HFA Audio Setup History 12 – Breaking down the walls – March 2014
After having turned the former bedroom into a Media Room I started feeling trapped in the small space. As I work long days behind the computer I felt it important to feel at ease in the space around me. After all, that is why I decided to make a dedicated room for this! To add to this, I found that the small room had terrible standing waves that I could not get rid of.
So, I decided to break down a few walls to combine three areas into one large space. It’s a good thing that I didn’t realise what I was getting myself in to because then I might not have started… I can honestly say that while certainly doable when you’re motivated, this was quite a lot of work, half the work being the breaking down of walls and the other half being the cleaning up after…
Yup: these walls are brought down with a simple saw… well, a special oversized one with huge teeth…
These blocks weigh a ton it seems, and if they drop on the floor, they shatter in 36 pieces… OMG the mess, THE MESS!
OK there’s no way back now…
Several times I had almost sawn through the electrical conduits, but until the very last one, I succeeded in preventing this.
Oh joy, there’s also the heating radiator to remove…
Water pressure is off, and armed with these pictures I went to the hardware shop, to get some end stops, as my house is a rental house, and when I move out, these walls, and radiator need to be replaced. So, I couldn’t simply remove them altogether.
Draining the radiator
The floor had to be partially re-laid. Fortunately, these particular floorboards were still available. The two pipes would bug me for an extended period, during which I first covered them up with a small wood enclosure but it was so small that you could easily trip over it. Later I covered it with one of the hollow legs of a large table that I specifically made at this particular length and for this purpose and still later when the bed returned to this room I would cover them with a side table.
Only part of the mess. I had already brought debris away every evening to spread the load…
The electricity conduit on the right side got me in the end. It was hidden in a curved manner inside the wall so even though I thought I was steering clear of it, I managed to saw it in half resulting in a complete power shutdown throughout the appartment! Luckily it was only a fuse and once the cables were restored all was good afterwards.
In spite of all plastic covering, dust was EVERYWHERE!
Bedroom 1, hallway and bedroom 2 combined into a single larger space
The sawing wasn’t perfect but with several layers of plaster all the evidence of former walls being present is gone
Naturally I had accounted for just too little decoupling underlayment… luckily I had plenty of bubblewrap laying around to fill in the gaps. Well, the last boards don’t carry any weight so that should be fine, no?
The wall that was previously here had several cables coming from various points in the ceiling. A wide cable tray was used to curl up the unneeded ones, and to lead the necessary cables to the side wall where I made new switches and an outlet.
Former media room v1 before the desk was moved to the other end. The bed in its final position would move more to the right, against the back wall.
Construction of the media room computer desk that I had made so nicely only a short while ago in the small room
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