The Wall

this

See this? This is the back wall of my house. Back about the time that this blog started I had the wall torn down and replaced. I told them to leave the wall open so I could work on my own schemes.

The plan was to make a wall that I could get into. I suspected there were issues in the wall before I had it removed. But to prove it I'd have to tear down the sheetrock. Whether I was right or wrong the sheetrock would then need to be repaired. And what if I needed to run wires? What do I do if rats get in the walls? Or if the insulation starts to settle? Or I get mold? The answer to all of those question is punch holes in the wall and then patch it. My plan was a modular wall.

Ideally I want something like on the starship Enterprise where the walls are made of panels that you can just pop open when a plasma conduit needs replacing. I drew up some lovely plans for huge wall panels that would work like that, but just weren't worth the effort for a lousy 8"x14" wall that includes a door, a window, some stairs, and a counter all screwing things up. My design would work great in an office building or hotel with long stretches of wall that could be covered with identical panels. Then you'd just make some door panels or electrical panels for those sections where something different was needed. But that doesn't describe my house.

Wall studs are supposed to be placed 16" apart measuring from the center of one stud to the next. I figured that I'd make a series of 16"x16" plyboo squares and fasten them to the studs with decorative bolts that could be removed whenever my paranoia about rats and mold got the better of me.

But I don't work terribly fast.

In June 2006 I had the whole back wall removed and rebuilt. It was complete mess and the only reasonable thing to do was to start over. That and the bathroom needed work. We found out later it wanted to fall through the kitchen ceiling. [link] I had to live in my office for two months while the work was being done.

In late 2006 I got a bunch of plyboo and started working with it. [delivery] [first attempt to cut it]

Then other projects got my attention. I installed an attic. I exposed the brick and replaced the floor in my library.

I went back to the plyboo in August of 2008. I cut a couple of sheets into 16"x16" squares. I was proud of how close I came to getting them within 1/32 of an inch. [link] Turns out now that I had only 8 that were just right and about 12 that were right in one direction but in the other direction one edge was right while the other was off by 1/16 of an inch. I'll need to sand them down.

I picked this project back up again late 2010. Now, don't think I'd been ignoring it completely all this time. I had a pile of cut plyboo squares blocking up my kitchen. You can't ignore that. Instead, I'd been trying to figure out how to get the boards attached to the walls correctly. In my mind I had it right, but I couldn't find the parts that I needed. I really thought I was gonna have to get some angle iron and a grinder, cut a bunch of metal corners, and then drill holes in them. I forget what words I had been Googling, but "angle bracket" was what I needed. Once I had that I found the brackets I needed with holes big enough to take bolts and some attractive bolts that take Allen wrenches. I was also gonna weld some nuts to the angle brackets so the bolt would have something to screw into. But then it occurred to me that the metal on the brackets was thick enough that if they were threaded I wouldn't need the nuts.

For those of you who haven't spent time in a metal shop (and obviously I haven't spent a lot of time in one), a "tap" is what you use to put threads in a hole so a bolt will fit in there. It's sort of a really hard screw with sharp threads and gaps running down the sides to let shavings fall out and get a fresh bite into the metal. They often come with a "die" which you use to put the threads on a metal shaft to make it a bolt.

At Christmas I took my angle brackets and bolts with me to Kansas. Dad and I got some taps to match the thread spacing on the bolts. Dad tapped the first several and I got lazy and waited until I was back in DC to tap the rest.

Then I did nothing for another couple of months. I'd had a look at the studs in the wall and realized that they weren't installed 100% correctly. They weren't all the right width. They weren't placed at the exact right spacing. Some weren't even straight up and down. They drifted by an inch. I always forget that the specs and the reality of home building differ by a good deal. Math alone won't get the job done.

A friend gave me what was, in retrospect, the obvious solution. Get some 1"x2"s and put them horizontally along the wall. Since I'm the one doing the work they'll be exactly where I want them. Then I can attach the squares to the horizontal boards.

I started in the lower left corner of the window and started working my way up and to the left. I got 5 squares put up the first afternoon. I don't have as much time to do the work as I'd like, so it was a couple of weeks before I got back to it. I hoped to get up to 10 squares in place. But I soon found that some minor issues were adding up to make big gaps. So I started working from the top and coming down. I ended up having to rehang everything by the time I was done. I made sure the top horizontal board was level and hung squares from it. Then I put in the next horizontal board down and hung squares from it. Then the next and the next. The squares still line up with the lower left corner of the window and now the spacing works out better than it did before.

Unfortunately I've used all my good squares. I'll have to spend some time with the sander taking down that extra 1/16" on of the corners of some of the remaining squares. I think 7 should do the trick. Then I'll have to get into the irregular shapes.

More pictures when the wall is closer to done.