Monday, December 20, 2010

In Photos: A Technology Guy Plays With Drywall (& Technology)

I'm on my way to Southern California tomorrow for a quick-ish holiday family visit... before I leave though, I can proudly check a major item off of my to-do list.

But first...

Front Door at Christmas

Since I'm not sure how many posts will come between now and Christmas, before I forget let me wish everyone, not otherwise offended, a Merry Christmas... This is my front door with a live wreath from St. Ignace, MI courtesy of my grandparents and newly-installed handrail lighting in "blue-green" mode (it's capable of about 250 colors)


When I moved in, I had a perfectly nice house, but working in technology -- specifically audio visual integration/automation technology, I had some "upgrades" to install throughout the home -- security, whole house audio/video, lighting, and automation. Living in a vertical townhome, the easiest way to do this was to drop the ceiling in the garage and cut quite a few holes in walls on the upper levels.

It seems I've misplaced all of the real early photos -- the ones showing various bundles with somewhere around 150 wires but here are two early in-progress photos:

Click for largerBundle of  A/V cables

My boss -- someone with many miles of drywall under his belt from his own home improvement project -- was nice enough to help patch and blend the drywall in the living spaces of my home but left the garage as a learning lesson for me. I was nervous. I've seen some bad drywall in my time. The actual drywall went up during last spring, budding and taping was a process that I procrastinated on for far too long.

I'm hosting an event (might be a party, might not, the details are still a bit too be determined) in mid-January and between that inspiration and having 3 weeks of vacation to use before the year is up to motivate me to finish things. I have to say that I'm generally quite satisfied.

Garage Finished - Long Shot West

All of the drywall on the underside of the sofit was installed and finished by yours truly... I wish the areas around the conduit were a bit cleaner, but all-in-all I'm quite happy with the results. You really can't see any of the seams!

Since drywall doesn't really photograph that well -- it is ultimately flat and white -- I figured I'd throw in some photos of the reason I dropped the ceiling:

Garage Equipment East HalfGarage Equipment West Half

Go ahead and click the pic for a larger version and a description of what everything is.

Later this year or early next year, I'll put together a post on the AV Equipment Room

Lincoln

3 comments:

  1. Hope your party is fabulous! Merry Christmas!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Katie! Merry Christmas to you as well!

    Nidhi you have anawesome sense of DIY :)

    ReplyDelete