studioporn

after getting the whole-house dehumidifier installed last year, i've been kind of dragging my ass on buying/installing a whole-house humidifier. i finally bought one about a month ago but didn't get around to installing it until this past week when temperatures dropped and the humidity in the studio got as low as 26% (ack!).

the humidifier i got isn't anything terribly special...just one of those whole-house drum humidifiers you can pick up at home depot. the unit itself is pretty decent, but it was a pain in the ass to install and the whole process was kind of kludgy. it took a little while for it to start working its magic, but after about 3 days the humidity levels are pretty stably about 10% higher throughout the house. i still need to tweak things to get the studio a few % points higher, but overall things are looking good.

my goal is to have the humidity in the house be between 40-50% year round. for the studio this is mainly to help wood instruments behave well, but i also want the humidity controlled in the rest of the house for comfort/health reasons. nothing i hate more than waking up in the middle of the night in the winter feeling like every drop of moisture has been sucked out of me.

when springtime rolls around i'm going to confront the dehumidifier situation again. i'm still really pissed at the way they installed this thing and i believe it's running very inefficiently as a result. in places with both heating and air conditioning, you're always supposed to do any dehumidification before the evaporator coil and any humidification after the furnace. the reason for doing humidification after the furnace is that the increased temperature enables the air to hold more moisture, and the very process of passing air through the furnace drops the relative humidity significantly.

as for dehumidifying before the evaporator coil, i've learned the hard way why this is important. dehumidifiers are self-contained refrigeration cycles--air passes over an evaporator coil where it is cooled significantly, which causes excess moisture to condense and get drained out. then it passes through a condensor coil, which causes it to heat back up. i discovered this summer that the air coming out of our dehumidifier is actually several degrees warmer than the air going in, and since the output of the dehumidifier was tapped into the supply line, that warmer air was just circulating through the house and making the a/c work harder. when spring comes around i'm going to switch it over to the return so that all of the output from the dehumidifier passes through the a/c evaporator coil before going anywhere else. that should also provide better dispersion of the dehumidified air throughout the house--in the current set up, because of where the dehumidifier is tapped into the supply trunk, one end of the house and part of the studio barely get any direct delivery of dehumidified air.

Posted by Len at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

finally installed the laminate flooring this weekend. it looks awesome--really adds a lot of warmth to the room:

overall it was pretty easy to install. the only tricky part was the dealing with all the weird wall angles. it was sometimes difficult to accurately measure the angle and transfer it to the piece i was cutting--a couple of pieces i had to do sort of by trial and error and mess up a few cuts until i got it right.

it's amazing how much of a difference the flooring made. it completely changes the vibe of the room and brightens it up a lot since i no longer have that dismal, gray, concrete slab thing going on.

Posted by Len at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i finished building the helmholtz resonator tonight. here are some photos of the process. first i built the frame out of 2x4s, then i put up some 1x2's on either side of the middle stud and secured straps at 2" deep to hold the insulation in place. then i cut the rigid insulation and put it in place. next came the fabric, which is there for no other purpose than to make the gaps between the slats look nice, and that's partly why the installation is so sloppy (the other reason is i was lacking a decent means of cutting this fabric, which is a pain to cut insofar as fabrics go). finally, i put the slats up after staining them...

the left-hand side of the resonator was an absolute bitch to do, owing to the really tight angle (24 degress on the inside, which meant having to cut everything at its complement of 66 degrees). since things that are capable of cutting/ripping at that angle are few and far between, i had to get creative. mostly it involved rotating the wood 90 degrees before putting it in the pathway of the saw. this sounds easy enough on paper, until you find yourself having to do things like stand a 3-foot piece of wood vertical and pass it along a table saw, or cut pretty much diagonally through a 2x4, which a standard 10" saw can't do. for the frame i had to do the rip cut using the band saw instead. which, as usual, came out very sloppy and i had to go back and plane the hell out of it. i finally got tired of planing and said, "fuck it, it's good enough."

this is what the angle cuts look like on the slats:

i had to pick up a tenoning jig so that i could secure the pieces vertically to run over the table saw. yet another semi-expensive tool that i wsh i didn't have to buy, but it did do an awesome job and if i ever do use it for making tenon joints in woodworking, it has all sorts of knobs and stuff to tweak it out the wazoo.

haven't done another round of room analysis yet, but i do know already that it is not helping with the ringing at 320Hz, or at least not significantly. after walking all around the room and singing that pitch, it sounds like there's only one particular area in the room where the sound energy at that frequency is disproportionately high, so i'm going to tackle the problem by building a smaller, wall-mount helmoltz to go on the wall in the middle of that area.

Posted by Len at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i set up a bare-bones recording setup so we can get moving on recording the rest of christa's songs while i continue building the studio. setup consists of a mic, pre, compressor, small mixer, computer audio interface, and monitors. here's a pic i snapped of the setup:

christa came over this afternoon and we laid down vox for a tune whose guitar part we recorded about a year ago. this was my first chance to do a serious recording in the room as well as being able to give my new great river preamp and RME audio interface a whirl.

the good:
i love the hardware and software interfaces for the RME stuff. they're much easier to work with than my delta 1010's. all the important stuff on the box (word clock, sync source, -10dBV/+4dBu switching, etc.) is accessible on the front panel. the software seems very well suited to handling multiple interfaces, and it's much nicer being able to return to hardware that'll let me have up to 3 interfaces per card rather than having to deal with the one-card-per-interface crap. the clip lights on the box are dope, especially since they kick in a few dB below 0 dBFS, allowing me time to quickly adjust levels before ruining an otherwise good take with digital clipping. other converters i've used either don't have any level lights on the box or the clip lights are of the "if you're seeing this, you're hosed" variety. oh, and of course the converters sound quite nice and are a welcome change from the slightly-harsher-sounding deltas.

the great river pre is...well...great. lots of headroom. christa's a very dynamic singer, and it was able to handle her full dynamic range without me having to be constantly riding the gain or really holding it back. the 6-segment level indicators are a great feature. the sound is great and very easy to work with, at least for vocals--haven't tried anything else yet.

while i was setting things up i was listening to a bunch of mixes, both my own and those on commercial cd's. i'm amazed at the bass response in the room. the bass traps have given an extremely tight and clear low end. i heard some things in my own mixes that i had never heard before and, remembering some of the challenges i had when mixing the low end on those songs in my old place, i had a few "ahhhh! so that's what i wasn't able to hear accurately" moments.

working on actual music in that room after spending a year doing almost nothing but construction work in that space was a very surreal experience. this is going to sound kinda hokey, but instead of having a sort of "i'm sitting here and here's a desk and there's a person over there singing" sense of distinction, i felt myself and everything around me to be more...idunno...liquid, i guess? the room, the equipment, the singing, me...it all just kind of fused together. it's weird having a space of my own where i don't feel like the room is the enemy of the sound. here the room really embraces the sound.

the bad:
those frequency response spikes in the room around 200-350Hz are quite noticeable--they show up when recording and are exacerbated on playback. i started building a helmholtz resonator yesterday but haven't finished it yet. i really hope that will help tame those frequencies, as that will be critical to getting good recordings and good monitoring.

the console desk sits about 6" too high for my liking. taking the casters off will help at least somewhat, but it still won't leave me at an optimal vantage point once i install the console. and i'm definitely going to have to remove those rack shelves along the very top and knock the overall height down to provide a single surface on which to place both of my computer monitors and aux monitor speakers.

i'm not overly thrilled with the speaker stands i got last week. the main reason i got them was so that i could set them slightly higher than 48" and then angle them down towards me with MoPADs. however, they get really wobbly under the weight of my mackies. the connection between the stand and the bass isn't quite what i would call strong. i need to play around with them for a bit in the coming days and see if i can make them more sturdier. once i get the desk height down i'll also be able to drop the monitor height several inches, which should help at least somewhat.

so overall i'm quite pleased so far, although there is still much much work left to be done.

