A New Darkroom!! II.

    The biggest challenge in building this room is the walls.  The current walls were left with open studs and visible tar paper, which had developed large holes from previous tenants nailing things, which is definitely no good for a darkroom.  So, we will be upgrading the structure a bit by building new, insulated, sheetrocked, and taped walls.  There was also a bit of electrical work to be done:  There was only one light, whose switch was to the right of the garage door (horribly inconvenient).  We moved the switch to the interior of the space, and added and rewired some electrical sockets, which you'll see later.
    We never use the garage door at the front so we just decided to wall it off, which meant removing the tracks for the door, building and insulating a wall and even a portion of the ceiling, which was difficult since it came up at an angle from the top of the door.  We also added a layer of plastic to add additional weatherproofing to the numerous holds in and around the door frame.  Boy oh boy has this been a LOT of work!!

 

    To stabilize the walls we needed to shoot bolts through the floor tracks and into the cement foundations.

 

    This is a shot from the interior of the room.  Thankfully the one wall that divides the garage from the house is solid enough that we don't have to build a new one.

Here you can see the current stage of the room, which is floating and taping all the seems between the sheet rock and filling in any holes we created while drilling them into the studs.

 This angle of the garage is the same angle as I showed in the previous darkroom post that you can see here.  There was no source of light for this side of the room, so we had to add two florescent lights in the ceiling, as well as adding some plug sockets near the bottom.

There is still at leas one solid weekend of work to do before the room is useable, but Gavin and I work well together and can get a lot of things done when we set our minds to it.  I am a little worried I have overstretched myself a bit, with taking Image Synthesis AND trying to complete the lighting work on the short film Sleddin', but hopefully it will work out great and I can make some rockin' art!