Hi there.
My name is Nils with LRN2DIY and today I'll be showing you how to build a riser
with built-in power so that you can add stadium seating to your home theater.
Now, this project involves three main steps. First,
after getting your measurements,
you're going to build a box using some pretty basic construction techniques.
And in that box,
you're going to do a little bit of basic wiring in order to get things ready for
an outlet. Second, we'll carpet the outside of the box,
and then we'll insulate the inside of the box.
And then we'll finish everything off with the third step,
which is to wire it up for the outlet, and then for a plug as an extension.
Now for the first step, we need to start with some measurements.
So in our case here, as you can see, we've got two rows of three.
So I needed to measure exactly what the width and the depth of this would be.
And that's pretty straight forward,
but the trickier part is finding out how high you need your riser to be.
What we want to avoid is making the riser too low so that when you're sitting in
this back row, it cuts off the bottom of the screen.
What I found was easiest was to set up the scenario as realistically as
possible.
If you can have some family members or friends help out by sitting in the front,
then they can put the seats up or down so you can see kind of a more realistic
situation. And then take some books, sit on those books in the back row,
whether you're reclined or sitting up and see what you can see,
you'll then want to get the measurements of how high those books needed to be in
order for you to always be able to see over the front row.
We'll keep the construction of this one pretty simple. As far as the lumber,
you're going to need some 2x8,
2x10 or whatever the dimension is that matches the height that you want this to
be.
Now be sure to bear in mind that lumber dimensions are usually about a half inch
shorter than what their named.
So a two by eight is actually one and a half by seven and a half.
So you'll need to take that into consideration for any math,
for adding up your sides and your ends.
After cutting my two by tens to length for the front and the back,
I made sure to cut the sides minus the three inches that the front and the back
would take up. After cutting my two sides,
I had just enough leftover to serve as a brace for the middle of the box.
I chose just to use some three inch decking screws,
just because I had some extras lying around and didn't want to have to go buy
anything new. And those worked out just fine.
I drove four of those into each of the ends of the sides,
as well as the middle brace.
I highly recommend that you put braces at least every couple of feet,
if not more.
So I did take some two by fours that I had lying around and cut those to length.
And then I use those as braces in between that middle brace and the sides.
This just adds a lot of stability to the flooring that we're going to put on
top. Now, because I had several sheets of OSB lying around, like you see here,
I thought I would build as much of this as I could with the stuff that I already
had on hand and just use up those scraps.
If you're buying some four by eight sheets of OSB,
that'll make the job a little bit easier, and you know,
that most of your cuts will likely be pretty straight from the manufacturer.
Because my scraps were not cut at 90 degrees most of the time,
I decided to just let those overhang a little bit and then I trim those up
afterward. So I kind of just puzzle piece this together as best I could.
I also made sure to fasten this down with multiple screws to get this thing as
sturdy and rock solid as possible. I set my circular saw to its max depth cut.
And then I just rode that blade along the outside to get a nice flush cut of
those OSB pieces, right along the edges of my box.
After finishing off the first layer, I went back and did a second layer,
making sure that I did not put any of the joints in the same location.
If you're going to have to end a piece in the middle somewhere,
make sure to end it over a stud. In my case,
what I did here was mark the center of the stud.
I set my circular saw blade to one half inch depth,
and then I rode along and just cut that off right in the middle.
And that way I could butt my new piece right up on that stud as well.
This ensures that all of the edging of your flooring is supported by 2x material
on all sides. And then you can use screws to Fasten that in. With the box built,
the next step is to get ready for some electrical. In my case,
I just wanted one outlet.
Be sure to pay special attention to where you place the outlet.
I made the mistake of putting mine a couple of inches too far forward.
If I had put it any further forward,
then the framing of my chairs would have covered it up completely.
So it's a good idea to make sure to see exactly where that needs to go before
you start cutting your hole. Now,
I chose to use an oscillating multi-tool to make plunge cuts right through once
I knew where that box needed to be,
but you can also just use a drill and drill a hole and then cut it out with a
jigsaw or even use a circular saw to do this job. Just so you're aware,
there are a couple of types of electrical boxes that you can choose from.
You can go with an existing work box, which is what I'm using here.
And this gives me the option to have these little wings or flaps that pull out,
and those just pull tight against the flooring material. In this case,
with my electrical box in place,
I was able to take about 10 feet of some 14-2 Romex cable and run one end of it
into the electrical box,
and then drill a hole in the side of the riser and run the rest out that way.
