Just add Evil...

That's better.

Trim

And finally, I put in the baseboard.

All done! Looks too nice for an Evil Lair, though...

Ceilings, floors, and more

Using the anchored line, we pulled the network cable down into the outlet. Donnie put the wall plates on.

I put in the floor. It was dirt cheap laminate and didn't click together that easily, but it sure beat the glue-together stuff I installed on the main floor.

The drop ceiling didn't drop much since I was trying to maximize useable space. I had to struggle to get the panels in because the ceiling hangars were just below the rafters. It was an exercise in frustration.

Paint

With the drywall up, both Donnie Darko and Calvin helped with the filling, sanding, priming, and painting.

We used the paint left over from the front living room; I didn't care much for the colour but it would mostly be covered with shelving anyway.

I finally had to move Grimlock in order to get the door in. Baby came to check things out. The wife was curious how I planned to fit all that... cool stuff (not her words) in the lab.

Drywall

Next we started putting up the drywall.

One wall would have a network port outlet. I didn't want to take the network offline the entire time I was finishing the room, so we needed some way to anchor a line from the outlet to the ceiling so we could drag the network cables down afterwards.

Donnie pounded a nail in the ceiling to temporarily anchor the line.

Electrical

There are several places in the basement where a previous owner had dropped electrical wiring from a room above. This makes turning off a particular circuit at the breaker panel difficult: you wouldn't ordinarily think that shutting off the circuit for the master bedroom on the main floor would also shut off the ceiling light (and just the ceiling light) in the laundry / storage room immediately below it.

This is one of those situations. The only wiring into the lab came from the hallway and bedrooms above it. I had no idea how much load was currently on that circuit, so I decided to replace it altogether.

I ran a new circuit from the breaker panel. I wanted lots of power in the lab, so I got some heavier duty wiring (red heater wire) and a 20 amp breaker. The rest of the family was watching a movie so — wearing rubber gloves and runners, standing on a plastic stool, and keeping one hand behind my back — I popped the new breaker in without shutting the main breaker off. I can't decide if that was really clever or particularly stupid.

The old circuit didn't just end at the lamp fixture; it continued on to power other things. So I removed the fixture and tied the circuit together in a junction box.

First light for the new circuit!

Finish framing

The walls were up.

Walls

So after planning and buying materials, I cleaned out the corner so we could start putting the walls up.

I didn't really plan that part too well, though, as there wasn't a lot of room left to swing a hammer. We had to get creative at times, lifting the walls up to pound nails in at an angle.

The back wall was in place and the front wall was coming together.

When the front wall went up I realized we were going to have more problems later with Grimlock, my vintage 1979 PDP-11/44 mini-computer, right in front of the door. I hate moving that thing around. It weighs a ton.

Planning

The first step in building my new lab was modeling how I was going to arrange my Ikea shelving to provide a decent working space while maximizing storage areas.

I got the idea to build this model from my Dad who used to make these really cool paper models of houses he was building. Once he built a cardboard house for this Wile E. Coyote figure I had which I thought was totally awesome. That inspired me to make many cardboard spaceships as I was growing up. Some of them got pretty elaborate, with lasers made from battery powered light bulbs, missile tubes that shot small card-stock paper airplanes using elastic bands, computers with paper slides to change the display, and other more-or-less functional parts.

I was hoping this might inspire more creativity in Donnie, but it also gave me the opportunity to show him some math, including the Pythagorean Theorem, squares and roots, and working with scales (the model was scaled to match his Nick Bluetooth figure).

Building a Computer Lab / Evil Lair

Donnie Darko wanted his own bedroom, mostly to have a place to keep his own stuff. So I was evicted from my nice upstairs office. There was one corner of the basement where I'd been storing my computer equipment, and I decided it was time to turn it into a proper lab.

My main workstation would stay in a corner of the den upstairs so I could still pretend to be a part of the family.

Geocaching at McKinnons Flats

It's a beautiful, warm day to be geocaching at McKinnons Flats, a Watchable Wildlife site on the Bow River, southeast of Calgary.

The only wildlife we saw was Calvin, though.

(original posts)