Hey folks, I haven't posted here in so long I had to re-register! Anyway, I've done my searching and haven't been able to come up with solid answers to the following questions.
First off, here's the scenerio: I have an unfinished basement space that I've (tried) to attach a picture of:
The room is 28' long, 18' wide on the end that has the door that goes to the upstairs, and 14' wide by the end that has the furnace room on it. The ceilings are all 9'10" high.
The room will be oriented as pictured with the components stacked to the left of the kitchen area as pictured.
This space is about to be converted to an apartment, then in a few years I want to convert it into a multi-use, mainly home theatre, but also have space for fooseball and a card table. Once that conversion is done, this will be the basic layout of the basement that I'm left with.
What I want to do is complete the necessary wiring to accomodate my goals for when I reclaim this space.
This space is totally unfinished at this point with the exception of insulation in the walls and vapour barrier, both which I anticipate tearing out to complete this project. It has a concrete floor with radiant in-floor heating installed (no heat exchanger or pumps yet). It also has a bit of ducting but will only be required for A/C, if at all. In fact I'm considering blocking them for the use of the apartment.
My goals are thus:
- spend as little money as possible to achieve the highest possible result (entire renovation, including appliances, flooring, trim, paint, wiring for all power and all AV, and plumbing, EXCLUDING ALL HOME THEATRE COMPONENTS SINCE THIS WILL BE AN APARTMENT IN THE SHORT RUN)
- keep as much of the outdoor wind noise out of this space as possible. We often have significant wind where I live and one of my biggest goals is not to prevent noise from going outside, but to prevent noise from coming inside.
- isolate as much of the noise from the HT area from the main floor of the house as possible. This is more for the time that the basement will be used as an apartment so we all have our privacy. Our bedrooms are on the second floor, two floors away from this space, so this isn't a huge issue for sleeping kids or anything, just for occupant noise.
- leave enough room for relatively easy use of the back door
The basic design of the basement is obviously a walkout with a 50% slope. This means that at the front of the foundation, it's entirely burried in dirt, but at the back it's entirely open with the foundation's concrete roughly following this slope by several steps.
What this means is that I have a stepped pony wall down each side of the foundation. Currently, there is 2X6 insulated and vapour barriered construction on top of that concrete, but there is still space for another set of 2X4s.
My thoughts are to flush up the walls so that the walls are straight up and down with no steps. This will act kind of like a double studded wall sitting on top of the concrete step giving me more thickness and more quiet.
Then I'm thinking of using double 5/8" drywall with a layer of Green Glue in between them, on ALL walls, even the bedroom walls, and the walls going upstairs behind the cabinets in the kitchen, and in the bathroom, and furnace room.
I priced out QuietRock, and although it seems like quite an awesome product, I don't know that it's that much better than Green Glue, and the Green Glue is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper.
One of the questions I have is about how to silence the ceiling. There's a couple companies in town that spray urethane foam. I am not able to find much on it's ability to dull noise but I do know it's an incredible insulator. I'm thinking about having it sprayed in my floor joists then double hanging 5/8" drywall with Green Glue there as well.
The other thing I'm confused about is that my windows and doors appear to have only enough overhang for one 5/8" sheet of drywall so I'm not sure how to address that.
I'm also wondering about a sub-floor. I'm not sure if I need one, or if it would waste some of the energy from my radiant in-floor heating. I hear it's better for bass response, but I don't know why. Do I need one or can I just carpet right over the concrete with a good underlay?
The other thing I'm wondering about, but certainly not as pressing as the other stuff, is how to orient the room to accomodate my needs. I just can't settle on which end to put my screen in, if I should build a seating platform for a second row, if I have enough room for a second row or if I should just go with bar stools and narrow depth bar type table behind the first row. Don't worry about light when you're making recommendations here. I'm buying black-out blinds to cover that. Hopefully they'll also deaden any unwanted sound reflection from the glass as well.
I've read and compiled all the stuff from the "I wish I'd done this" thread, so I'm not so concerned about what's in there. My main questions about this thread are how to isolate noise as best as possible, on a somewhat limited budget, for the needs of both an apartment, and a multi-use HT Room.
My budget for this stage, EXcluding components, but INcluding everything else from speaker wire, to video cabling, to CAT6, to the multiple circuits, to dimmers, sconces, pot-lights, trim, flooring, plumbing, painting, and finish carpentry is $30,000.
Do you think it can be done? Do you think my goals of quiet will be accomplished? What else can I do to ensure I have a viable home theatre / family room that can be used as an apartment in the meantime?
Thanks in advance for addressing these questions from an almost first time poster!
