Biscardi Creative Blog

It’s Days 127 and 128 on the construction of the new facility and we can finally see that the end of our journey is in sight. Still have at least another month before completion, but we can now see the entire place really taking shape. The drywall, sanding and priming was all completed this past week so Friday we all headed over to do some base painting. Then on Saturday I had a big group of 8 show up to really get us far into the painting. Lots of photos to share!

Here’s the kitchen primed and ready to go.

Conference Room primed and ready.

Looking down the front hall.

Jenny gets started in the Machine Room.

Adrienne and her shadow in the Media Library

Jenny getting the Screening Room. Yeah, those are 10′ walls in that room to allow the ceiling to slope from 10′ to 9′ as part of the sound tuning of that room.

Contractor Joe McCabe popped by to check on the progress of the painting and go over the doors. John is working the base coat in Edit 4.

Jenny working the upper color in Edit 1. Every edit suite has a theme, that’s the way I’ve always done them in my facilities. The themes will be revealed as the painting continues…..

John working the bottom color in Edit 3. Part of my “Painting with Shadows” series.

Adrienne working the second color in the Media Library. We made the library some nice natural, warm colors.

Joe working a base coat in the Conference Room. We’re planning to put corkboard all around this room to make it easy to hang storyboards and other planning materials for features, tv shows and projects in general.

We had plenty of the conference room color left over so Joe went into one of the bathrooms with it….

John getting the second color going in Edit 3.

On Saturday Rebecca joined in, here she is working on Edit 5.

Base coat down on my office. We’re recreating the Wally World theme of my current edit suite, but I’m taking that theme into my office this time.

Edit 3 with the famous “18% Grey Wall” in the front. While we’re having fun with all the themes, we are still creating professional edit suites and to that end, the front wall of each room is a standard 18% grey to allow a neutral field of view for all the monitors. You want this neutral color so that your eyes properly see the colors on the screens.

Screening room completed with the base coat. On the left side of the picture is the 18% grey wall which is the front of the room.

Looking down the side hallway. The hallways area all a natural sand / almond type of color. Will go great with the flooring.

The kitchen from almost the same angle as before. Might be hard to tell, but the kitchen does have a light grey now and you can see the sand / almond color out in the hallway.

Looking down the front hallway as Rebecca surveys 2 days of awesome work by everyone who helped out!

Somehow we did not take out the camera while everyone was there on Saturday. No clue how that happened. But we need to thank Roger Mahr, Tyler Mahr, Chris Tompkins, Randy Lockey, Heather Lockey and Quinn Lockey for coming out on Saturday and really helping us out. We only have three rooms left with no paint on them and we never could have gotten that far without their help and of course my incredible team of John, Adrienne and Jenny! Now we have a little bit more base coat left and then on to detail work, floors and ceiling!

Ok, it’s been over a week since the last update on construction because it’s been a lot of little things. Some minor framing tweaks, a LOT of electrical run and the insulation. But today….. WOW! Huge changes in just 10 hours.

Today was drywall day. As in 4800 square feet of drywall hung up in ONE day! By 6 men! Unbelieveable! I showed up around 6pm and this wall in the kitchen was one of the last waiting for drywall

The new Media Library.

Back of the Machine Room. On the other side of the corner is where the VO Booth is.

Screening Room is REALLY starting to look good.

The back wall of the Screening Room showing how it’s angled to help with sound reflection.

Cleanup on Aisle 6!

Kitchen wall is finished in under 5 minutes….

The new 12 foot x 20 foot Conference Room. Boy do we need this room in a hurry! Lots of planning to do.

Neat shot from the 2nd floor looking down on a few of the offices.

Contractor Joe McCabe up on the 2nd floor admiring the handiwork of his team. He’s simply the best contractor I’ve ever met and worked with.

Meanwhile outside… forms are all set for the concrete curbs and sidewalks. Sidewalks will be poured tomorrow!

So to recap…. 7am this morning, no drywall on the walls. 7pm tonight, Drywall fully hung on all the 4800 square feet of walls. WOW! These guys are good. I’d be happy to get a single 10 x 10 room done in one day! More tomorrow!

This past week has been pretty much full of cables, cables and a tennis ball. At this point the building has been inspected and is ready for “cover up.” That means we’re ready to have the insulation and drywall installed. So by the end of this coming week, we will no longer be able to see through all the walls…..

Electrical panels have been hung and preliminary wiring is in place. We have two panels right now because one will have a second feed from the backup generator in case of a power outage. If the power goes out, in approx. 30 seconds, the generator will kick on and that panel on the left will switch over to that for power. We’re starting out with a generator that will keep four edit suites, the machine room and the screening room all on during an outage. As we grow we will either get a larger generator or simply add a second one.