Posted by Len at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

after a bunch of searching, i've settled upon the following lights for the ceiling:

i think they look really dope, plus they're really slim--only 3.5" deep.

i'm also going to install 4 wall uplights throughout the room to help illuminate the ceiling and provide more general illuminance. choosing these is a bit trickier, seeing as how most wall lights are designed to be hard-wired, but i never had the walls wired for lighting, only the ceiling. i've read that at least some types of lighting can be converted from hard-wired to plug with the use of these kits you can buy at home depot and lowes. i'm gonna go check those out tomorrow and see if they'll work.

related to this, over the weekend i found a cool lighting estimator page from GE. actually, i found that page several months ago, but at the time wasn't sure how to use it since i wasn't versed in things like footcandles. but thanks to an email message from tommy last week with a bunch of useful lighting info, i got on the right track and rediscovered that page. the original, less-technical web page i found on this topic suggested an amount of lighting that was about half what GE's estimator says. which very conveniently matches up with my subjective observation that the room is only about half as bright as it should be.

i should clarify in all this talk about lighting that the amount of lighting for any given session will be completely flexible; the ceiling lights will be on a dimmer, and the wall lights will be individually switchable. i also have a floor torchiere i'll be putting over by the console.

Posted by Len at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i did a bunch more measurements today after installing the bass traps. below are the waterfall plots from 7 different mic locations in the room. here are the results from the original analaysis for comparison. frequency and dB ranges are the same, but be aware that the time scale is different. the traps have significantly decreased the reverb time of the room and brought it more in line with what would be appropriate for that size room. so the previous time scale went from 0-1000ms while the new one goes from 0-500ms.

the area around 60-70hz (particularly right around 60hz) has been MASSIVELY improved by the traps. the region just above 300Hz no longer rings out like it used to, but it could still stand to be tamed a bit with a helmholtz on the wall. there are still dips leading up to 100Hz, but they're not as bad as before. don't know what's up with the spikes @50hz. i need to look into both of those some more.

overall i'm extremely happy with what i'm seeing.

Posted by Len at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

so the electricians have done nearly all of the work in the studio. the outlets are all wired and the lights are all in. all that remains to be done is to install the dimmers. i had to order some special dimmers that won't generate any interference when used. i ended up going with the lutron nova line of dimmers, which is what other studio peeps have been using when they don't want to go all hard core with a variac transformer. unfortunately, the dimmers are on backorder and i don't know yet when they're expected in. and i've learned this week that for some reason electricians have a real aversion to the color black for plugs and switches. jerry and dave tried repeatedly to talk me out of using black plugs and to use dark brown instead, but i stood my ground. and i'm glad i did, because black plugs in metal boxes with metal face plates is HAWT.

the booth sconces look fucking awesome:

the lights in the main room are a different story. the lighting is too directional, leading to problems with shadows and being blinded from intense brightness if you happen to be standing in the wrong place. the fixtures are also too domineering. when you walk into the room, your attention is pulled right towards them, and not in a good way. and overall, even though it's 800W of lighting total, it's still very dark in the room. michelle and i are going to spend some time this weekend exploring other lighting options. bah. i thought i was *finally* done with this crap. oh well, these things happen, no biggie.

in other electricity-gone-bad news, i received the RME PCI card today. it's actually a main card and a daughtercard, and the person i bought it from decided to put both cards in the same static bag when packing the box. this is generally a bad idea, and the damage the main card received as a result speaks to that. check out the damage it sustained.

Posted by Len at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

no, not the indie rock band, but the bass trap of the same name where you pile a corner from floor to ceiling with wedges of rigid insulation in order to smooth out a room's bass response. while disco was over this week cutting the insulation, i was building the frames for the two traps. here's how one of them looks (sorry for the shitty quality):

notice the access panel. in retrospect, i really should have put that panel somewhere else, but at the time it didn't seem like it would be a big issue to put it there. no biggie, i just had to make sure the trap dimensions were such that it completely covers the panel.

next came stacking all the wedges inside the frame:

note that the bottom 10 or so wedges are in two pieces. this is so if i ever have to get into that panel i can just pull out the small pieces in front of the panel and pop a short 2x4 or something in the corner to keep the pieces above propped up while i go into the wall.

here's how the wall looks with both traps installed. the pieces that disco cut are on the left. the pieces that i cut are on the right. you can kind of tell that my frame of mind was, "i don't care how these look, i just want to cut them as quickly as i possibly can").

eventually these bad boys will be covered in black fabric so they look all sleek and stuff. but the next step is to do another round of room analysis to see how much these have helped the low-frequency response problems.

Posted by Len at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

lately i've been staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on the studio. but since the electricians are coming a little after 8, i figured i may as well just stay up all night and plow through a bunch of stuff.

disco came over tonight to help building the bass traps. he spent most of the evening cutting out wedge-shaped pieces of rigid insulation while i started building the frames. i'll try to have pix up tomorrow so everyone can see how i'm building them.

i built a new access panel to replace the one i messed up over the weekend. overall it turned out ok, but i'm still not thrilled with the way it's engaging the seal when closed. i made it 2" thick this time around instead of 2 1/4", which helped a bit, but i still can't get the panel to go flush with the jamb. i suspect i'll have to go back to my original plan of angling in the door edges so it tucks into the seal better. i had disco crawl into the access panel and then i closed it behind him and had him check for any light seepage. everything checked out there, but i'm still hearing a little more sound transmission through the panel than i'd like. i need to experiment with a few things to see if i can improve it. it's not like horrible or anything right now, i just think i could do better.

i'm almost done building the wooden boxes to encapsulate the lighting junction boxes and make the lighting assemblies look all nice. i just need to cut out the holes for the junction boxes and do a little more gluing and sanding and stuff and then they'll be ready to be painted.

on the mudding/taping front, everything is taped now. well, save for the outside corner on the iso booth bulkhead, but we won't talk about that. i'm typing this up while i wait for the most recent mud coat in the vox booth to dry so i can slap on another coat.

