First day of building the new walls, the contractor got a lot done, insulation is all up on the exterior walls and headers are in place for the new walls around the perimeter. And they only were here for 2 hours today.
It's getting closer!
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Hi Randy,
Sounds like you hired some decent contractors. I hope it continues to go well.
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Pics or it didn't happen. LOL nice to hear you are getting closer to your new layout.
Michael
CEO- Mile-HI-RailroadPrototype: D&RGW Moffat Line 1989
I can feel the excitement.
Like Mike said, pics or shens!
Of course once you get the space finished, at least if you work full time and have type A wife, you'll be biting at the bit to work on the layout and often find time is still hard to come by! I guess I can't complain too much, I started benchwork last month and have 7 sections assembled and most of them up that form the core staging sectoin and a bit beyond; a total of about 50 linear feet.
The red areas represent benchwork assembled and mostly up - seven major sections. Homasote is down and painted on most of it and leveled.
Rio Grande. The Action Road - Focus 1977-1983
Well, the walls have to be painted (she said she'd help - and I am holding her to it, she's the one said we can do it all in a weekend, so I left that option off the contract with the builders). ANd paint the stairs, and install new handrails. The painting will hold up completion - it has to be painted before they can install the drop ceiling and new overhead lights.
rrinker Well, the walls have to be painted (she said she'd help - and I am holding her to it, she's the one said we can do it all in a weekend, so I left that option off the contract with the builders). ANd paint the stairs, and install new handrails. The painting will hold up completion - it has to be painted before they can install the drop ceiling and new overhead lights.
Your wife?
Your hobby?
The basement?
Randy, you better call the contractor back.
Rich
Alton Junction
rrinker Well, the walls have to be painted (she said she'd help - and I am holding her to it, she's the one said we can do it all in a weekend, so I left that option off the contract with the builders). ANd paint the stairs, and install new handrails. The painting will hold up completion - it has to be painted before they can install the drop ceiling and new overhead lights. --Randy
If you mean she, as in your wife, always a bonus is she helps. Once we got some major stuff done on the first floor my wife told me she promised to help with the basement finishing and help she did. She helped with the drywall hanging, painting after it was taped, mudded and sanded. Then she did all the tiling in the basement bathroom shower and floor, and then did most of the floor prep and installation. Bless her.
I would have loved to finish the basement fast in a matter of days or a few weeks but I didn't want to cut into our savings so my wife and I did most of it ourselves, paying as we went - so even though it took almost a year, we paid for it mostly out of monthly income. On the plus side, we will have increased value of the home - sweat equity.
Installed the drop ceiling myself which I found was actually much easier than I imagined.
What are you using for lights? I ordered 16 LED 2x2' 4k temp flat panel lights from greenledzone.com at about $33 each and installed a dimmer with them. I really like them and the color temp seems better than the 5k LED's I used over my last layout.
I'm using some sort of 4K LEDs, a mix of 2x4 adn 2x2 panels depending on where. No dimmers, these are strictly for use while walking around and building the layout. The most used entrance to the house is still via the basement, from the garage. There's also a front exterior door. That and the bathroom are getting the vinyl planked flooring, and one circuit of lights, with 3 places of control - at each door plus at the bottom of the stairs. The whole rest of the basement will have LED fixtures in the drop ceiling controlled by another switch at the bottom of the stairs. ANd then 2 switches with pilot lights to control all the outlets - and I still have one more switch for the stairwell light. Not sure how I'm goign to do 5. I guess a 4 gang box plus a single.
The layout will have integrated LED strips for lighting - THOSE will have dimmers, actually DMX drivers so I can dim the white, play with the RGB string to do simulated sunrise and sunset, and bring up the blue for night.
DMX drivers are pretty cheap, and otherwise it's a very simple and robust protocol (if it's good enough for shows...) and otherwise pretty simple to automate. ANd I can't build ALL the electronics, I'd never get to the layout.
So far I'm liking the 4K temp over the 5k. Interestingly, I painted my Homasote a light brown color just to coat it and give a base color. It was light brown mistake paint from Home Depot and it look light brown there. But after I painted the Homasote, it had a greenish cast to it. I could only guess it was 5K lights influenced the color hue.
