And so it begins...

This is the first post of what will be the final major renovation project we'll need to take on with Cedar Crest for a long time. This renovation will entail turning the first floor of the barn into a garage as well as studio space and a laundry room. We'll be adding a four-season solarium and the carriage house is going to become the main entrance to the house. The kitchen will be expanded and completely renovated and what is now a parking area is going to become a small courtyard. Our contractor - Holleman Heritage Woodworkers - has provided us with a video that we've uploaded to ourYouTube channel. Click on the link below to see the animation walk-through of what we plan to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z6a6dxC890&index=1&list=UU9AnyRdk_rjJ3ew_L2FRwlQ

Our New TV Room

After the major deck reno we decided to hold off on any further work for a while. Then, one day, I noticed a piece of wallpaper starting to peel back from the wall in the that we knew would eventually be our TV room. I couldn't help myself and started peeling the wallpaper. A few months and more $$ later - we have a new TV room. So much for taking a break. But, it's winter now and we spend a lot of time in here so the investment was worthwhile. Here's a few pictures of the project.

After I finished peeling all the wallpaper away the painters arrived and gave everything a fresh coat of primer. The white paint was very bright and was not looking much like a home theatre. You can see the wires hanging from the ceiling where the projector will be installed.

Here is another view of the primed walls. The old TV has a 52" screen. It's sitting in front of the wall where the new screen will go.

This is the wall to the right of the screen. At this point we're still waiting for our new theatre light fixtures but we needed to have the wiring finished so we just installed bare bulbs to tide us over until the new fixtures arrived.

And this is the wall to the left of the screen. Those patio doors open up to the deck. We bought heavy, room darkening curtains to put over those doors and the window. I also bought some limousine window tint film and tinted the large triangular window and the skylights with 95% tint - almost blacked out. The result is a very dark room - excellent for watching TV.

We had this riser built at the back of the room. It's about a 4" lift and creates the platform where the theatre seating will eventually go. It will be covered with the same carpeting as the rest of the floor.

This is an example of the theatre seating that will eventually go on the raised part of the floor. This is a set that we saw in a showroom. We liked everything except the colour so we're still looking around to find something that we like. We both agreed that the bottom lighting was necessary given the darkness of the room and the carpet.

This is the carpet we decided to go with. A local flooring store found a distributor in Georgia who specialized in theatre carpeting. It is exceptionally durable and was exactly the look we were after. We weren't disappointed.

 

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Here we are with the walls painted (dark brown) and the theatre light fixtures arrived and we did a decorative panel around each one. The framing around the fixtures is actually black. They just haven't been painted yet in this picture. |Also, in this photo the ceiling hasn't been painted yet. The projector is obviously up and we projected an image on the wall so we'd know where to paint the screen. We opted to paint a screen on the wall (using Home Depot's Silver Screen paint) instead of purchasing a projection screen. The image you see here is simply projected on the dark brown paint.

Here's one of the painters masking off the area of the wall where the Silver Screen paint will go. Once that's done then a black frame will be built around the whole thing to finish it.

The finished room. Mike got a popcorn machine for Christmas that gets a lot of use. We still haven't purchased our theatre seating yet but the treadmill fit nicely into that spot. It's a great space to walk and watch some TV. Our Holly Carr silkscreen painting of a NYC street is still waiting to be hung along with all of our framed Broadway playbills. You can see our Panasonic projector suspended from the ceiling and the blacked out triangular window. What you can't see are the cracks in the window. On one particularly cold day we must have had the volume a little too high (we got a new sub woofer too) and managed to crack the glass in the window. Opps.

Here's another view of the finished room with the screen painted on the wall and the framing done around it. We have a couple bookcases full of movies which never get used now that we subscribe to NetFlix. Our desk and chair are to the right so the room doubles as a TV room and an office. Another room down but we're really done for a while now.