More progress on the home shack!
Well, kind of...first, let me tell you what I was working on, and then I'll roll into the ham radio / shack progress connection.
Well, kind of...first, let me tell you what I was working on, and then I'll roll into the ham radio / shack progress connection.
We currently share our home with 3 furry friends (or maybe, they share their home with us?) Anyway, their litter boxes have been residing in the end of the unfinished part of the basement that will eventually be the rec room. (If you'll recall, from all the way back here, the room that's becoming my shack used to be the "cat room.") We wanted to transition their box area to the back of the new utility space, but a couple of them are older cats, which means they sometimes have questionable aim...
Anybody who has ever tried to get the smell of cat pee out of anything knows what a chore that can turn into. Rather than have our utility room end up smelling like (well, you know....) we decided to make it a very easily cleanable space. With that goal in mind, I hung plywood on the walls and painted it, to seal it up. There was still that floor to deal with though...
Anybody who has ever tried to get the smell of cat pee out of anything knows what a chore that can turn into. Rather than have our utility room end up smelling like (well, you know....) we decided to make it a very easily cleanable space. With that goal in mind, I hung plywood on the walls and painted it, to seal it up. There was still that floor to deal with though...
So, after some scrubbing, some etching, and some more scrubbing, I epoxy coated the floor to accomplish 2 things - to keep any "accidents" from soaking in and become a permanent part of the milieu, and to make any needed cleanups simple...
With the floor sealed, and easily wipe-able, It was time to finish up the other things. I added some trim (PVC trim, for obvious reasons), some silicone to seal around the trim, and some of those beautiful truck-stop-bathroom wall panels. The final effect makes for a tidy utility room, but also a place to put the cat boxes that will be easy to clean.
So what is the ham radio and shack progress connection? There's really 2 parts to that:
- I had to get this done in order to move the cat boxes, so that I could continue hanging drywall. This means that during the next several days I'll be doing some odds and ends to prep, and by the weekend I'll be hanging the walls in my future shack!
- With the layout of the house, this room is part of one of my "exit routes" to get coax out of the basement in the future. By routing through the storage space with exposed conduit/cable, I can get wires and coax into this room, and out of this little handy spot that goes to a 12" x 12" plastic junction box right at ground level outside the house.
This is one of the entrance points I left myself for future coax / cable needs.
Remember when I put the radon fan in? The thing I didn't explain at that time was the big gray box with the ground rod right next to it....that's where the conduit in the utility room goes. When we finish grading for the flower garden on this side of the house, the ground level will come up to just below the top of this box.
I'm excited to have another thing done (even if it is just the fancy restroom for the cats), especially when its one that moves me closer to having my ham shack done!
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