studioporn

sorry i've been radio silent the past week. not much to update on the studio proper, but lots of tangentially-related things going on:

the movers moved us into the house yesterday and we're now living here, which means it'll be considerably easier now for me to get more studio work done.

we spent all day today dealing with house wiring stuff. i replaced nearly all of the remaining 2-prong outlets in the house with 3-prong ones (thank god the house is at least new enough to have all grounded wiring). also fixed a couple of switches which had been installed upside down. then it was on to running datacom, since this wiring all has to pass over the studio area and needs to be done before any serious construction happens down there. each room is getting 2 ethernet jacks and a coax jack for cable. we've run 10 cat5e lines and 3 cable lines thusfar, and when all is said and done there'll be about 14 and 5, respectively. all the wiring's running into the laundry room area, where there's an 8U wall rack with 16-port cat5e patch panel, 16-port gigabit switch, and ultimately the router and modem will be down there along with a coax distribution unit. i knew our ceilings were plaster, but i was pleasantly surprised to discover that all of the walls appear to be drywall. this made cutting the holes soooo much easier. the only plaster i had to contend with was the ceilng in the garage, where i had to poke a few holes in to shoot up into the walls above.

carpeting was installed on thursday. one of the main reasons for installing carpeting in the house is to help with the studio soundproofing--carpeting and padding helps reduce things like footfall noise from passing down into the studio, and also helps attenuate studio noises which would otherwise travel up through the floor. we went for density in both the padding and carpeting to help with sound transmission loss. while the 8-lb. padding we got is better in this regard than the standard 6 lb. padding used for residential carpeting, i found some commercial-grade padding after the fact with much higer densities, like 16 or even 22 lbs. while it would have been kinda cool to get something like that, the stuff we got should be more than adequate.

our kitchen is like 95% done now--electricians finished up everything but the lights on thursday, plumber came on friday and did the sink, garbage disposal, dishwasher, and fixed at least one of the problems with the drain pipe going down into the basement. at some point someone drilled holes in the top and bottom of the pipe, presumably to unclog it. they screwed a frankenstein bolt into the top hole and in all honesty it looks like they just shoved a wad of paper into the bottom hole. rob removed this whole stretch of pipe, replaced it with ABS pipe, and added a cleanout we can use for any future clogs. damn older houses not having any cleanouts. he's coming back this week to run the gas line for the stove, at which point we'll have a fully-functional kitchen.

i started framing the studio bathroom, but haven't finished it yet--had to put things on hold while we deal with the kitchen drain stuff, as the bathroom wall is tenatively going to run right next to it and i need to leave that space accessible until everything's fixed. there's still a remaining problem with this drain--there's a small leak right where it goes into the floor. hopefully rob will be able to fix this on tuesday when he comes to do the gas line, then i can permanently attach the wall i've already built and then crank out the other new wall. i had to punt my plans for doing the doorway-at-an-angle design--after running the numbers, i found that this would cause the doorway to run straight through the supply register that's coming down from the ceiling.