Details details…
I have been working steadily but haven’t been keeping up with posting the details. Some of this may be too boring to be worth reading, or obvious to anyone who is rather handy. I can’t even claim that what I did is the best way to do things. Read at your own risk.
When putting the ½” plywood up on the walls, I ended up pre-drilling and countersinking all the holes. My original plan to just let the screws pull themselves into the wood didn’t always work. Sometimes the plywood was too hard and the underlying 2x2 too soft, and the screws would just strip. Having the screw heads standing proud is unsightly and I got tired of selectively removing and countersinking stripped screws (and putting in a nearby back up screw) so I just countersunk them all.
Chip out on the plywood end grain was also an issue. My circular saw isn’t the best quality, and even with a decent carbide tipped blade it wasn’t always pretty. The wall panels are mostly 4' wide and mostly square, so I only had to cut one end. Mostly any chip out was covered by the ceiling or floor panels, but not always. Sometimes I just had to fill in the damage with non-shrink spackle. The ceiling panels have nothing to cover any chip out so spackle or caulk was the only option.
The ceiling panels were rarely perfectly square. It seems, when I put the supplemental rafters in way back when I could have measured them more carefully. It’s nothing that you can see by eye, but it is enough to force careful measurement of the plywood panels before cutting. All inside corners mate to within 1/8” or so. In some cases even “straight” edges had to be cut with a slight curve to keep to that gap. At 1/8” a bead of caulk in the corners finishes them nicely and any mistakes are well hidden.
The technique of caulking the plywood at the butt joints, and then going over the gap with non-shrink spackle mostly worked fine. The joints are almost entirely hidden except in a few places. Where I ran into trouble was due to the plywood variation in thickness. A thick spot butting up against a thin spot tends to show. Unfortunately you can’t really see all the imperfections until you have the first coat of primer in place. Differences in surface color make it hard to see differences in surface level or texture.
I cut the holes for all the outlets about 1/8” oversize. Cutting them more precisely would have required too much back and forth opening up holes that didn’t quite fit. I also have an outrageous number of electrical boxes for such a small space. I count 66 holes in the plywood for the walls and ceiling, each one carefully measured and then transferred to the plywood panel by hand. Frankly, I was surprised I didn’t loose any panels by cutting holes in the wrong places.
Once the walls were in I realized that I had a few electrical boxes that were standing slightly proud. They are all plastic, so a quick pass with the router brought them down to flush.
I eventually caulked all the gaps between the holes and the outlet boxes. I probably didn’t accomplish anything useful by doing so. The walls are full of foam that fits tightly to the boxes and the back side of the plywood so It’s not an issue with air infiltration or anything. Mostly it’s just me being fusbudgety, but that’s how I roll…
The air conditioner is recessed into the ceiling and the ceiling opening around it is a special case. I wanted broadly beveled edges and rounded corners to allow the air coming out to flow smoothly and stick to the ceiling. That required a router with a rounding bit and a temporary fence. The broad bevel was created with more non-shrink spackle. It isn’t structural, but I think it is tough enough if you coat it with a couple of layers of glue and then paint. I like to use Titebond II as a surface hardener in cases like this. I also use it to toughen up and seal exposed plywood edges. It is reasonably water proof, so I don’t worry about light moisture exposure due to condensation. I wouldn’t recommend it for something that is constantly wet though.
I put a coat of latex primer on the walls and ceiling. I suppose I could have gone directly with interior latex paint but I wanted a reasonable surface for the finished coat. The grain on the raw plywood tends to raise up when painted with a water based paint, and it does so with the primer as well, but at least I can knock it down with a sanding block before applying the finish coat.
I don’t recommend sanding regular latex paint. The surface rips and tears under the sanding block making little gummy balls of latex paint. Instead of knocking down the high spots it makes frayed edges that show through the finish coat. Regular home construction techniques would texture the walls to hide minor imperfections, and then use flat latex paint to further hide them. I wanted a smooth semigloss finish, so I probably just made more work for myself, but there is nothing unusual about that.
I am not sure if this is stupid or not, but I have been doing all the painting with a brush. I was telling myself that the primer coat needed to be worked into the wood, but that’s probably nonsense. There are lots of things to paint around but a roller would probably be faster. A roller would leave a bit of a texture, which would probably be OK as well. I haven’t actually done all that much house painting in my life so some of you could probably recommend a better technique.
I installed one of my overhead lights made from Christmas tree lights. I noticed that some of the LED’s were blinking, and then I realized that some of them weren’t even lit. I don’t know what is going on, but those LED’s just aren’t reliable. Reluctantly, I tossed them and replaced them with a standard 12V florescent light.
One of the overhead LED lights I made was built inside the plastic housing of an overhead florescent light that came with the truck but was dead. I found that the plastic housing trapped the heat from the LED’s and even though it only draws a couple of amps, it was getting quite warm inside. It doesn’t help that the ceiling pockets where the lamps reside are surrounded by R-max giving nowhere for the heat to go.
The florescent lights that I bought have an aluminum housing which helps to carry the heat down to the external surface where it can radiate away. They get warm, but only warm. They are also a bit brighter and produce a warmer light. They draw a little more current than the LED’s but not much. I still think LED’s are a good idea, but my implementation sucked.
It’s like I keep telling the guy who is paying for all of this. If you wanted perfection you should have hired someone who knew what they were doing…
To be continued…
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