PROJECT 2
My talented daughter Mary had been planning on opening a Pole Fitness Studio in the southern Oregon coastal towns of Brookings / Harbor. Dad can you help? Of course I can. So she started searching for a good location. She quickly came up with a couple of possibilities. The second was a better choice and price. So she sent to me the sizes and photos of the space.
We quickly loaded all the parameters into Revit CAD and came up with a 3D for her. Then we sourced out the materials and created a budget. See added the specific Pole equipment and we had a working project. She then signed the lease and ordered the poles.
I drove up from Southern California picking up the four 13ft long poles from Hollywood on my way. Once on site we devised a plan of action, and got to ordering all the materials we could not get locally.
First was demo time. Always my favorite. We extracted the carpet and scraped the floor. There was a small amount of floor damage from a previous under slab repair job that needed self leveling compound. We removed all the chair rail and base board. We also addressed the UFO lighting in the ceiling that was only controlled by a breaker in the Electrical Panel. Adding a switch for that and also disconnecting the outlets that would be buried behind the future mirror wall.
After covering the existing red and light green wall areas with Kills primer, we spray painted all the room emerald green eggshell. All the gantry wood structure was painted flat black. And base boards semi gloss white.
We did not want to bond the five 8ft x 4ft x 1/4" mirrors to the uneven walls, as well as also wanting to be able to remove them easy if relocation took place. So we battened the wall with 1 x 4 lumber. This also gave us a face to mount the perimeter mirror holding aluminum angle which was also to be the heat sink for the LED tape lighting. This allowed us to drop the mirror panels into the bottom channel and support them with the top channel.
As you can see from the pictures, and considering the roof height was around 21 ft from the floor, we had to create a structure to attach the tops of the poles to. We decided on two 21 ft long 11" tall I Joists to span the shorter of the room's two dimensions. Then crossed them with 2 x 6 lumber. We did not want to cut into the metal stud walls, so we ran a 2 x 4 face board around the perimeter of the room. These would be screwed to each stud with two sheet meal screws, and would support all the cross members. Under the 2 x 4s where the I Joists were supported we added a 4 x 4 king stud structures at each end. We added flat aluminum bar to the underside of all the cross beams for heat sink. Then added LED tape lighting on the underside of the two I Joists. With the ability to add LEDs under the crossing 2 x 6s if deemed necessary.
We started flooring using a marble look vinyl 1ft x 2ft tile. Once we got past where the first two pole locations were going to be, we installed the first two poles to the gantry. We did it like this so we were not running the scissor lift on the vinyl floor. Then we continued the flooring until passing the rear pole locations, and repeated the installation. Then finished the floor. Simple rectangle base board was added to the three walls. They also acted as support for the mirrors, remembering the mirror had to be off the floor to allow for installation of the LED tape.
Next we added blackout film to the glass curtain wall. A nightmare as they were 10ft tall and 4 ft wide. After a good cleaning, the LED neon-like logo sign was installed and wired. Some storage cabinets and desk were assembled and shelving installed. We created a corner changing room using some EMT conduit and pipe wall mounts.
Everything came out as expected although we did have some supply chain issues. Mainly because of the freak winter weather that hit the US west coast this year. As well as coming in on budget (a very tight budget).