More on room prep

 My basement is unfinished. The walls are covered by a “blanket” of basement wrap insulation (This was a requirement by the county when I built the house. It’s not terrible and I’m just going to leave the insulation in place). What I’m doing is framing in 2x4 walls in front of that wrap. I plan to cover the “public” areas with drywall and those walls that are strictly in the layout area with OSB plywood. My thought there is all the wall area in the layout will be covered by, well, layout.

In the areas that I’m planning to drywall; a entry stairwell, hall, and crew lounge (That will double as my wife’s craft area the balance of the time) I’m thinking of building in 2x6 backing at 36” O/C  up from the floor for any eventual hand rail installation. You never know how much help we’ll need as we age.

Additionally at 66” O/C up from the floor I’m putting 2x12 backing to allow easy installation of TV hanging brackets (I chose 2x12 because I have a shit-pot full of scrap 2x12 left over from several stair builds).

In each wall I’m adding, as I go, 120v outlets at 48” O/C up from the floor, every six linear feet.  The drywall walls also wall off the Well Pump and water softener, as well as the water heater, into their own utility rooms. The idea here is to give the craft room/crew lounge a cleaner look. 

I want/need some book cases, I have a huge collection of books that has overflowed from the upstairs book cases, and I want a decent place to display and store them. My collection of Tom Clancy novels (Every title, going back to “The Hunt for Red October” until the most recent) is probably ten feet long!

But I also want the book cases to be under my staging yards, so building them right now, while it would get the books out of boxes, will be jumping the gun a little because I’m not sure exactly how high off the floor the staging yards will be. I was thinking of just building the book cases 40” tall, as I believe my layout’s lowest deck will be at 40” off the floor. Shimming the top of the cases UP is not a problem, but if lower staging descends LOWER than 40” off the floor, that would be a problem.

As I discussed previously I want to build carts to store stuff under the layout. I am still proceeding with that plan, but each cart will have to be custom built to fit the specific  space at each point under the layout. I am planning fairly narrow benchwork. Some areas will be 24” deep and under layout storage at these points will not be a problem. But other areas will be considerably shallower. Again I’ll have to wait and see. I still want to start getting the casters purchased. I’ll need to draw a design for the carts, taking into consideration the size of a “cubic storage box”, almost everything we are storing is packed into a so called “bankers box”. The carts will need to hold as many boxes as will fit into a space between the legs that will support the front of the benchwork. If I know the overall dimensions of a particular number of cubic storage boxes, I can then lay out the spacing between the support legs. A couple inches one way or the other, in order to allow space for these storage carts, won’t matter much for the benchwork legs. I ASSume upper decks will be supported by brackets fixed to the OSB covered walls. 

We’ll see…

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