on the gear front, i purchased the PCI card for the RME audio interface a few mins ago. i'd been looking on ebay for the past week but wasn't turning up much, so i decided to just give up and buy a new one from somewhere. i found a place that was selling them for $570, which is about $30 below the average. just as i was getting ready to place the order, i decided to check ebay one last time just for the hell of it. i'm glad i did--i found someone had put one up with a buy-it-now of $340 just a few hours ago. needless to say, i snatched that little bugger right up.

i talked with dave at work today about how one might go about building the metal frame to hold the absorption cloud above the mix area. he suggested i get a machine shop to fabricate the frame for me out of welded aluminum. i'm now completely convinced that this is the right way to do it and will have the most professional-looking finish. only downside is i'm probably looking at around $100-150 for materials and then anywhere from $100-200 for the labor, depending on some of the joint particulars. i'm gonna try and get an estimate this week or next.

man, even after 3 energy drinks i still feel like crashing. i'm gettin old. can't handle these all-nighters like i used to.

Posted by Len at 04:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

mudding and taping in the booths is very far along. but i've been doing it in between other tasks, so it'll probably be another couple of days before it's completed.

electricians come on tuesday to do the first round of wiring stuff up. all lighting has been purchased, although they won't be hooked up in the first round. more on that later.

met with michelle today to finalize remaining color choice stuff and discuss other design things. all fabric colors for the acoustic treatments have been finalized. capeting will be picked out tuesday night. i've narrowed the door jamb stain down to 2 choices.

framing for the bass traps has started. disco's coming over tomorrow night to help cut all the insulation for the traps while i finish the construction/installation of the frames. i'll also be making a new access panel in the main room due to the aforementioned goofup when cutting it.

as soon as we finalize a stain color for the door jambs, i'm going to start staining them and move on to installing the stops and seals and all that fun business.

sometime next week i will put in a *very* minimal recording setup down in the studio to begin finishing up recording for christa's cd. this will be an exciting opportunity to get a feel for how the room sounds for a real session.

Posted by Len at 03:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the corner bass traps in the mix area are such that one of them is going to completely cover the access panel in the wall. this means that before i can get moving with those i first need to complete the panel assembly. this is basically a small door but without hinges and made out of plywood, so it was a good thing for me to practice on in preparation for doing the real doors.

first i had to create the jamb in the opening and seal it with acoustic caulk:

next came the panel. i took 3 pieces of 3/4" plywood and glued them together. i had to make it this thick since plywood isn't as dense as drywall and i wanted to make sure i have a mass in that space comparable to 2 layers of 5/8" drywall.

the rubber seal that goes around the doorway is kind of a weird shape. the longer side of the "V" shape gets recessed in the door stop...

here's the door stop ripped to create a cavity for the seal. note to self: rip fence at 3/8", blade at 22.5 deg.

next i cut the stops for each side and mounted on the jamb:

and finally i glued the seal in. they come all coiled up, so it was a real bitch getting the pieces to stay in place until the glue started to set--they kept curling and popping back out of the stop. i eventually managed to get them to stay put just long enough for me to shove the panel in the opening, prop a concrete block up against it, and call it a night.

overall things came out ok. in the future, i need to do a better job on the carpentry of the stops--one corner came up a hair too shy. i also need to find a better way to get the gaskets to stay in place, as well as doing a better job with the corners--i kind of cut them haphazardly and sort of eyeballed the angle. dumb idea.

my initial tests indicated that the seal could be compressed up to about 3/8" thick, so i set the stop back a distance of the panel thickness + 3/8. after everything was in place, i found that under normal circumstances the seal won't actually compress that much and i should have recessed it another 1/8-1/4" to compensate, as the panel won't go flush with the jamb. this morning i had the bright idea to knock off the inside edges of the panel a bit, just enough to allow the panel to fit all the way in but still fit snugly in the seal. but in my haste i didn't double-check where i had the rip fence set and midway through the cut i realized i was ripping too deep into the panel and now it fits too loosely inside the seal. so it looks like i'll be making me another panel today. fortunately, they're relatively easy to make.

Posted by Len at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i spent the evening taping all the corners in the iso booth. goddamn there are a lot of corners for such a tiny room, what with the bulkhead and all. on the one hand, mudding and taping is horrible, tedious, monotonous, not very rewarding, emboldening to terrorists, harmful to children, and loaded with transfats. on the other hand, i find it has a certain flow and i can achieve a kind of zen-like state while doing it, which enables me to zone out and plow through stuff without even realizing how much time has passed. i'm probably the only person on the planet who enjoys finishing drywall way more than actually putting the drywall up. the initial taping part isn't as great, but i find doing the subsequent layers almost, dare i say, relaxing. my finishing skillz aren't yet in the "mad" category, but i'm definitely getting better.

speaking of which, when i finished the drywall in the main room, by far the worst job i did was on corners. i was using regular drywall tape to do them, but due to a combination of my corner-taping inexperience and the funky 1/4" gaps at all the corners with the caulk and stuff, i had the worst time getting a nice, crisp, straight line along the corners, and we had to do a lot of trickery during the room painting in order to compensate for the unevenness. this time around i wanted to do a better job, so i decided to ditch the drywall tape for the corners and use strait-flex instead for all the inside corners. this stuff is much stiffer than tape, which helps produce some really straight corners. it's also amazingly easy to work with and i'm very pleased with the way the corners turned out, which is a pleasantly different experience from the other corner product i'm using.

for the one outside corner in the main room and for the bulkhead outside corners, i'm using a different product called ultraflex, which is much wider and better able to span outside corners involving 5/8" dyrwall with gaps and all that fun stuff. however, it's also quite thick and just a little too stiff, even for outside corner material. my general approach to putting the intial mud layer down for taping is to apply it very liberally to make sure i have full coverage and then squeeze all the excess out by dragging a taping knife very tightly along the tape after applying it. however, the ultraflex is so stiff that if you put down too much of a mud bed, it's really difficult to squeeze out all the excess and it ends up feeling really lumpy. i spent a fair amount of time trying to work just the one bulkhead corner so that it didn't feel quite so much like...like....idunno, roseanne barr's thighs or something...when you run your finger along it.

in other news, i ordered a shitload more rigid insulation today so that i can build a couple of superchunk corner traps in the mix area. it's only been in the past week or so that i've found out about these things, and even though they're a bit costlier than other DIY corner treatments, it sounds like the extra dough is worth it.

