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The Rationale
My computer room has always been on the top level of my 4 level
split, and this has proved non optimal for several reasons.
I can't use much volume in the wee hours for fear of waking the cat, Samantha... or for
that matter, my wife, Nancy... ;)
I can't redecorate to a style more in keeping with 3D wargaming and unleashing
havoc... you know the steel and rockets "guy thing" theme...
The heat my computer throws off is more tolerable (and useful) when released
in the basement's cooler environment...
My computer draws power from the same circuit as my wife's, and several other
heavy draw items, lights, etc...
So... I decided to include a new computer room in the new construction on
the lowest level of the house.
October 9, 2000
First step is to draw up a floor plan:
... and then a new wiring layout...
This gave me a room of good size, as remote as possible from
the sleeping quarters, two different power circuits in the room, (one of them
(nearly) dedicated to the computer), as well as cable, DSL filtered and unfiltered
telephone jacks, a Cat 5 jack, and best of all, license to decorate any way I wanted.
Cool. So the construction begins...
October 22, 2000
Humble beginnings, to be sure. This is the corner of the basement where the
computer room will be...
Completely trashed, junk all over...
Nov 13, 2000
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 Things are rolling! Happy days. By now,
the studs are 95% up, (except laundry room) the wiring's all in, and the R20 insulation is in the outside walls. Actually,
in the area near the window, it's more like R50; nearly triple thick walls there...
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 You can see the cat's blanket in the
window... her new fave sleeping place (she's a connossuer of sleeping locations)...
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 Looking down the north wall westward.
There's still so much junk lying around that even taking pictures is tight.
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The Intervening Months
No, we didn't take months off here. We finished the Storage Room
completely first, so we could get a lot of junk stored properly. (permanently?) I did
most of the construction, my wife did the taping and much of the painting. Once that
was done, we moved on to the Work Room. Things went well there, too.
My wife watches a lot of (a LOT of...) home improvement shows, so
we tried some pretty cool ideas in those first two rooms. Finally, the work room was
done, and we moved the tools and JUNK out of where my Computer Room was going to go.
February 5, 2001
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Work on the wallboard actually began in late January. Feb 5th shows
some progress  as I am seen here
wasting a perfecty sunny warm day, sanding the second coat of spackle. I really had to
work on the sanding, and I eventually used a flashlight to highlight all imperfections
to get a very uniform surface.
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In this view, you can see the doors are already hung,
and that the hallway  is
partly roughed in, and the storage room is finished and already crowded with
junk and building materials :)
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February 8, 2001
Three days later, the first coat of primer is on...
... and a base coat of straight gray ("Moonshine", a guy color!) is next.
You might ask why the odd little roller... that's a solid high density fine
textured sponge roller, usually used to apply melamine paints,
which was used to put both base coats on. The final
choice of finish paint demands an extremely smooth surface to work well, and this
little roller did an excellent job. Takes for freakin EVER to apply a coat, though.
Feb 10, 2001
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The start of the finish :) OK!!
 *AHEM*. Well, it wasn't
as easy to apply the finish color as I thought. According to the paint store, you
have to apply it with a sprayer, so I dug out Nancy's Wagner. After the first coat,
the sprayer was literally in the garbage, and I was furious. Blobs of paint, ugly
sags, etc etc...
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 ...it wasn't going well.
After a little experimentation, I found that if you apply the first coat with the
melamine roller, and then thin the paint with latex conditioner, then a thinnish
coat of the metallic latex again but with the resurrected Wagner, the finish turns
out pretty much as advertised :)
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 Here you get a vague idea
of what the finish looks like, though... it looks grainier and bluer here than in
real life for some reason...
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February 11, 2001
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So... what's next? I had to finalize the trim feature
ideas I had been working with. I decided that my first idea was going to
be fine, a kind of steel beam and rivets theme.
The corners will each have this done, as well as a long wall midpoint
detail. Lots of drilling and installing "rivets"! The doors and window will
get a "rivetted" frame too.
Going to be busy this week, though. Start of the Nascar
season, and all its attendant driver drafts and such, and I still have to do
a lot of looking for the right stuff for the trim.
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April 14, 2001
Finally got back at it, and have the trim in place. It still
needs some finish work, but here's a couple of update photos:
 Along the north wall you can see the
idea I had in mind... 208 wooden furniture buttons later... viola...
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 The wiring is complete, too, except
for hooking up the category 5 (network) cable's RJ45 wall jacks. I used those excellent
Leviton modular jacks for telephone, cable and network throughout the house.
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 You can see that nothing's been done
about the door yet :) Lots of small finish work to do. You can see there's still
some unsanded/unpainted details to do.
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 A better pic of the corner trim. There's
still some work to do to make the joints disappear.
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April 20, 2001
Woooohooooo!!! :)
It's just about done! I installed some soundproofing, lights, and the
ceiling, cleaned up, and I'm just about ready to move in!
 Couldn't use a flash, or the lighting
effects would be lost, so I had to use slow "shutter" speed and big "aperture" to
get these pics.... so they're a little blurry. Meet the cat, Sam :)
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 Picture showing that I still need to
come up with some ideas for the door....
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 From the floor looking up past the
window.. the lighting is one 15 Watt 18" flourescent on each side of the room,
behind some chrome plated grating (called "parabolic lens" for some reason) which
is topped by a clear diffusor in a strip that runs the full length of the room
on each side.
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 The full ceiling. Note the gap in
the diffusor at the extreme right, where the heat duct blows down through the
chrome grating. Sat on the floor for this pic....
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 ....so the cat sat on me :)
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There will be one more set of pics I guess, after I'm moved
in. Keep an eye here for that final update :)
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