Now as I have used the same paint and the sections are under 4K lights, they look more like light brown paint.
rrinker Well, the walls have to be painted (she said she'd help
My wife did that once. I got her a scrub suit to wear so she wouldn't ruin any clothes. After we were done, she couldn't throw that suit away fast enough. Now "I don't have anything to wear"
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
Some pics
Day 1:
Day 2. You can see the footer for the wall that will enclose the yard and town on the left and the branch on the right.
Very nice!
- Douglas
Nice. Now I see what your doing, stud wall after insulation.
Mike.
My You Tube
Gee, where'd you get all that insulation?
Mark P.
Website: http://www.thecbandqinwyoming.comVideos: https://www.youtube.com/user/mabrunton
I think they picked it up out a side door at Home Depot
Lookin' good!
Woo. You'll be done at light speed compared to my finishing!
The best thing is the layout room will be a nice environment for the layout - no ugly unfinished room to mar the photos of the layout!
In the bottom picture, from over at the top left where the room disappears into the corner, is where the front door is. From there over past the visible door (to the garage) and then straight down towards the viewer, where the air compressor and hose are, is the part that will get the vinyl planking.
They are also putting horizonatal spacers between the studs to keep them aligned. Plus there's still all the electric to run before the drywall goes up. I posted a mention of this in the adhesives thread, but in reviewing where I wanted the outlets to go with the contractor, I hit on the idea of putting half up top and half int he usual location - so power supplies for the top deck lighting and so forth can just sit up on top of the valance. Since I really have no way to run wires up from under the bottom deck all the way to the top, but I will be able to run wires from above the top valance down to the top deck. And of course up from the traditional outlet location to the bottom deck.
ANd that neatly divides the two switched circuits as well, upper outlets and lower outlets.
Installing outlets at this point costs very little. The more in a utilitarian space, or train room, the better, IMO.
BTW, see how nice floor to ceiling sky blue walls look,
Doughless The more in a utilitarian space, or train room, the better, IMO.
The more in a utilitarian space, or train room, the better, IMO.
Normally I would agree. In our son's small 11'x12' bedroom, there are 9 outlets. Two weekends ago I replaced every outlet and cover plate in that room. At one point I remember saying " how many dang outlets did they need in here?!"
Anyway,
It's fun following along on build projects like this. I often pick up an idea or two.
Thanks for sharing.
Ed
Semi newbie HO scale modeler coming from the O scale world
You, Jim and Mark are making me wish I'd moved to a town that had basements. When I came to Richmond, I asked the realtor to find a place with a basement and I was told only 10% of the houses here had basements and only 10% of them were dry.
Since '86 I've built 2 HO layouts in what the builder thought would be the dining room and 1 in a spare bedroom (after the kids moved out). Now I'm hoping my move to N-scale in the bedroom will solve my space deficiency.
I have the right to remain silent. By posting here I have given up that right and accept that anything I say can and will be used as evidence to critique me.
Doughless Installing outlets at this point costs very little. The more in a utilitarian space, or train room, the better, IMO. BTW, see how nice floor to ceiling sky blue walls look,
It's true. Look at a lot of train rooms and you'll see floor to ceiling sky blue. In the few cases where the blue goes up 2 or so feet above the layout and above that the color is a shade of cream, it's jarring in photo's.
As for outlets, I think where I live, they have to be no more that 12 linear feet apart but I put them more like 8 feet apart or maybe less. I was surprised that so few breakers run the upstairs. I went a bit overboard and have two separate 15 amp circuits for the back wall in the train room, and a 3rd circuit for the room with the walkout doors. A fourth circuit (20 amp) for the bathoom outlets. The ceiling lights are on their own too.
One of the outlets on the train room back wall was wired with 4 sockets, the rest are all standard 2 socket outlets.
I don't anticipate needing more than four 5 amp DCC boosters, but need to do my homework on that.
carl425 You, Jim and Mark are making me wish I'd moved to a town that had basements. When I came to Richmond, I asked the realtor to find a place with a basement and I was told only 10% of the houses here had basements and only 10% of them were dry. Since '86 I've built 2 HO layouts in what the builder thought would be the dining room and 1 in a spare bedroom (after the kids moved out). Now I'm hoping my move to N-scale in the bedroom will solve my space deficiency.