Posted by Len at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

first 2 room analyses didn't turn up as much as i had hoped. combination of the software being good in the acoustics department but really bad in the software department, and getting my reference mic with the calibration info on a 3.5" floppy. it's bad enough these days when something comes on a floppy, but even worse when the metal slider is broken. so i had to rip off the slider and try on a few machines before i finally got stacey's old laptop to read the files off of it.

last night i stumbled across a free java app called Room EQ Wizard which has some really nice features and is really easy to use. below are some graphs of measurements i took in the room. there was a speaker near one end of the room doing a log sweep, and in each test i moved the mic to a different location in the room and took a reading. the graphs you see show frequency vs. amplitude vs. time; in other words, they're a very good way to visualize the overall frequency response as well as the reverberation response of the room:

the goal of a well-tuned room is to have a nice, smooth reverberation. overall i'm in the right ballpark, but there are some things that stand out in these graphs:

1. the area around 60Hz going up towards 70Hz is resonating like crazy. long after everything else has decayed, that frequency is still going strong. this will most likely need to be addressed through the use of bass traps in the corners (that's where low-frequency energy is the strongest--particularly in trihedrals, where wall corners meet up with the floor or ceiling)


2. there is also a slightly less intense, but still noticeable, spike right around 300Hz. i will probably tackle this with one or more helmholtz resonators. the convenient thing here is that 300Hz is also the area where kick drums can get boomy-sounding, so in drum rooms and other spaces where drums will be regularly recorded, it's recommended that this frequency be absorbed anyway, even if there aren't any problems there with the room itself.


3. there's a strange dip centered roughly around 90Hz and spanning as much as an octave or so depending on the position in the room. i don't yet fully understand the data here--i consistently see this behavior regardless of speaker or mic position, and have verified the data with 2 separate analysis programs and separate sets of readings. before finalizing room treatment plans, i need to do some more research to better help me interpret this particular data point.


4. the low mids as a whole could probably benefit from a little absorption. up to about 400Hz there are some peaks that jump out a little more than they should.

the really nice thing about this data is that it confirms what my ears have been hearing, which is a relatively decent reverberation save for some beefiness in the lows and low mids.

Posted by Len at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

this weekend i spent a considerable amount of time planning out how everything is going to be wired together once i start putting gear into the studio. in the past i was very haphazard with my wiring and ended up with lots of half-implemented and unintuitive signal flow. not to mention the lack of attention to the physical running of the wires, which led to some nice copper-and-rubber spaghetti all over the floor. i've decided that this time i'm going to think everything through before connecting a single wire.

my primary goal is flexibility--i want to be able to connect any mic to any preamp to any channel to any effect to any output. i also want to have a nice, intuitive setup. like a rack of patchbays with a nice top-down flow. and when it comes to hooking everything up, i want to have a very clean, streamlined flow of wires and do a better job than i have in the past with strain relief and the like.

anyway, if you want to see what i have in mind for the signal-routing aspects, click on the image below.

Posted by Len at 01:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

just a few minutes ago i finished putting up the final piece of drywall inside the studio. this means i can finally start thinking about life beyond drywall. i've been putting this shit up on and off for nearly 4 months now, and i was beginning to think i'd never actually get to this point. as i was putting sheets up tonight, i began to do some calibrations and found that each sheet of drywall was taking me on average 1 hour to do. this includes measuring, cutting, loading onto the lift, rasping down edges that might be too long, poking holes for electrical and other stuff, chalking lines, screwing, and doing the foam-and-caulk stuff at each corner. there are somewhere on the order of 120 pieces of drywall in that room, so i've spent somewhere around that many hours just hanging drywall. and then on top of that there's the final layer of foam and caulk and mudding and taping and all that fun stuff. man, drywalling is a bitch.

anyway, i'm going to do some cleaning up tomorrow, after which i'll take some photos of the vox booth and iso booth.

Posted by Len at 02:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

last night we got the rest of the second wall layer in the iso booth up. tonight i hauled ass and got all the first ceiling layer up in there and caulked and mudded everything. tomorrow night i'm going to do the same for the second layer. and then i am going to consume massive amounts of alcohol to celebrate finally getting every last piece of drywall up in the studio. i still won't be completely done with drywall--i still need to mud and tape everything, not to mention putting up more pieces elsewhere in the basement--but just getting all the pieces up in the studio is a monster accomplishment.

in other news, i bought all the laminate flooring today and ordered all the wiring panels and connectors and stuff for the audio wiring. and now that the drywall is all but done, i'll be contacting the electricians tomorrow to schedule them to come out and hook up all the electrical outlets in the rooms.

Posted by Len at 03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i've been really dragging my ass on the remaining critical drywall work, so i dragged myself out to monroeville today to rent a drywall lift. again. i put up the last pain-in-the-ass piece of drywall up in the vox booth today. the room and the bulkhead are both funky shapes, which makes for a really funky shape for the bulkhead ceiling--no right angles or parallel surfaces at all. these things are such a nightmare to measure, cut, and get into position. but i don't care anymore because it's up, and after putting up two more small pieces the vox booth is completely drywalled now. woohoo!

i'm going to turn my attention next to finishing up the drywall in the other booth. thankfully, the shapes in there aren't nearly as bizarre, so it should go at least relatively quickly. man, i am so sick of drywall. doing normal rooms isn't so bad, but for studio stuff it's soooooo damn tedious with the layers and the caulking and the weird angles and shit. the worst part is, even when i finish the other booth, i still won't be done with the drywall--i'll have to come back at some point and do parts of the garage, lounge, and bathroom. but i'm going to defer those as long as i possibly can because i'm tired of being covered in white powder 24/7.

i spent friday and yesterday working on door tweaks and putting foam and caulk in the gaps between the jambs and the drywall.

this week i hope to buy all the laminate flooring as well as order all the boxes and connectors and stuff for the audio wiring. i'm also going to try and start on the window assemblies and do more door work in between drywalling. did i mention i'm sick of drywall?

Posted by Len at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i got 2 more doors hung this week, one for each of the booths:

i'm slowly getting better at my hanging skills. the last jamb i put up was almost entirely square and for the first time i didn't have to do any shaving along any of the door edges to make it fit.

there's still a lot of work to be done on these doors, though--i still have to install the stops and foam gaskets, as well as settling on a door-closing solution. oh yeah....and i still have to break off all the protruding shims and fill in the jamb perimeter with acoustic caulk.

window stuff will have to start happening soon, so i've begun tracking down the various pieces i need for the window assemblies. looks like the only really tricky thing for me to track down will be the neoprene to hold the glass tightly in place, and i found some leads on that front last night.

Posted by Len at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

painting was finished last night. disco came over tonight to help me run the rest of the cabling, make a pass at cleaning up and organizing the mess that was the basement, and take some photos of the finish paint job in the main room.

i've included some of the better photos below. we still don't have the lighting fixtures installed, so getting good lighting is still a bit tricky, especially for photography. but these should at least give you a general idea of how the paint looks. it's hard to see some of the detail on the gold-ish colored walls, so disco took a few close-ups to better show the funky lines and patterns and stuff.

