The A/V Access Hole

Two weeks ago I wrote about of holes in the wall, but I didn't mention the most interesting one: The access hole for the audio/video equipment! Anyone who's ever (re)connected cables for the TV, receiver, DVD player and so on knows what a hassle that can be. The worst must be bookshelves with built-in space for the TV - once you've filled it up with books and electronics you simply can't move it out from the wall to reconfigure the connections!
To solve this problem I came up with what I hope will prove to be a great solution - simply a hole in the wall, for easy access from the other room! (Providing that room doesn't belong to the neighbour...) In our case, that room is our new bedroom, and the hole will eventually be hidden behind a panel door.

The cables include Cat 5 network cabling, surround speaker cables and lots of power cables - all of them hidden inside the walls and the floor. :-)

Week 3

On Monday this week the aforementioned new wall got up. Well, closed at least.  So I hereby present our new library!

The Wife's buddhist altar will be in the niche in the center, and on each side there will be bookshelves, embedded in the walls. Surely it will be a very nice and cosy part of the living room when it's done, and I look forward to spending many hours of reading there - once I figure out how to make time for it...
By the way, we've already bought the armchair for the library, and The Princess is working hard testing it!

The floor is still an issue. Monday evening we found an interesting pile of I-don't-even-want-to-know-what, scraped up from some part of the floor. Apparently it's the result of many hours of hard work, and I'm really very happy I'm not doing any of this myself!

The Thursday morning inspection showed considerable progress, and our library has now real walls...

By the end of the week, most of the floor had gotten a complete make over.  A thin form of cement is covering almost every part of the floor. Notice the lower level of the entrance. Part of the remaining bags of cement (also shown in the picture) will be used here, but the level will be kept different so that the height of the tiles we will have here will match that of the rest of the floor. (More about this later!)

Solid ground

Checking in this Sunday morning immediately gave a much better impression of the floor than last time! :-)

Furthermore, a new wall is on it's way up, dividing the living room and our previous bedroom:

Notice the angles, which will create a niche for the altar on the living room side. This new room from where the picture is taken will be used as an office and guest room, and building a wardrobe in the two corners will make this wall look even from this side.

Unsteady ground

The kitchen and entrance floor turned out to be full of cardboard and newspapers, used as filling material, and didn't look very good this morning:

But, a truck from Maxbo had arrived with a more modern filling material...

... so by this evening the situation looked a lot more promising:

Tear down those walls!

So much was happening with the apartment every day last week! Already after the second day the workers were done removing all the necessary parts of the walls.
Our main objective is a bigger living room, while keeping two bedrooms - and moving a wall means first tearing one down. We're also widening the entrance to the living room, and moving the entrance to what used to be "the master bedroom". This means temporarily making the apartment considerably more "spaceous".
This is nicely illustrated by the following photo, taken from the living room facing the entrance to the kitchen, which is blocked by a supporting wall.

The hole to the right is the widened entrance to the living room. The hole to the left, furthest away, will be the new entrance from the kitchen to the old bedroom. It's a big hole, as that entrance will have a sliding door. The hole in the middle used to be the entrance to the bedroom, with a sliding door. A wall will be put up there instead.

Automatic room confusion

Time for some gadget talk!
Something I look forward to a lot when the remodelling of the apartment is finished, is to buy new audio & video equipment to replace the stuff I've sold! Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out what to get...

An essential part of any home is of course the surround sound system, and for once the WAF was actually helpful, in that it severely limited the alternative models of speakers to choose from. Though I do want quality sound, I'm not at all interested in seeing the sound, so going for a speaker system from Bose seemed in the end like the obvious choice.

Initially I thought Bose was all about integrated solutions where you had to buy the speakers with the receiver and a (superfluous) DVD player included. Which is dumb of course when you have already found (or bought) the receiver you really want, and in my case will buy a Blu-ray player instead of a DVD player.
Fortunately they do indeed sell pure speaker systems - like the Acoustimass 10 Home Entertainment Speaker System. These neat little satellite speakers were easily accepted by Wife, and a listening test was very convincing. (Now, if only I manage to place the hideous subwoofer where it won't be too visible... Why does it have to look like a big old computer tower??)

One thing about Bose was worrying me though: I had heard about their AdaptIQ room correction system - would the speakers really play along fine with any "normal" surround receiver using the automatic room correction of the receiver??
Fortunately a very helpful salesman at Soundgarden could verify that there was no need for concern. AdaptIQ was only used in their Lifestyle system, and the Acoustimass would work exactly as I had hoped - he promised! Furthermore it would be an excellent match to the receiver model I want, he said.

So what receiver am I secretely not mentioning here??
This too was a difficult choice, but I've eventually settled for Onkyo TX-SR606. With honorable mention to Yamaha RX-V663 and Harman Kardon AVR 255.
All of them get great reviews, but in the end it was the 4 HDMI inputs of the Onkyo that won me over. Quite a beauty from behind, isn't it?? ;-)

The transformation begins!

Monday the 11th of August the workmen got started. Arriving home from work that day we were pretty curious to see if much had changed. It had.

In May our cosy dinner table corner looked like this:
(Notice the exclusive fur-on-fur table decoration!)

This was now transformed to a more simplistic style:

Meanwhile, back in 123...

Our own apartment was now basically empty. With ''The Invasion of the Workmen'' only a few days away, we had just enough time to empty out the few leftovers.

Luckily we also found time to exert some destructive energy. Well, this time "we" does not include Wife as she went away for the weekend, and left it to myself and a friend to "help" with the renovation by tearing down some wall paneling. In the process we produced way more noise than I had expected, so it wasn't exactly the considerate thing to do on a Sunday. But it was quite fun! :-)

In the Beginning...

... there was a lot of thinking in apartment no. 123.
A couple years after we moved into our dear three room and kitchen, we (ie The Wife) started to feel the need to touch up our home. So the thinking and planning and discussions begun - including talking to lots of friends and colleagues to get useful information. We're not too impulsive, and we wanted to do it properly, so quite some time went by before we finally took some real action. We had a pretty good idea about what we wanted done, and we were certain that Yours Truly (aka Mr Butterfinger) would not be doing any of it himself. Thus, we decided to bring in professional help for the finalized drawings. Thanks to the missis, we found just what we needed: Llegna Form promised to deliver the complete package we needed - of architectural services, carpenters, electricians and so on. They swept us away with charm and professionalism, providing us with excellent suggestions and creative ideas throughout several initial meetings.
Providing us with a schedule of actions to take, we got going with the process of emptying the apartment, as the renovation would include "everything", except the bathroom. So we advertised most of our furnitures for sale (Finn.no is indeed a very handy site!), and started to pack. Packing often means enduring some time with a lot of mess, known to bring Wife close to hysteria - but luckily that part went pretty smooth, as focus was put on "what had to be done".
She even survived the part of disconnecting and sorting out all the cables belonging to the "boxes" of our home...



Selling our stuff was relatively easy, but finding a temporary place to live seemed like a serious challenge. Very few wants to rent out a flat for only 3 months (unless you pay a fortune), but luckily someone who had just moved out from a flat in the same building agreed to let us rent it while they try to sell it!! :-)
The condition was of course that we keep their apartment presentable for occasional viewings, but this arrangement still made so many things very practical and easy! For example, our shed in the basement isn't spacious enough to store a lot of our stuff in, so instead we could fill up some of the wardrobes in the neighboring apartment with boxes. Or, thanks to the creativity of Wife, make a fake bed out of 12-14 boxes, like this:


So two weeks ago we moved out of our own home, and have now settled quite well - only two entrances away!