Diamonds, draperies, and squares… OH MY!

In the ‘holy crap this thing is coming together’ category, the ceiling is pretty much buttoned up!  I settled on some red burlap from a local fabric store.  Walmart gave me the idea but their product was around $4/yard and was only about 47″ wide, which would mean I’d have needed about 20 yards of the stuff.  So I trekked over to a fabric store, they only had brown and orange.  Went to the other fabric store and hit pay dirt.  They had 3 large rolls of red that were 60″ wide and $6/yard.  So I grabbed a couple of yards to do some test tiles.

The tile frames were made from some of the same 1.5″ MDF stock I used on the pilasters ripped in half, braced in the corners and stapled together top and bottom.  I used the MDF because it’s perfectly straight compared to something like furring strips which would have drove me nuts finding a dozen straight enough to make perfect squares.  This actually made a rather rigid frame to stretch and staple the fabric to.  In the end I ended up having to make 28 squares and 4 diamonds using 10 yards of the burlap and somewhere in the area of 1,500 staples.  I’ll be typing only with my left hand for a month!  The smell of the burlap is already fading away.

Painting the track with the same paint as the ceiling was somewhat of a flop.  I didn’t think to scuff or clean them before painting and even the slightest touch was almost like wiping across a white board.  You can see in the pics I had several that still needed painting after they were cut to fit.  For those I scuffed them with sandpaper, used some spray paint as a base, then painted them with the flat ceiling paint.  This seems to give everything a good bond.  I probably could have got flat black spay paint but beings I had the exact match I went the route I did with only a little extra labor.

And finally in this update, on to the walls!  We’re going with some basic curtain panels in a red as well.  I thought 1 panel would be enough to give a little bit of a pleated look but I think we’re going to end up with 2 panels for each section.  Pictured is a test with just one panel.  For mounting, I started off planning to use PVC pipe and then opted to recycle materials I had on hand.  I had several sections of the L shaped wall ceiling track material.  I cut that to length, popped a couple of holes in it for nails and used some small finish nails to hang them.  It’s questionable whether this will change because I don’t think the nails will keep them from popping off when things get rumbly… 🙂

Next up:

• We’re having a carpet installer out to measure the platforms to get a quote.
• I’m waiting on a return email from a screen company to verify the option I’ve selected will work in my application.
• I will build the screen/speaker mounting boxes.

My goal is to have a few folks over for the January 2nd TaxSlayer bowl so we can watch our Georgia Bulldogs play!  Everyone will have to bring tailgate chairs though 😉

On with the pics!

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