Posted by Len at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

several people have asked for more pictures of the painting and other progress. i plan to take a bunch of photos as soon as the painting is done in the main room, which should happen by about monday. michelle started working on the last 2 walls today, and it'll take 3 separate coats of paint. each of which requires 4+ hours to dry, so it'll be spread out over at least 3 days. the paint is coming out really well. only thing is, metallic paints bring out every slightest imperfection in the drywall and mud, so before she started painting this morning i went through every bit of those two walls with a flashlight at an oblique angle to find any dings, dips, bulges, or other imperfections, and fix them up. it was tedious work, but it'll be worth it.

mic and preamp for the room analysis software arrived today. now i have everything i need to begin analyzing the room once the construction is done.

set up the table saw last night, but i haven't had a chance to use it yet. because i'm a moron. only i can cut myself on a table saw, not once but twice, and quite seriously at that, before the thing has even been plugged in or been given a blade. the first time i cut myself was while trying to remove the styrofoam block holding the motor assembly in place. yes, i cut myself while removing styrofoam. how? i have no clue. then after i attached the rip fence i was gliding it back and forth to make sure it moved straight and smoothly and all, and in the process i accidentally rammed my finger pretty hard into a sharp metal piece that was jutting out of the scale adjuster. the metal ended up sliding under my fingernail and made quite a mess. fortunately all i needed were some band aids, although it's still really sore today. especially when i type. which i'm going to stop doing now.

Posted by Len at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i have decided that i loathe my table saw. now that i'm working on some things that require very accurate cuts (like for the boxes that will hide the lights' junction boxes), and my crappy ryobi is failing miserably. the fence is wobbly, the miter gauge is wobbly, part of the crappy tabletop plastic cracked, there's very little table space in front of the blade, and so on and so on.

i have like 3 ridgid saws that i've been extremely happy with, so even though their table saws are a good bit more expensive than my ryobi, my experience with their other stuff says it's worth every penny. i was very tempted to get their stationary table saw, but it's just a bit more than i can afford right now. goddamn is it nice though. the rip fence is like buttah. i decided to go with the smaller portable table saw instead. a fair bit less table space, but still more than the ryobi and plenty enough for my needs. the rip fence and miter gauges are so much more reliable than what i have now, which are my biggest problems with the ryobi. i went back to home depot this evening to buy it, but it was way up on a shelf and they apparently didn't have any licensed forklift operators in the store. so i'll just go back tomorrow.

the green walls are all finished now. man they look awesome. i will put up pictures soon--i just need to get the right lighting in there first. the yellow/gold walls will be started in the next day or two.

disco came over tonight to help me run the mic and midi cabling. took longer than i thought, but we got quite a bit done. 2 of the 3 panels are completely wired up now and we're going to finish the last one tomorrow night.

Posted by Len at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

friday's ceiling painting turned out to be another suboptimal day. michelle just couldn't get the metallic paint to come out smooth and even. after much research, we found out that most metallic paint applications require at least 3 coats, so we went ahead with another try. also, we learned that there's a roller made specifically for applying metallic paints, so we got some of those and things came out great. the ceiling looks fucking awesome now.

tommy came over to help with drywall today, and we managed to get another two pain-in-the-ass pieces up. the vocal booth is now 2 pieces short of drywall completion. woohoo!

8-channel mic snakes and midi cable should be here tomorrow. i also ordered a copy of ETF and the corresponding reference mic and preamp for doing room analysis/tuning.

i've been kind of slacking on doors lately...i need to get back in the swing of things with those soon.

Posted by Len at 07:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i bought a jig saw today. this means that since i embarked on this process i have purchased the following cutting devices:

• rotozip
• table saw
• mitre saw
• concrete/masonry saw
• hand saw
• hack saw
• small band saw (never actually used>
• large band saw
• router
• jig saw

and the following drilling devices:

• 3/4" drill
• hammer drill
• SDS hammer drill
• right-angle drill
• impact driver
• dammit, i know i'm forgetting one

Posted by Len at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

yesterday i ordered the mogami 8-channel mic snakes and midi cable to run throughout the studio. the main room will have 3 panels, each with 8 mic channels + headphone + midi in/out. permanent studio cabling alone has run me around $600 total now, and that doesn't even include the mic panels, connectors, plates, removable wiring, and all that other fun stuff.

disco came over on wednesday to help me with drywalling the vox booth ceiling. after 3 hours, we managed to get one piece up. it was a real bitch because the weird shape took a long time to measure, and we had to be very meticulous with putting the markings on the walls so we'd know where the screws go for both the first and second layers of drywall. as i've probably mentioned before, the floor joists and their placement are extremely bizarre in that part of the ceiling for reasons that are still unclear to me. once the piece was finally cut, it took us forever to maneuver into the room and into place and then we had to put together a makeshift T out of 2x4s to hold the drywall up while i fastened it. hopefully the second layer will be much quicker, seeing as how i've already measured the shape and we already marked the screw holes and stuff and i know what all the pitfalls are of getting the piece into place.

not much to update on paint. on tuesday we returned the ceiling paint to lowes and i got my money back. then we went to home depot and got some more ralph lauren paints to use on the ceiling instead--we got some metallic silver and metallic green, which michelle then mixed together until she got something very close to the color of the crappy lowes paint. it looks pretty slick, but the second coat still hasn't been put on yet--that will theoretically happen today.

i had a scrap door piece from when i had to cut the door down to size, so i tested the stain on that to see how it's going to turn out. not too bad, although the wood on the door has a tiny bit of a pinkish hue to it that is still showing through the stain a little, but i suspect that isn't going to be too big a deal. besides, to try and fix it would probably entail gobs and gobs of trial and error.

one of my coworkers does woodworking, so i consulted with him on the best way to make wooden boxes that will both cover the junction boxes for the lights and also look good. hopefully i'll get to try my hand at making one of these this weekend sometime.

tommy gave me leads on a couple of good, local glass places which i'll call sometime next week or the week after once i have money again to begin plunging in to that part of the project. and once i track down the other parts i need to build the window assemblies.

Posted by Len at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

yesterday i ordered the mogami 8-channel mic snakes and midi cable to run throughout the studio. the main room will have 3 panels, each with 8 mic channels + headphone + midi in/out. permanent studio cabling alone has run me around $600 total now, and that doesn't even include the mic panels, connectors, plates, removable wiring, and all that other fun stuff.

disco came over on wednesday to help me with drywalling the vox booth ceiling. after 3 hours, we managed to get one piece up. it was a real bitch because the weird shape took a long time to measure, and we had to be very meticulous with putting the markings on the walls so we'd know where the screws go for both the first and second layers of drywall. as i've probably mentioned before, the floor joists and their placement are extremely bizarre in that part of the ceiling for reasons that are still unclear to me. once the piece was finally cut, it took us forever to maneuver into the room and into place and then we had to put together a makeshift T out of 2x4s to hold the drywall up while i fastened it. hopefully the second layer will be much quicker, seeing as how i've already measured the shape and we already marked the screw holes and stuff and i know what all the pitfalls are of getting the piece into place.

not much to update on paint. on tuesday we returned the ceiling paint to lowes and i got my money back. then we went to home depot and got some more ralph lauren paints to use on the ceiling instead--we got some metallic silver and metallic green, which michelle then mixed together until she got something very close to the color of the crappy lowes paint. it looks pretty slick, but the second coat still hasn't been put on yet--that will theoretically happen today.

i had a scrap door piece from when i had to cut the door down to size, so i tested the stain on that to see how it's going to turn out. not too bad, although the wood on the door has a tiny bit of a pinkish hue to it that is still showing through the stain a little, but i suspect that isn't going to be too big a deal. besides, to try and fix it would probably entail gobs and gobs of trial and error.

one of my coworkers does woodworking, so i consulted with him on the best way to make wooden boxes that will both cover the junction boxes for the lights and also look good. hopefully i'll get to try my hand at making one of these this weekend sometime.

tommy gave me leads on a couple of good, local glass places which i'll call sometime next week or the week after once i have money again to begin plunging in to that part of the project. and once i track down the other parts i need to build the window assemblies.