I thought the midwest and east coast was common with basements. In northern Virginia west of DC, basements seemed pretty common when my wife and I were house hunting in 2017. But cost of living and houses are probably considerably higher than Richmond I'd guess. Thus the problem for us was finding a home in our price range with a good sized basement suitable for a decent sized HO layout. Many finished basements were broken up into rooms and I needed an open basement. And price range was limiting us too.
We ended up compromising on a bankowned (foreclosure) home that was in good basic condition with an unfinished, but framed in basement. It still required a lot of work - we had to install a Radon mitigation system and then finish it. It ain't as big as I'd like but decent.
Most homes here have basements - it would be the other way around, maybe 10% are on slabs instead. You gotta put the footers down deep for freeze protection anyway, might as well dig it out and make it usable space. And with the ground around here, usually they are dry, but poor construction can make them very wet - usually no in-between.
A basement was a given. A dry basement was a requirement. A BIG basement was a wish. Due to knee issues, a single story house was also a requirement, but for a given size house, that means a larger basement, so generally an all around win. Until you get to a place like mine where something like 25x26 (I think I measured the width as 25 when I got curious - I know front to back the interior is 26') of said basement is the garage. Yes, through that one door is another space that alone would be a halfway decent train space. There is unfortunately no way to add on a garage to my property, and parking outside is not an option - GF won;t go for it and really, neither will I. It's bad enough that with a lot of space occupied by the stuff moved out of the basement, I can't have my car and truck both in the garage like usual and the truck sits out. Scraping windows and cleaning snow off a car is something I haven't had to do since I moved there.
I COULD pull a Tony Koester and wall off part of it, and there'd still be plenty of room for 2 cars plus 'stuff', but that's not a cheap job, plus the laundry is currently in the way so I would gain nothing. The next big project is modernizing the upstairs to get a proper master suite with a nice bathroom, and there will be enough leftover space to move the laundry up there, this it would be time th think about what I could do if I expanded into the garage - basically move the staging from my plan over to the left by about 30 feet is the simple option, but I could probably make better use of that space with a different approach to the staging. One can dream.... I think I would be happy to just extend things all the way to the left side of the laundry area once the equipment is upstairs.
GF was worried that cutting the hosue from 4 to 3 bedrooms would hurt resale, but 3 bedrooms with one being a full master suite with a modern bathroom, plus the upstairs laundry, is a far more attractive proposition than 4 bedrooms which are all pretty much identical, and 2 dinky outdated bathrooms (the hall bathroom isn't that small, compared to the house I grew up in, it's HUGE, but still just standard tub and so forth. The bathroom off the 'master' bedroom just has a shower stall, cabinets, and toilet. No tub - and not even any electrical outlets!).
On the topic of basement renovations - another thing I had done is I had the clothes dryer vented to the outside - I have no idea why the original owners never did this, they had the dryer pipe go through the wall into the garage, and then directed it into a metal trash can to sort of capture the lint - ALWAYS had to close up the car windows or else the seats and dash got all lint covered. ANd it wasn;t safe to be in the garage with the door closed - it's a gas dryer. Plus the humidity just worked its way back into the basement. The sill above the block foundation is just high enough above the ground that a vent pipe could be run through there, so now the dryer exhausts all that damp hot air outdoors and not back into the house. Brushed all the lint off the gargae walls and now things stay clean.
Tearing out the old basement uncovered some other things as well. I always figured the bathroom off the master wasn't always there. By the really wacky set of elbows in the water lines going to the sink up there - it obviously is a later addition. What it looked like originally, I have no idea. Maybe the hall bathroom was bigger and there was only one bathroom. I'm not sure the master bedroom even was originally a bedroom, but then I don't knwo why it would have a closet that's the same as the other bedrooms, which as far as I can tell is completely original. Guess I'm just curious, it's going to all get changed anyway.
2" foam, Randy?
I'm finishing my basement pretty much like you are, but I'm also adding flooring over a dimpled membrane to act as both vapor barrier and insulation. Should be a bit easier on the feet than concrete, as well.
SNuck that in while I was writing my book - on the subject of electric, I probably went way overboard. I have set it up for two 20 amp circuits for the basement outlets, plus the lights on another circuit (the overheads, not the layout lighting, that gets plugged in to the outlets). The old circuit for the basement outlets was a single 15 amp, the only thing that's going to be left on that one is the outlet for the washer/dryer and an outlet in the bathroom.