Contractor Joe McCabe wearing one of the most stylish construction shirts I’ve ever seen! Here he’s drilling through the back of the machine room into the VO Booth so we can run some audio cables.

Network and A/V cables come together in the machine room. All the grey cables are Cat6 for running our keyboards / monitors remotely. All the Mac Pros will sit in the machine room and they will be connected to Gefen remote Cat6 boxes and in each edit suite, the DVI monitors and keyboards will be connected via the Gefen receive boxes. We can put the Mac Pros up to 200 feet away using these boxes.

Low voltage boxes in Edits 3 & 4 I believe. These are the end runs for all the cables coming into the rooms. I designed the rooms as much as possible so they would face each other resulting in easy cable runs. We pulled two cable bundles to essentially the same place. The orange boxes on the right are for future expansion if necessary. Really easy to add stuff like that now while there’s nothing on the walls.

Molly comes for her first visit to the new building! The last time she was here it was just raw dirt. Wonder what she’s waiting for…..

Ah, that explains it! A nice new tennis ball. One really nice feature of the new building… long 60′ hallways. And 80′ from the kitchen wall all the way to that door at the end of the hallway. Now we’ll be able to burn off some of her energy no matter what the weather is doing outside.

Daddy, you need to clean your lens. She’s checking out the new screening room.

And there we are, the happy entrepreneurs wondering what the heck we’ve gotten ourselves into this time. If you want to be a successful business owner, get yourself a good partner. And I don’t mean a financial partner, I mean a GOOD partner who will support you no matter what. I have the best partner I could ever ask for. More soon!

Now that the electrician, HVAC and plumbers have done all their rough in work, we brought in 11,000 feet of video, audio and network cable to run through to all the suites. We’re doing all this initial work ourselves and Bob Zelin will come on up here towards the end to add all the connectors and label everything up. Per Bob, we ordered everything direct from GEPCO cables in Chicago, prices are much lower than anything from Belden and Canare these days. Ordered the cables on Monday, they were here on Wednesday!

While we were working inside, the front end loader was taking down the dirt outside in preparation for the parking lot.

John and Adrienne mark the floor in 10′ increments to make it easy to pull the lengths of cable. Yeah, we could use a cable counter, but we don’t have one, so we’re going old school. One of the advantages of a 100′ building. LONG hallways!

Jenny organizing all the labels in the kitchen.

Video, Audio and network cable stretched down the hallway with John manning the boxes at the end of the hall. We used string initially to figure out all the cable runs by simply running the string exactly as we wanted to run the cables, and then just measure the string. Very simple, very low tech and very accurate.

John hanging out with rolls of cable. You like that pvc pipe support for the video spool? Yeah, it held up well enough….

Me and John pulling the longest cable runs out to the Conference Room. These are 95′ long.

Adrienne gathering up some labels in the kitchen.

Runs of cable ready and waiting in the Media Library to be pulled up through the ceiling. All edit suites got 2 video, 4 audio and 6 network cables.

Cable runs from Edit Suites 4 and 5 hanging down from the ceiling and you can see some of the serious air conditioning ducts that will feed into that room.

Remember that front end loader out front? I thought he was going to make the parking lot lower. Um, apparently this will be the VIP parking for my four wheel drive clients……

Can’t believe how quickly things move along when you have folks who really know what they’re doing. Last week was a flurry of interior activity with rough plumbing, electrical and HVAC all happening simultaneously. They went so fast, now I’m the holdup for the next step. We need to get all our A/V cable in here so we can pull it through the shop before they cover up the walls….

One of three HVAC units going into the shop. We’ll have one dedicated just to the machine room. These are being installed up above the main level and the units themselves are sitting on rubber / cork feet to minimize the vibration caused by the units so we don’t get any additional noise down below.

Contractor Joe McCabe and editor Roger Mahr standing at the end of the “upstairs” area where the HVAC units will be located. This entire space will also be useful as a storage area.

There’s Chuck from Chuck’s Plumbing working on the kitchen sink. You last saw him running the dirt mover before they poured the slab. He and his team are doing an awesome job with everything.

Some of the HVAC running down the halls. I really like how efficiently they are doing the runs. They put two units on either side of the building so the air flows the shortest distance to where it needs to be.

SEPTEMBER 24

A look at HVAC unit number 2. As I noted previously, the two main units are located on either side of the building so they will work most efficiently.

One of the bathrooms completed and ready for insulation and drywall.

There’s one of the spools of electrical wire on the left with more HVAC dropping down from above looking down one of the edit hallways.

Rough electrical in one of the edit suites. Each room will have a pair of wall sconces, a pair of overhead cans in the back of the room and a ceiling fan. I actually love doing electrical work myself, but a job this big, it’s easier to leave it to the folks who do this for a living.

Next up, leveling the parking lot, running the A/V cables and then on to insulation and drywall…..