Posted by Len at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i started working on some of the door assemblies. the studio-side door leading to the lounge is now hung:

this is just the basic frame and the door; i still have to do the stop, gasket, closer, and caulk the perimeter and install casing over top. plus hang the door on the other side and insulate the space in between.

this evening i started working on the studio-side door to the garage. i also picked up some samples of the floor moulding and door/window casings i want to use, and found a really nice stain that brings a tone out of pine very similar to the laminate flooring we picked out.

theoretically, painting is on full speed ahead this week, but michelle ran into some snags today with the ceiling paint. we're using this weird 2-coat system where you put down a semi-gloss base and then another coat that's really thin and metallic. but apparently it's a little too thin, to the point of having a consistency like water and making it really difficult for michelle to roll on. several phone calls this evening didn't turn up much in the way of a solution, but as luck would have it, a rep from the paint company is going to be at lowes tomorrow, so we're going to trek out there in the morning and show them the paints that were mixed for us and see what they have to say.

in other news, this weekend i ran all the cat5 lines for the headphone feeds throughout the studio. i also ran 2 audio lines from the main studio to each iso booth, in case someone needs to sit in the studio with their guitar and put the amp in the iso booth or something. in that scenario, they can just jack their guitar into a panel into the studio and then connect from the iso booth panel into the amp. this week i'll be ordering all the 8-channel cable snakes and midi cable so i can run 8 mic lines and midi in/out to each of 3 panels distributed throughout the main room.

Posted by Len at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

nothing particularly exciting to report for this week. lots of waiting. i once again found myself running out of acoustic caulk way more quickly than i realized and i'm currently waiting on another shipment of 12 28oz tubes which should be here tomorrow. i can't really do anymore drywalling in the iso booths until i get that stuff for the wall corners. painting in the main room is at least a week and a half behind schedule. the only work that has been done thus far is a coat of primer on the ceiling.

in general, this has been a real shit week. the reality of how much money i'm spending on stuff and how much money i no longer have is really catching up with me. the reality of how long everything has taken and the mountain of stuff left to do is really getting to me. i'm realizing that had i known months ago what i now know about room acoustics, there are many things i would have done very differently and i'm worried i may have really screwed myself over in terms of certain angles and stuff. i'm having lots of "oh shit" moments, like the discovery tonight that temperature/humidity changes of late seem to have caused portions of the floor leveling stuff i put down months and months ago to start cracking all the way through and lifting off the floor. i'm trying to work my way out of several corners i unwittingly backed myself into over the past few months, like the way i wired things for lighting, or the way i sized the doorways, or the way i framed the bulkheads. overall i'm in a real "i don't know what i'm doing, i've fucked everything up, i'm really fucking stupid for trying to do all this shit myself, this thing is going to be a complete disaster when it's done. if by some miracle it ever is done" funk.

it's been really wearing down on me too that for every evening i do have help with the studio, there are 4 or 5 other evenings where i was supposed to have help, but the people offerering to help were sick/had something come up/forgot about prior plans/had water pipes freeze/were abducted by aliens/god only knows what else. and it's kind of weird, but the reliability of any given person is actually inversely proportional to the amount of money i'm paying them. go figure. i think about 1/3 of my life right now is spent having "can you still make it tonight?....no?.....well, i'm really sorry your dog died....and your grandmother's sick....and your house was robbed....ok, when can you make it again?....well, tell you what, how about you call me when you do know?" conversations. when i do get help, it's usually only for like 2-3 hours at a time. i'm more than grateful for the help i do get, but all that non-help in between is wearing me down.

i would kill to find people to come help me for like a good, solid 8 hours on a saturday or something, but i've long since resigned myself to that never happening. i'm trying to juggle sooo many different things right now and the degree of multitasking i'm finding myself having to do right now is making me sink further and further into the lake of despair and insanity. i'm no longer thinking clearly about the studio, or anything for that matter. sleep is sucking royally these days--my brain keeps me awake spewing angst continuously until about 6am every day until i finally crash and get a few hours of dreaming-about-everything-negative-imaginable sleep. the rational part of me knows that the best thing to do would be for me to take a break from studio stuff for a week or two and clear my head and recharge my batteries. but the rest of me....well, yeah, whatever...

sorry for being all down and goth-teenager-like, i just figured that if i spewed my thoughts into the intarweb, maybe they'll leave me alone tonight and let me sleep.

Posted by Len at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

argh. i'm so tired of looking at lighting. nothing i look at seems to fit the space and my budget. i keep going back and forth as to what kind of style i want and what will work well with the space in terms of room colors and all. i stumbled across this light last night that looks potentially promising:

Posted by Len at 02:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

painting didn't start tonight like originally planned, but we did spend about 3 hours hashing out more interior design details and then went to home depot to drop gobs and gobs of cash on paint and painting supplies. michelle's gonna come tomorrow morning and start working on the ceiling. in a related note, i've found a few more minor bumps and depressions in the ceiling. mostly minor stuff that normally wouldn't be that noticeable, but with the color being used on the ceiling it sounds like any spots that aren't completely flat and smooth will stick out like a sore thumb. so i'm going to go be all OCD with the ceiling shortly and try to catch the rest of these buggers and deal with them once and for all.

i have some really cool information on the psychology of colors to be used for the space. i was going to provide sample swatch images the colors we'll be using, but there seem to be some significant inaccuries in the pantone color numbers that were transcribed for me (that gold looks awfully.....black), so instead i'll just provide textual descriptions and you can use your imagination.

the general color themes for the room are yellow/gold, green, and silver:

• silver: sleek, classy, stylish, modern, cool


• green: calming and harmonious. green says balance and beauty drawing from the shades of nature


• yellow: sunshine and light yellow projects a radiant look, creating instant warmth

two of the walls will have a golden yellow base with a slightly darker gold gradient over tissue paper, darker on the top, lighter on the bottom. the other two walls will have an olive green. both of these are from the ralph lauren metallic collection. they're shiny but in a metallic sort of way as opposed to a glossy sort of way. the ceiling is this sort of metallic green that looks really slick. here's some psychology/evocation info on at least some of the colors:

• golden yellow: nourishing, buttery, tasty, sunbaked, wheat, hospitable, comfort & comfort food


• olive green: calming, sophisticated, classic, earthy


• gold: rich, glowing, divine, intuitive, luxurious, opulent, expensive, radiant, valuable, prestigious

Posted by Len at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

earlier this evening i met with the artist to go over the paint/floor/lighting plans for the studio. she picked out some pretty swank colors and i think they're going to work really well in the room. we went to home depot and spent way too much time agonizing over laminate flooring. in the end, we just kind of accidentally wandered past a display that had some laminate flooring that was exactly the right tone for what she had in mind, is a really good price, and best of all, is in stock.

the plan is to start painting wednesday evening, which means i have to make sure all the main room is all prepared by tomorrow evening. on that note...

i got the corner bead material today. it was wide enough to span the frankencorner without any problems. initially i was a bit dubious as to the adhesion strength of paper-based corner beads which don't use any fasteners, but so far it seems to be pretty strong, and i really like the fact that this stuff isn't susceptible to the problem that the metal beads have where a dinged-up corner can wind up exposing the underlying metal. i need to do another skim coat or two of mud tonight/tomorrow morning, but other than that it's pretty much done.

the rest of the mud in the room is touched up and ready for sanding.

i spent a good chunk of the evening installing the foam rod and acoustic caulk along the base of all the walls. i'm slowly getting better at getting a not-too-terribly-sloppy caulking application on the corners. it's really tricky when all of the gaps are 1/4" or more--i'm used to dealing with much narrower caulk beads. i've gotten pretty good at cheating with the help of some putty knives.

i'm beginning to work out the details of the speaker soffits. more on that later.

Posted by Len at 02:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

mudding's all done, so i figured i'd take a few pics before starting into the priming and painting.

Posted by Len at 02:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

mudding of the main room is essentially done now. all that's left is to apply the exterior corner bead once it arrives, do some spot fixes, and then sand everything down. in theory the bead should be here tomorrow or tuesday at the latest.

i got another 20 sheets of drywall delivered yesterday for finishing off the iso booths and other areas of the basement. ii also rented a drywall lift to help with that task. i've been working on the vox booth today and making some decent progress. the smallness and weird-shape-ness of the space is making it a bit tricky to put the upper wall pieces up, but it hasn't been too terribly bad thus far.

tomorrow night i meet with the artist to go over room colors and flooring and lighting and all that fun stuff.

i've mentioned here and there that a couple of the supply outlets are still really noisy, owing to a combination of mechanical noise and excessive air velocity. it's also the case that the far end of our house is really cold, and the two aren't entirely unrelated. i ordered an air volume damper to control the amount of air coming into those registers off the trunk. i'm still looking for a canvas duct connector to help decouple the mechanical noise of the furnace from that duct run--it was tapped just before the canvas connector for the main supply trunk for the house.

i found a place that can do the laminate glass for me for the vox booth windows. they have 1/2" in stock, which will cover one of the pieces just fine, but they don't have anything bigger for the other piece. they're looking into ordering a piece of 5/8" or 3/4" for me. hopefully i'll know tomorrow whether that's doable, and then as soon as i have exact measurements for the glass i can go ahead and place the order. i think what i'm going to do, since i need to be very exact with the measurements and all and angling of the glass may make things a little tricky, is get scraps of 1/2" and 3/4" plywood to test-fit the dimensions before ordering.

still waiting for the door gasket material to arrive. still trying to track down a source for magnetic weatherstripping. still trying to track down other door/window assembly odds and ends like u-shaped neoprene setting blocks and all that fun stuff.

time to go put up some more drywall.

Posted by Len at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

whilst looking for something completely unrelated i happened across a scan of the window construction diagram from the rod gervais book i have and which has been an endless source of valuable information. i'll probably be following this plan verbatim.

Posted by Len at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

after what seems like an eternity, the end of mudding in the main room is finally drawing near. mudding is a long, drawn-out process to begin with, but given various details of soundproofing considerations, this process was even more drawn out and the corners are even more of a pain than they are in standard drywalling. once the current coat finishes drying, all i have to do is put down one final coat on one side of each of the corners, do some touch-up work where needed, and sand everything down.

well, i lied. there is one more thing i have to do. the one outside corner in the room has proven to be a bit tricky, owing to a combination of there being 2 layers of 5/8" drywall, a 1/4" gap at the corner filled with caulk, lack of full framing support running the whole length of the corner, and the splayed angle mean that the standard metal corner beads just don't work here. i had to order a flexible corner bead today with paper facing and wide corner legs in order to handle this space. rather than using nails or other fasteners, this stuff is attached to the corner using regular ol' mud. which leaves me a little bit concerned as to the strength of the corner, but it's not like there are any alternatives. if i had to do this all over, i would have approached that corner a bit differently to avoid all these complications. but in the grand scheme of things it's really not that big of a deal.

in other news, i'm still waiting for the rubber door gaskets to be delivered. given the funky way in which the door stops need to be cut in order to make the gaskets fit, i need to waiit until the gaskets are delivered before doing any door framing so that i can size up the cutting angle and all that fun stuff. i'm also searching for a suitable magnetic weatherstrip product to run along the sides and top of the door to provide another seal.

i'm beginning to plan out the window for the vox booth as well. this will be a dual-window assembly, one on the booth side and one of the main room side (i'll put up a drawing at some point). whenever one puts a hole through a wall for a door or window, it's important to fill that hole with a material at least as heavy as the drywall which would otherwise be there; that way, the only weak point you have to address in terms of soundproofing is along the perimeter of the opening. when it comes to windows, it's also important to use different thicknesses for each piece of glass so that each side has a different resonant frequency. i'll probably do 1/2" for one side and 3/4" for the other. both will be laminated glass, as that is the best in terms of both safety and sound transmission. since laminated glass requires special equipment and stuff for cutting, i'm in the process of tracking down some local glass companies that can do this for me.

Posted by Len at 02:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

while i'm on the tail end of mudding and taping, i'm beginnig to plan out the door assemblies, which will be the next big thing. they're also going to be rather complex, what with the need for air-tightness and all that. here's my current plan for the assemblies (it's essentially the same going all around the doorway, so i've just drawn out the side where the door handles will be):

the main differences from normal door frames are the use of the rubber gasket along the doorstop (others have found that a particular type of GM trunk rubber works best here), and there won't be any doorknobs or latches or anything else that might involve making holes in the door, so instead there will be handles surface-mounted on either side of the doors and magnets to hold them in place when closed.

the trunk rubber is on order, i just picked up enough wood to do about 4 of the 8 doorways, and i'll be ordering the fabric to wrap the insulation this week--i'm going to order all my fabrics for this and various room-treatment purposes from one of the companies out there that makes fire-safety-rated fabric.