I'm also installing some extra upstairs in the office/workshop room. Half the upstairs is all on one 15 amp circuit, and I already have 4 computers and a laser printer just in the one room. Since I had a subpanel installed int he finished side of the basement, it's easy to run wires up there, and I was putting in another pair of 20 amp circuits, one for my computers, and another for my electronic and hobby workbench - also probably way overkill.
I wondered if I shouldn't have gone with 20 amp circuits for my left and right branches in the trainroom, but since the only things using those two circuits will be the layout, I hope it will be ok. I'd think the main thing using those two circuits will be DCC boosters. There are sockets on different circuits on the opposite wall that other things could use.
The 20 amp bathroom circuit has an extra 4 socket outlet run into the unfinished utility "shop" room where I have a work bench and plan for a paint booth eventually.
So my basment basically has 3 separate 15 amp wall outlet circuits (to the main rooms) and a 20 amp wall outlet circuit (bathroom) to the newly finished area, as well as other outlets on other circuits pre-dating the finishing.
riogrande5761I wondered if I shouldn't have gone with 20 amp circuits
.
My electrician said the cost between 15 and 20 amp components is so minimal that it did not make sense to choose a 15 amp circuit for the layout, even if expected current draw is under 5 amps.
My train room will have 2 dedicated 20 amp circuits in addtion to the wiring tha is already there. One for the layout and one for the workbench.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
rrinker SNuck that in while I was writing my book - on the subject of electric, I probably went way overboard. I have set it up for two 20 amp circuits for the basement outlets, plus the lights on another circuit (the overheads, not the layout lighting, that gets plugged in to the outlets). The old circuit for the basement outlets was a single 15 amp, the only thing that's going to be left on that one is the outlet for the washer/dryer and an outlet in the bathroom. I'm also installing some extra upstairs in the office/workshop room. Half the upstairs is all on one 15 amp circuit, and I already have 4 computers and a laser printer just in the one room. Since I had a subpanel installed int he finished side of the basement, it's easy to run wires up there, and I was putting in another pair of 20 amp circuits, one for my computers, and another for my electronic and hobby workbench - also probably way overkill. --Randy
When we built our new home in 1999, the unfinished basement had one 15 amp circuit. I immediately added a second 15 amp circuit and divide the basement into the "East" portion and the " West" portion. My entire layout now runs off the East 15 amp circuit.
Our kitchen had separate 15 amp circuits for the stove and refrigerator and one more 15 amp circuit (controlling 4 duplex outlets) on the long counter wall below the cabinets. When we added a microwave above the stove, I converted the 15 amp stove circuit to a 20 amp stove/microwave circuit. Later, I added two more 20 amp circuits on the long counter wall so that a pair of duplex outlets shared each new 20 amp circuit. That ended the tripped circuit breaker scenario caused when the countertop oven and the pancake griddle were all plugged in.
riogrande5761 Doughless Installing outlets at this point costs very little. The more in a utilitarian space, or train room, the better, IMO. BTW, see how nice floor to ceiling sky blue walls look, As for outlets, I think where I live, they have to be no more that 12 linear feet apart but I put them more like 8 feet apart or maybe less. I was surprised that so few breakers run the upstairs. I went a bit overboard and have two separate 15 amp circuits for the back wall in the train room, and a 3rd circuit for the room with the walkout doors. A fourth circuit (20 amp) for the bathoom outlets. The ceiling lights are on their own too.
I think the typical building code is for that 12 foot maximum between outlets in a finished wall. There is also a distinction if its living space or non living space, for rooms like laundry rooms, walk in closets, and in my case, basement garages.
I could finish my garage and not put in more than one outlet if I wanted. Not sure how the law can judge all basements to be living space.
An 8ft spread seems reasonable, maybe could go a little tighter.
I think there could be overkill too, if you had 27 outlets crammed into a space, builders might fear someone would use all 27 outlets at once with 54 appliances, thereby overloading the circuit.
So there has to be some balance between spacing of the outlets and the number of outlets on a circuit just to keep things safe for when dimensia sets in.....