, Antique Brass, etc. as a finish. Perhaps a splash or two as an accent, but overall I like to live in the silver world. Chrome is OK, but I much prefer the more classic and slightly yellowed hue of Nickel plating. With the right prep work I can get a very soft and diffuse Satin Nickel finish. Not the crap that comes from China, but the real deal. An alternative to Satin Nickel that looks fairly similar but won't oxidize is Stainless steel with a satin finish. My absolute favorite finish in this genre is a black nickel finish (Google this), but I don't know if it would provide the contrast against the alabaster I am looking for.

For the record, I know it's not good to put any really "shiny stuff" in your theater, but I can't help myself from wanting to evaluate the idea. Thanks again for your input.
Edited by TMcG - 12/6/12 at 8:25pm

That Teak oil finish is a bit too red IMHO and I would like to stay more in the browns. The wood sample shown with the carpet is completely unfinished and is a small chunk of the actual veneer I bought. This is the lightest African Mahogany wood I have seen, fyi (not sure if that's good or bad yet). I have some solid stock of African Mahogany and all of it is unfinished and quite a bit darker. In fact, it may be a bit troublesome to get the same initial hue between the veneer and the solid stock when I go to have the moldings made. Once I get my new fancy schmancy camera up and running I will take some pictures of what I have and post here.

If you have any pictures of the wood tones you are suggesting, please feel free to post for all to see.

I will really be leaning on you quite heavily when I sort out the wood finishing and getting all of your expert finishing advice! If I reached 20% of the quality you are getting with your wood I will be happy, but I want the woodwork to look absolutely professional no matter the DIY effort needed to get it to that point.

The wood in the picture Fred linked in his post from Dernier & Hamlyn (copied below) looks a lot like the tone and satin finish I had in my mind. In fact, the wood looks quite a bit like the African mahogany veneer I purchased, don't you think? I'll be in London in February, perhaps I can stop by this hotel lobby for an in-person visit while I am there. Lighting is with Cold Cathode lamps according to the design file HERE.


Edited by TMcG - 12/6/12 at 8:27pm

Yeah, I was digging on that two-tone as well. We'll see.

I'll see what I can do to get you some sample veneer. I can throw in some of my solid stock along with it FWIW. I don't want to distract you from all you have going on, but I appreciate the help and let's face it - you are totally set up for finish work!

That's cool! But you shouldn't have shown me this because now I will know where you keep the stash of good liquor if I broke into your house! LOL!

For some reason the third one still speaks to me at the moment, only I had envisioned a repeating pattern somewhat keeping with the original scale. For example, the light fixture is 18" tall and my panel might be 72" tall so the same pattern would repeat vertically 4 times. The second drawing looks like the Chrysler building and I am trying to avoid doing a design that's instantly recognizable (although I like it!). The first design is a bit spartan for my tastes, but could be developed. Who knows, right? But I really appreciate your efforts!

This might seem like a bit of a photo dump, but in my search through tens of thousands of images (literally), I came across a handful between gate panels, stair balustrades, old return air ducts, grates and panels in the Art Deco style. Here is a small compilation of pictures whose very presence on my hard drive meant that I found some sort of redeeming value in the design at one point in time. I'll comment on the ones I really liked.

This was one of my favorites:


I was looking at the middle design here:








And of course the light that I previously picked:


I don't know why, but that light's pattern keeps catching my eye for some reason. Perhaps I am the only one, but nothing has to be settled on this for another 4-6 weeks.

Thanks Larry! I finally had the chance to go through your theater build 100% - very impressive!! You are definitely on the downhill side of the construction phase. Hopefully your schoolwork will allow you to tackle a bit of the finishing work here and there.

I had to chuckle - not only do we have the same granite, we actually have very similar backsplashes. I'll edit this post with a pic tomorrow. You will be shocked on how close they are.

Fred / Dave / All....I found one picture that captures "the look" I see for the tone of the African Mahogany woodwork and any Nickel plated metal accents, in the columns or otherwise:

You are right, I do owe you and everyone else the basement layout. One caveat to the blueprint below - this was the one and only draft from someone who took my basement plan and quickly laid everything out in CAD in order to estimate professionally finishing the space. I didn't ask for it - he just did it. The only thing is he took an extreme creative license to shuffle some walls, add walls, move electrical panels and add mechanical equipment I didn't have. So you will see just outside the theater entrance that he added walls and double doors leading into a single door to "add drama" as he put it. The wacky tobacky must have been working its island magic, that's all I have to say. But you will see in the real life picture of outside the theater what my final (and original) design was.



Here is a wider shot of what it looks like outside my theater with the two walls flanking the theater door. I originally had the recessed movie poster light box going in to the right of the theater door because I initially didn't want to mess with the structure around the steps. But when I closed the deal on a 9' Brunswick pool table, it came with an unbelievably nice solid mahogany (discontinued wood species) cue rack. Here's the same rack in a different species for those who are interested. So now I needed wall space for this rack, but by having a very open concept design wall space is at a premium. So I bit the bullet and decided to restructure the back wall of the stairs which runs continuous to the second floor and is a MAJOR structural point load in the house. I built my temporary walls to hold up my house and then cut the studs at the correct finished height for the movie poster light box. I decided to run the header the full width of the stairwell to give me the greatest left to right placement flexibility so I could perfectly center this light box ans satisfy my perfectionist OCD tendencies. Once the structure was in place I filled in the framing for the opening and closed off the other opening so it can be fully drywalled for the surface-mounted pool cue rack.



My previous post may have been unclear regarding the door swinging out into the basement instead of into the theater. Swinging toward the light box would block the light box. Swinging to the right would hit the pool cue rack and not feel "normal" in the way that door would swing if it were full open and almost hitting the cue rack. So that leaves my options to left swing into the theater and hit the column immediately to the left inside the door which would block traffic. My only option left is the right swing inward and just dealing with the less-than-optimal room at the rear at the theater. Hopefully this plan and picture makes my post a bit more clear. Plus when the door is shut, the 2" of acoustic panels on the surface of the door (inside the theater) will be made to line up in the same surface plane as the acoustic panels on the walls.

As for the handrail....it has the potential of being fairly economical as there seem to be plenty of stairway balustrades available in a style that would fit. Finally!!! An off-the-shelf product that's cheap and available.

EDIT - If you look to the left of the movie poster light box you will see another door to underneath the steps. I had considered putting the entrance to the theater through this doorway but it didn't feel like it was the entrance to something special, I would lose the storage area underneath the steps completely and this door location would have interfered with one of my columns that would be housing one of my side speakers. One other tidbit - I originally had the theater room "flipped" so the entrance was at the bottom of the steps. I had plans to build up the landing the same height as the riser so it would be a smooth entry into the top row but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted the entrance to where it is now to keep all the fun and activities (theater entrance, snack bar, pool table, lounge, etc.) all in one centrally located area. Interested to hear your thoughts.
Edited by TMcG - 12/8/12 at 5:00am

Thanks for chiming in Wraunch. Send me a PM with your contact info and you can visit the room if you are in town and our schedules allow the diversion.

STAY CLASSY!!

No other pictures without a trip to Australia. I guess I should have qualified my remark. The light is making it look yellow, but the tone of the wood is a nice brown and I would be going with a satin finish, not gloss.

Cuzed has already tackled this design in his "CuznEddy Cinema Project" starting at THIS POST. I hope Cuzed doesn't mind, but here is one of his photos:

[IMG]

Thanks RT!! Get ready to put your Certified Carpet Counseling degree to work....in a week or two I am going to be receiving a number of larger carpet samples. I'll post photos when I get them and beg of you for some free professional advice!

While Dennis has the performance aspects of the theater covered, I am open to any and all ideas to make this theater's Art Deco style really shine so please don't hesitate to post any pictures or advice.

I think you might like this....I picked up an authentic Art Deco era exit light that came from a movie theater in Chicago that was being demolished. An architectural salvage company had a bunch of stuff, most of which was unaffordable, but buying this light was my one guilty pleasure. I am going to mount it centered above the door inside of the theater. This little baby came with paint all over the metal and TONS of paint splatter all over the entire thing which took several hours to carefully clean off without ruining the metal finish or removing the white "exit" paint from the glass. I think it will add a nice touch whenever the movie is playing and the room is dark without affecting the picture on the screen with it on.



With 7 watt bulb dimmed:


Side profile:

Nice pictures - I really like that motorcycle. Yeah, I can see where the scale is a bit lost in these pictures. The base of the unit is 5.25" wide. When the light is sitting flat on its back the height of the metal is 2" and the glass adds another 1.25" so it protrudes just over 3.25" from the wall in total which is fairly compact.

This was manufactured by a company called Perfeclite located just outside of Cleveland, OH. They specialized in commercial lighting with some fairly unique designs from what I have seen, but they eventually went out of business a long, long time ago.

I've been looking for a lot of period-correct pieces for the room, particularly for the door. I have been combing eBay for about the last 16 months for a door lock set. Even if it was in poor condition I could have it cleaned up and send it out for plating. Seems like most of value are already professionally refurbished and sell for a mint, or are so beaten up that they would take too much to make right.

Knowing the danger I would be in if I made a post to you without a picture, I present to you a Nickel-plated door knob I found that is new, but an exact replication of an original.



...and the included mortised lockset with "old timey" keys:


This has not been purchased yet, just on my hot list until I flush out my door design after I put the column design to bed.
Edited by TMcG - 12/9/12 at 4:10am