With the box built and the electrical started we're ready for step two,
which is carpet. We're now ready to go ahead and put carpet on the riser.
It's up to you if you want to put padding,
I've decided not to put padding on this.
We will put installation inside of it to make sure there's no acoustic
reverberation happening inside there.
But for now we're ready to go ahead and put the carpet on to Fasten this on.
I've got a stapler here and this is just a cheapo Harbor freight stapler running
off of a really tiny, hot dog compressor and running this at about 80 PSI.
And I'm running quarter inch wide staples that are three quarters of an inch
deep. And that should be sufficient to hold this out,
especially where we're going to be putting several staples on here to hold it.
Now with our remnant cut to size, we're ready to start fastening this thing on.
And unfortunately I don't have a carpet kicker, a knee kick.
And so I'm going to have to do my best to try to pull this as taut as I can all
the way through making sure I don't leave any waves or bubbles or spaces in
this. The first thing I'm going to do down here is mark where my outlet is.
I'm going to cut into this. So I'm just cutting that much out,
just a little bit here.
I'm going to pull this corner as tight as I can and do the same thing.
Same thing in the middle. Now for the corners here,
I want to pull these down as tight as I can,
and then staple them as low to the ground,
as low to that base as I can making sure that they're nice and tight.
Since I don't have tack strips. This is kind of my next best thing.
So with my first side done, I can now focus on my first corner,
which is right under here.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut a 45 degree roughly from the actual
corner up here, inside here, right down like this,
and then straighten it out, down towards the bottom of the platform.
And once I have this line cut here,
I'm going to take the side and wrap it up and over and fit in that forty-five in
that line,
and butt them up against each other and try to get a nice tight fit so that you
can't see the seam.
There we go. Now our goal
is to match that piece we just cut.
I can cut this piece off. We're going to see if we tuck,
how that looks.
And you end up with a pretty nice seam and your corner is nice and tight.
And there's nothing in the way there, which is awesome.
From here we're just going to wrap around and do the whole thing on the rest of
it. And then we'll do the electrical for the outlet as soon as we're done.
Next up, we're going to go ahead and insulate the inside of this box.
And I've got some extra R19 insulation here that I had from when I finished the
basement. So I'm just going to use that. It doesn't have to be perfect.
We're just trying to prevent a bunch of sound from rattling around inside here.
Pretty easy stuff,
that just took me about three minutes to do so this is good to go and I'm going
to do my wiring and we'll be all set. Now,
if you enjoy this type of content and find it helpful and want to support the
channel,
you can do that by clicking on the Patrion link in the description below,
or you can join and become a member of this channel and whether you choose to
donate or not, we're glad you're here. So thanks for watching.
Okay, so now it's time to go ahead and wire up our outlet into the riser.
The first thing we're going to need to do is strip off the sheathing and then
I'm going to strip our neutral
on our line. Okay? So I've got all three exposed. Black goes to brass.
So I like to take some needle,
nose pliers and make a little hook.
And ideally you want to have that hook going in the same direction that you
twist.
So having it go around clockwise and that way,
when you tighten this up, it just tightens itself on there.
It doesn't matter which screw you put it on.
They're both connected and then white to silver,
and then lastly our ground.
So that's all wired up. That's all there is to it. Okay.
That's plenty. Got myself an unbreakable nylon plate here.
Okay, here we go. Next on the other end,
we're going to do almost the same thing,
except for I've purchased a simple little plug here. So inside,
we've got a brass screw, a silver screw and a ground screw,
just like on the outlet itself.
We're going to really do the exact same thing that we just did this time.
We're going to peel off very little because if you look at it,
we actually don't need a whole lot more than what's peeled off now. And again,
we'll make some hooks on all three.
The last thing to worry about here is the screw that closes.
This is right here where the wire would go.
So you can either go around it like this,
or you can open these up a little bit more and, thread those around.
Look at that. Okay. Nice and tight.
And now we've got a good plug end with the ground and our three-prong
is ready to go. So I've gone ahead and plugged this in on the other end here.
And I've got an outlet tester here. We'll just make sure everything looks good.
There we go. So when these two lights are lit up and this one is not,
that means we have full connectivity and everything's looking good.
Now because you're watching this, I'm pretty sure you're into home theaters.
So I've got a whole playlist that you can check out right here where you can
learn all about how I built this home theater from scratch.
Some of the components that we use in here,
how I built the screen and lots of other videos. So feel free to check that out.
I'm Nils with LRN2DIY. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you on the next one.