HFA Audio Setup History 18 – Secondary Setup – Construction work Dec 2015 to February 2016
After being unhappy with the placement of the listening sofa, some more construction work was in order…
This is what the secondary setup looked like end 2015: a nice, cozy place to listen to music and watch TV. To make this setup possible I had already removed several walls. Still, I was unhappy with the placement of the listening sofa. Not evident from the pics shared so far, is that with the wall removed, the sofa was now positioned more or less in the hallway.
See? It is blocking the hallway, especially when positioned further into the room for a better sound balance. So, I set out to do some more construction work in my -ahem- rental apartment. The vendor has approved my remodelling work but unless the apartment can be rented as is to the next person, I’ll have to bring it into the old state again. Best not think about that now.
I figured: what if I rotated the setup to no longer have the sofa in the middle of the room and create a longer back wall simultaneously… All I needed to do is to close down the hallway and create a new doorway in the kitchen. After the other walls, I had removed this should be easy. And indeed it was: roughly 1 day to saw the new doorway and remove all the debris and another day to close the hallway.
Then, the plastering work could begin.
What looked like a perfectly flat surface during the day, turned out to be a curvacious affair, casting ugly shadows when using the ceiling lighting. Layer after layer after layer the plaster was applied, and because of the necessary drying time between layers, this process seemed to take forever.
Then, of course, there was the backside in thnow-closeded hallway. I stuffed it with Isofix first and after mounting the plasterboards I drilled some holes and filled all remaining cavities with pur foam.
Remember the radiator pipes that were still sticking out of the floor after removing the initial bedroom walls and heating radiator? Because this is a rental appartment and I have to bring the rooms back into the original state, I cannot remove the pipes altogether.
One solution was a custom made side table positioned over them. I don’t have actual photos of this but a fraction of the red box can be seen below.
The best solution that I came up with was to make a large table at exactly the right length (250cm) and with hollow legs so that the pipes would be covered and removed from sight. However, I quickly decided against the table because the bed was now in the living room as a result and so the pipes needed to be dealt with properly.
So, I collected all my courage and started drilling in the floor, hoping that I would not hit any piping underneath. Naturally, I did roughly check where they were by turning up the heat and feeling for hot spots under the floor but this was no guarantee.
After drilling 20 or so holes and connecting these holes by drilling sideways, I ended up with a large enough cavity.
Carefully I bent the pipes into position, making sure that they were in a nice curve. Luckily the appartment is very recent and so the pipes are not made of copper but a new composite material that can easily be bent.
Finally, I made sure that they were kept nicely in a position surrounded with foam and then covered them up with more foam, and then relaid the floor.
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