The house is a modest three bedroom bungalow in a rural Cambridgeshire village. The long term plan is to demolish it and do a self build. Hence any DIY being modest in scope and cost; no point in splashing the cash if the next modification will be by digger bucket...
So, as always, I Sketchup a new room, if only to see if angles/distances/etc work:
And they do. Speakers between 45-60deg apart, with one metre from the front baffle to front wall and 60cm+ to the sidewalls. Imaging heaven. Sofa position leaves plenty of room for a fold out dining table for 4. Sofa (which wasn't bought at this point) isn't too close to the gas fire. On that note, it's a relief that the new woman in my life isn't fussed about leather, fabric being audibly superior.
So that's the visualisation......
And now the reality...
Nothing in the room is square and the ceiling so heavily Artexed, it was easier to pull it down and put a new one up. Artex is a sod to remove, if pre-1984 probably contains asbestos and is normally hiding something anyway. So, it was on with the masks, a morning of pure filth and then to get new plasterboard up. Somebody remind me to order 9mm next time, because 12mm is savage to hold on your head whilst you get the screws in:
Note the lovely pink walls with brown skirting and radiators. Such carefully chosen hues pervaded the entire property, but 20L of Dulux Trade pure white emulsion cured that. God bless not-Mrs for sorting that out. Once the ceiling was skimmed, she completed the white out in the room (except for the front wall) whilst I carried on with things involving, wood, drills, screws and swearing:
The front wall showed signs of (historical) water damage, so even before the paper came off, it was likely it was in poor order. I elected to do a pallet wood wall for several reasons. 1, it saved the cost of more plastering. 2, I've never seen one up close, but the pictures I have seen look nice. 3, It would give me somewhere to hide cables. 4, they're cheap(ish). 5, done right, they sound better than a plain painted/papered wall.
Ultimately, if it looked cack, we're only going to have to look at it for a couple of years. If it looked good, I'd drop some serious cash on doing a big one in the next house, so it was a relatively risk free proof of concept.
Sketchup again. This time to work out batten positions and whether to do the wall in full pallet staves, or randomize things further by cutting them up. The front wall is 3700mm wide and a stave is 1200mm (give or take) and so I quickly realised that there would be 100mm sections that would look silly. In the end, I elected to base it on 1200mm and 600 sections, which resulted in the end of the rows being occupied by 650mm and 350mm lengths, cut to suit the variable width of the wall across it's height. It also meant that each row only had a 200mm wasted off-cut.
The pallet wood was procured from a fella in Dunstable who had over 500 lengths of hard and soft wood stuffed in a front room, I opted for the soft at 75p each, but when I saw the hard, they were well worth a quid each - Much more pronounced grain, pattern and variability of colour. I compromised by haggling him down to 110 lengths for £80. I only needed 80ish, but there's plenty of opportunity for other little projects around the house.
Because there's more than a bit of variability in length, I also played safe by going with 3x2 for battens, mounting them at alternate 300 and 600mm centres. Each end and indeed where ever a stave crossed a batten had to be screwed in top and bottom (you don't want rattles) meaning a mere 720 screws, pilot holes and rebates for the screw heads. The ceiling needed a couple of hundred, so buying a box of 1000 dry wall screws worked out quite well.
50mm rock wool stuffed the cavities (with the exception of the drop for the TV cables) and this in turn was dust-proofed with bog standard geotextile. Anything you can breath through will do. the rationale behind this, is that acoustically the staves are quite 'leaky' as none of then are basically straight. The rock wool will absorb the sound that gets in and this helps create a slightly deader acoustic behind the speakers. Black textile is recommended, so you don't see what's in the gaps.
I started with a resolutely horizontal line across the middle and then just added whatever piece of timber came next, building out from the center. By now, we were having to live in the house and I wanted to get the TV up sooner rather than later.
Like most houses, there aren't enough sockets (and never in the right place) to satisfy an AV nerd, so three rows up from the bottom I built in five double sockets, all wired back to a socket immediately adjacent the wall. I'd cunningly left the battens about an inch shy of the floor, precisely to give somewhere to tuck mains, speaker and signal cables. I took the opportunity to hide up some cables for rear surrounds and front height channels, because it would be stupid not to whilst you're there!
In a stroke of planned luck, the Virgin guy turned up whilst I was a few rows short of the floor, so that, the power and HDMI cables all went in at the same time. As he could see what I was doing, he gave me loads of extra cable length to play with. Top guy.
So,you keep on going for what feels like ad infinitum, deal with the wiggly ceiling gap mostly by swearing at wood and notice that what look like huge gaps when you first start, gradually seem to shrink in size as more wood goes up.
I also abandoned plans to oil/wax the wood once up. For starters, I didn't want to darken it, although it will do that naturally through exposure. I also didn't sand it, beyond running sand paper along the edges to take the edge splinters off, because it would suppress the texture variation and take the patina off the more weathered staves. Sometimes, less is more.
The (more-or-less) end result, I think, rather cool: