GIK Clouds - my installation

[joey_v]

So after some time playing with my system, I realized that I needed to treat the ceiling. After doing some calculations, we confirmed that absorption was the way to go as there was not enough distance from ear to panel to warrant diffusion.

The problem was, my ceiling is inclined and I needed the panels to be nice and parallel to the floor, which mean I needed to hang them from the ceiling via chain so that the length would be customizable.

I must say that my OCD got the best of me, because there was really no tutorial on how to hang clouds, I did significant pre-planning, as I could not afford to screw up the installation and have numerous large drill-holes in my ceiling... my wife would kill me. I also knew that because I needed atleast 6 panels hung (242 x 6), I needed to be very precise with my install.

So I had several questions in mind:
1. What kind of installation hardware would I need? GIK has a cloud install kit, but it would leave my clouds at an angle because of the slope of the ceiling and that's not what I wanted.
2. After realizing I needed some sort of a hook that would suspend the panels from the ceiling, I realized that I would need to suspend the panels from dry wall rather than ceiling rafters.... I found out when marking my ceiling for the rafters that my rafters were off set and were not centered... which meant needed something sturdy to hang from the drywall. I figured that since the panels were somewhere around the 10lb mark, it would probably not be great to use simple drywall anchors...so I had to figure out some other way.

So I figured, the best way to do this was to use toggle bolts as they have the strongest drywall anchoring capabilities, I watched numerous youtube videos comparing this to other anchors (yes, there are videos that compare drywall hangers!).

Then I had to find hooks that would somehow install into the toggle bolts, which was not particularly easy to do at my local LOWES as no one there was any help.... luckily I found the right combo.

Then I decided that apparently I'd have to drill a 5/8" hole into the wall, well that would look really ugly and messy with the hooks dangling through, so I bought some washers to clean the look.

Preplanning took me nearly 4 months as little details were annoying since I'm OCD, such as finding the right hardware, and even when I found the correct hardware, I would deplete the entire stash at Lowes each time I went and would have to come back the week after for the remaining stash, I did this 3x.

OK, so we figured out how to hang the clouds.... the next issue was - how to determine where to hang them.