This is not cinema related and has very little that is audio related, but I thought some would find it interesting.
Well having pretty much finished the cinema room around August 2015 I probably enjoyed quite a lot of weekends off before in the late autumn I had to update the original master bedroom for my youngest daughter. It had been decided that my office was going to be moved into her old bedroom, and my office was going to be turned back into a bedroom, which made sense really.
The front bedroom was quite simply and was completed late November. The conversion of her old bedroom into the office was also fairly straight forward, really just a case of adding more sockets where required and a few network sockets. This was done around Jan/Feb time, probably more February. Then I renovated the back bedroom which also entailed repairing some cracks in the internal block work, this was finished mid March last year.
Now for the major work, we have a through lounge dinner, with an opening between the two, the rear of the dinning room is almost south facing with a large 2.4m wide window. Many a time we've been sat having dinner on a nice summers evening and said wouldn't it my nice if we had doors there we could open.
So crunch time, we had two options, take out the window, knock the wall out below and fit 2.4 meter wide doors/bi-folds. This was the easy option, no structural work, much cheaper and much quicker. Option two was to fit full width (the room is 3.6 meters wide) 3.3 meters wide bi-fold doors, much nicer, much more expensive and a massive structural undertaking.
The question was put to SWMBO, and option 2 was dually chosen, she obviously had a lot of faith in me as this would entail taking out a 3.5 meter section of wall without the house falling down! Giving her the choice also meant she couldn't complain if it took longer than expected, well it always does, something always crops up to slow things down.
We did consider making the two rooms into one and completely removing the dividing wall, but decided this would not suite us, but enlarging the opening from around 1.5m to 2.1 meters would be beneficial. The kitchen back door would also be changed to french doors matching the bi-folding doors.
This is what we had.
I arranged a meeting with the building inspector, discussed it with him, and as the opening was so close to an external corner wall we would likely need a goal post steelwork frame. I found a suitable structural engineer and they came up with a goal post frame arrangement which would need to be fitted, and the columns would need to be bolted to the existing foundation concrete. There was various revisions, and then eventually a design was settled on and approved by the building inspector.
Now you'd think that the design of the steelwork will be dealt with by the structural engineer, and of course it is, well the length and size of the top beam is, the connection detail to the columns, the size of box used for the columns and the connections to the foundation concrete. What they don't specify is the height of the columns - they don't know this, so this was down to me. I dug two inspection pits to discover the depth of the foundation concrete, and from this did a Sketchup drawing of the steelwork. This drawing along with the structural engineers paperwork was passed to the fabricators who then made the steelwork. All the time I hoped I'd got that critical height correct, but wouldn't know until I installed it.
I'll post more info and pictures in due course.