Blood, sweat, and blood
Written by Dan + Taken by Dan
Unless you like watching / reading step-by-step construction guides, this phlog will most likely bore you. Hell, it may bore you even if you DO like step-by-step construction guides... I'm not making any promises.
As some of you may or may not remember, one of our restrooms (the largest one) had a blocked up door in the middle of the wall. At one point, it was a door for the bank's drive-thru, but now it's just an ugly eyesore. Enter Dan's dad!
Step one was to build a frame out of left over 2x4's from the false wall.
Next, screw them into the base board and cinder blocks.
Cover the frame with 3/4 inch plywood and screw it down. Remove the existing trim on both sides of the cutout and replace it with a single piece that was salvaged from the wall of the auditorium-to-be (it may not look that nice, but the trim is actually solid Walnut).
Replace the top rail trim and add an additional piece to cover the back of the frame.
Glue a piece of 1/2 inch styrofoam directly to the cinder blocks to act as a moisture barrier. After the glue has set-up, cover the styrofoam with treated sheetrock (glue it and screw it, mate!).
Use salvaged pieces of quarter-round and plywood to cover the broken sections of the wall and give it a more "finished" appearance.
Hide the joints in the paneling with wood salvaged from the walls of the art gallery-to-be. Voila... finished! When it's time to finish out the restrooms, we'll mud the joints in the sheetrock and paint over it, as well as all the woodwork. Then we'll hang something nice in the recessed area... a movie poster perhaps. Either way, it'll look a hell of a lot better once it's COMPLETELY finished.
While dad was busying himself with the restroom wall beautification project, I decided to patch the broken woodwork along the North side of the building. Unfortunately, I didn't have the camera with me when I started working, so you won't get to see what the wall looked like BEFORE I repaired it.
Basically, the paneling was split in two and the trim had been shattered and pulled off the wall. I have no idea how the damage occurred in the first place, but I'm guessing someone either slammed themselves into the wall or smashed it with a baseball bat. Maybe a tennis racket.
Either way, step one was to take salvaged strips of wood from the wall of the art gallery-to-be and shove it behind the broken section of paneling.
I then used salvaged wood screws to rejoin the two sections of paneling by screwing along the joint into the strips of wood that I shoved behind it.
Once the paneling was repaired, it was then time to replace the "backing board" that the trim was originally nailed to. Can you guess what I used? That's right, more salvaged wood from the art gallery-to-be! Here's a shot of the newly formed "backing board" made from scrap wood.
And another shot.
Once the backing board had been properly secured, I nailed the trim back into place.
I had to use another piece of salvaged Walnut to span the entire wall. You can barely make out the joint if you look a little to the left of the column. If you can't find it, that means I'm AWESOME!
Here's a shot of the entire wall... repaired by Dan.
I didn't have enough spare Walnut to cover the portion directly under the window, so I'll have to buy a 2x10 piece this week. Once everything is repaired, all the woodwork is going to be painted over, effectively hiding a majority of the nicks and dings in the trim and paneling.
My second project was to disassemble the phone networking and burglar alarm hubs. It took quite a bit of time, but I eventually unscrewed everything from the wall (without setting of the alarm!) and gently placed it in the cubby hole above the door frame. Once that was done, I tore down the old wood paneling that ran along the left side of the frame. If you look closely, you can still see a few remaining bits towards the lower left-hand side of the picture.
I then removed the boards that the paneling was nailed to... this is a really boring phlog, isn't it?
Here's a close-up of all the junk that I carefully disassembled and removed from the wall. I pretended like I was breaking into a bank while I dismantled the burglar alarm... it was quite exhilarating. Until the cops showed up. Then it was just sad.
Here's a shot of the Eastern wall - the part to the left will be the art gallery, while the stuff to the right (towards the false wall) will be the Cinebar. The linear outlines on the wall is where the "salvaged" wood came from. All told, I probably removed 18 tons of it from the wall. Notice the varying color of paint beneath the wood... each color represents a progressively tackier stage in the building's history.
Here's another shot of the Eastern wall. All of this will be the art gallery eventually.
This is the wall above the vault, towards the back of the Cinebar. The Health department has demanded that all of our walls be completely smooth in the concession area, so we have to sheetrock all of the areas that look like this. However, before sheetrock can be applied to the wall, someone had to go through with a hammer and a chisel and break off all the pointy pieces of masonry. That someone was me.
This picture was taken after round one of the wall versus Dan.
This was my weapon.
This was my wound.
So, I bet you're wondering how one goes about gluing sheetrock to a wall. No? You're not? Well, too bad. I'm going to show you anyways.
The first step is to squirt glue all over the back of the sheetrock. Make little circles where you plan on screwing the sheetrock to the wall.
Next, stick the sheetrock on the wall and screw it down.
Lastly, secure it. The more unsafe the securing apparatus, the better. OSHA be damned!
That's it! Now go try it for yourself, and don't forget to take lots of pointless pictures and post them to your own phlogs.
