Process of Building the Cigar Room

Planning

The first stage of building the cigar room was planning. Once I determined the size of the cigar room, I was able to start researching exhaust fans and the appropriate sizing for the ducting. Both of these choices had significant impacts because of the space both need. Since the exhaust fan wasn't going to fit overhead in the room I had to plan where that was going to go and make sure I had enough space to get the 8"x12" ducting out of the room and eventually out of the house. I was able to draw up all of the plans for the basement by hand and on my computer once I had all of the overall measurements made.

Framing

The next stage in the process was framing up the entire basement. Obviously if you are converting an existing room into a cigar room this won't be necessary. Although I have to say this made my life a lot easier since it was a piece of cake to run ducting, electrical, speaker wire, etc., when the dry wall wasn't in the way. We did the majority of work for the project in between the framing stage and the dry wall stage.

Exhaust fans and ducting

We spent a good week on mounting the exhaust fan and running the ducting. Since the ducting isn't flexible (I know they make flexible ducting, but it wouldn't have worked for this application) we had to do a lot of duct cutting and connecting to get it to go where we needed it. I had to have a few pieces of the duct work specialty made since not all of the parts we needed were available prefabricated.

It's important to make sure you have a back draft damper on the exhaust fan hood and a screen on the fresh air intake hood that go to the outside of the house. Both of these will help prevent things from the outside such as rain and insects from getting in the ducting.

Everything else in between

The next steps were dry wall, mudding, priming, painting, and trim. I'll spare the details on those since I'm not trying to write a guide for finishing an entire basement.

Registers and vents

After the dry wall was in place we put the overhead vent grille in and cut away and installed the registers for the HVAC and fresh air intake. The HVAC register was a standard 10"x6". The fresh air intake register was slightly larger, 14"x6", since it's ducting was 8" round.

Connecting the controls

With these parts in place we did the final electrical connections for the variable speed exhaust fan controls and electronic duct dampers. As shown in the About The Room section, all of the controls for the room are located on the wall when you open the door. We also went through at this part of the process and installed the speakers into the wall and connected them up to the speak volume level control on the wall.

Sealing the room

The next step was sealing the room to make sure smoke never leaves to any other part of the house. We installed the cigar room window and door. We then put a flexible door jam beneath the door and installed a weather guard all around the door way. Since the rest of the room from top to bottom was heavily insulated and the the walls and ceilings had no exit points for smoke, the room was pretty well sealed. The end result is you can smoke all day long in the room and never detect even the slightest bit of odor anywhere else in the house. I've been told the cigar room is wife proof, even though I don't have a wife to yell at me.

After all of this was done we installed the hardwood flooring and did minor touch-ups for the project. The hardwood flooring (or tile) is a must in my opinion because it doesn't retain the odor of smoke and is very easy to clean if you accidentally ash anywhere.

Start enjoying some smokes

In actuality the room itself was very easy to put together because of the fact that most of the work was done before dry wall ever went up. If you decide to do a similar project to a pre-existing room, you'll need to be prepared to rip out some parts of walls I'm sure to get everything run.

I had a blast doing the project. If you run into any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me and ask something. There are lots of photos available in the photo gallery.