Gym
Our plan for our home gym started in the only room in the house that wasn’t updated. The room is about 15’ by 15’ so provided plenty of space for our Tonal and our Peloton. But before we got started, we would need to completely rip down all of the wall paper, the bead board, the drop ceilings, and even the closet to pick up as much space as possible.
Preparation
In a perfect world, the very last thing we would do is move in all of our workout equipment. Unfortunately, we had an appointment to have out Tonal (pictured left) relocated to our new home just 5 days after we moved in. Which forced me to have to rip down the bead-board and wallpaper, sheet rock, spackel and paint just a small section of wall where the Tonal needed to go so it could be ready for the installation team. Now I get to work around this thing for the remainder oof the renovation…
First, I started with demolishing the closet. It added an extra day of work to the project, but since this is going to be our home gym for the foreseeable future, it was worth it to reclaim the extra square footage. It will also help will the overall aesthetic of the finished gym.
After the closet was down, it was time to start pulling down the bead-board and wall paper. I was hoping the bead-board would be nailed into place which would allow me to just fill the nail holes and paint, but unfortunately it was glued in place and the glue teared up the sheet rock upon tearing it down. So I needed to replace the bottom 4 feet of sheet rock.
The wallpaper was pretty nasty and required a ton of time an effort to get completely clean from the walls. In hindsight, I wish I had just torn down the sheetrock and replaced it. Would have been more expensive, but saved me a lot of time.
After a few day of scrubbing wallpaper and ripping down sheetrock, I started installing the replacement pieces.
Ceiling & Lighting
After a few coats of spackle, it was starting to look like a real room again. With that I turned my attention to the drop ceiling, after ripping down a few tiles, a huge mess of electrical wires was revealed. Our plan was to install recessed lighting, but first we needed to rewire the entire room.
We pulled out the entire circuit, and ran the electrical wire around the perimeter of the ceiling instead of across. We dropped the wire down through the walls to handle the switches and outlets, then back up and to the next one. The thought was by keeping all of the wires in this perimeter, we’ll be able to box these in with sheetrock later.
Next, we installed 12 recessed lights in the newly revealed ceiling. This is controlled by TP-Link Smart Dimmer Switch so that it can be controlled from my phone or from the Google Home devices. This will also let us link the switch the backlighting/uplighting we plan on doing later.
We picked up over 2’ of space by getting rid of the drop ceiling. Was definitely another 2 days well spent. Next step is to start boxing in the perimeter to hide those wires.
After about four trips back and forth to Home Depot, we had enough 2x4s to finish boxing in the perimeter. On most walls we had only about a 6” inset but had to bump out to 9” for the wall that had some plumbing running along it. Overall, I am very happy with how it turned out. We FINALLY get to move on finishing up the sheet rock and painting