Posted by Len at 06:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i got rid of all the scrap drywall and lumber today and did a bunch of cleaning up and organizing in the garage. we actually have space in there now! woohoo!

i also popped a whole bunch more screws into the ceiling to provide better support. it was a little tricky on some areas trying to figure out where best to chalk another screw line so that i didn't screw through the resilient channel and into a joist (which would defeat the whole purpose of the channel), come too close to the screws on the first layer, or risk coming a little too close to some of the electrical wiring (a good portion of which is sitting just a tad too low for my tastes). for the electrical concern, i switched from 2" screws to 1 5/8" to minimize the potential for problems. the channel is about 1/2" from the joists and the 2 drywall layers are 1 1/4" together, so that should leave all the screw tips well below any wiring. i'm probably just being paranoid and the 2" screws would probably be perfectly fine, but i'd rather be paranoid than on fire.

tomorrow begins more mudding and taping. yeeeehaw!

Posted by Len at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

now that i'm seeing the light at the end of the drywall tunnel, i figured this would be a good time to run through the list of stuff that still has to be done on the studio, in roughly chronological order:

• get rid of drywall/lumber/insulation debris that's slowly overtaking the basement. i've scheduled a junk pickup for monday
• order another 20-ish pieces of drywall to finish the iso booths and other parts of the basement
• finish drywalling iso booths and other parts of the basement
• finish mudding, taping, foaming, and caulking (currently awaiting next acoustic caulk shipment)
• order glass pieces for window (they'll have to be custom-cut)
• install doors and windows
• decide on and order ceiling lights for main studio
• get the electrical work finished
• install trim/moulding
• paint
• fix remaining ductwork noise problems (registers over mix area are still really noisy)
• make absorption cloud and install over mix area
• build soffits for main monitor speakers (maybe--still pondering this)
• install flooring
• perform room analyses
• build necessary fixtures to tune room acoustics (hemholtz resonators, bass traps, absorption panels, etc.)
• install main studio audio wiring and panels (microphone, midi, headphone)

then of course there's the whole lounge thing, and the whole bathroom thing, and god only knows what else. maybe, just maybe, i'll finish all of this before chinese democracy is released.

Posted by Len at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

second ceiling layer is up now. all that's left is to go back and pop some more screws in--i'm confident the first layer is adequately fastened to the resilient channel, but i'm not so certain about the second layer--and then mud and tape.

Posted by Len at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i just have one more layer of mud to do on the ceiling before starting on the second layer. here are some hastily-snapped pics of how things look right now:

Posted by Len at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

got lots of drywall work done this week. i rented a drywall lift mainly for doing the ceiling but also to help with the upper pieces of the second wall layer. the lift i got isn't great for doing walls, but it was certainly good enough:

the second wall layer in the main room is all done now. not that it looks all that different from the first layer, but here's a pic anyway:

today was all about ceilings. first the insulation:

then the resilient channel:

here's the drywall lift in action on the ceiling:

and finally, here's what i got done with the ceiling before calling it a night:

Posted by Len at 02:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i finished treating all the joints/perimeters tonight. joints were done with standard mud and tape. wall perimeters (at this point, just wall and floor corners since there is no ceiling yet) are packed with foam rod and then sealed with acoustic caulk. the full wall treatment isn't hard per se, but a proper explanation is a bit verbose. the john sayers studio design forum has a great post that goes into great detail on the sequence. my sequence is slightly different from what they illustrate since i'm doing wall-wall-ceiling-ceiling rather than ceiling-wall-ceiling-wall, but the general ideas still apply.

my mudding and taping turned out remarkably well given that i'm a total n00b in this area. i ended up with some incredibly smooth joints and only messed up 2 of them (tape's bulging out a little bit). luckily, that doesn't really matter for the first layer, so i can just leave it as is. nice thing about doing multiple wall layers is you can use the underlying layer(s) as practice.

no overly interesting pics tonight, but i did snap one of the completed mudding/taping for a portion of the room:

Posted by Len at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

yesterday i finished off the little odds and ends for the first layer of drywall. earlier today i started on the mud-and-tape extravaganza, which is actually going pretty well so far. the mudding-and-taping process doesn't make for particularly interesting photos, but i can show you the vocal booth with all of its walls in place (looking in through the window, looking in through the door, and looking out from inside):

Posted by Len at 06:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

finished the first layer of wall drywall in the main studio area. i have a couple more sheets to put up in the vox booth tonight, after which the first layer will be completely done.

Posted by Len at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i finished putting up the first layer of wall drywall in the iso room (ceilings will happen after the second wall layer):

more progress in the vox booth and main room too, but it's hard to get good pictures to show how things are coming along. here's a good one of the main room though.

Posted by Len at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

been a while since i updated here. past several days have been more drywall and preparing portions of the ductwork to be coated on the inside with the vibration-dampening stuff. seeing as how drywall is phenomenally uninteresting, i'll skip that and go straight to talking about the ductwork.

i picked up an air compressor last week and a spray gun to use with it. over the weekend i used these to apply the requisite metal primer to the insides of all the ductwork. it should've taken about 24 hours to dry, but with the weather cooling off and me being a doofus and leaving everything right by the garage door to dry, it ended up taking more on the order of 48 hours to dry to my satisfaction. i also made a complete mess in the process and got primer everywhere.

after much procrastination, i decided to work on the first vibration dampening coat. the manufacturer recommended using a spray gun to apply this stuff, and they even sell a "blessed" spray gun, which i went ahead and bought. as i opened the container and began mixing it up with my drill/power mixer, i realized that this stuff is about the consistency of caramel. quite literally if you were to combine 1 part gray latex paint with 1 part heated caramel, that's exactly the appearance and consitency of this stuff. even though they say repeatedly in their literature that this stuff is very thick, it wasn't until i opened the container that i was able to fully comprehend what that meant.

imagine, if you will, trying to spray caramel onto something. that will give you some idea as to the level of success i had with trying to get the compressor to siphon this stuff out of the spray bottle. it just kinda sputtered out of the tip in tiny specks like some sort of robot porn money shot. i just gave up and switched to using a brush.

the main problem with using a brush is that it makes it kind of hard to do a good job of applying thick layers, which is what this calls for--ultimately i need it to be about 1/16" thick to function effectively. after not being able to get things sufficiently thick with normal painting, i decided to pull out my sloppy painting skillz again, pour a whole bunch of the stuff right onto the ductwork, and use the brush to kind of smear it around and get as even a coat as possible. this actually worked out better than it might sound. i have two pieces of ductwork of equal length, one completely uncoated and the other smear-coated. if i pick up the uncoated piece by a corner and tap it, it rings out for quite a while. the coated one dampens right away. i tried the same thing on the original 2 pieces i did with just normal brushing, and those behaved about the same as the uncoated piece. as the stuff dries and cures, its dampening abilities improve significantly, provided the application is sufficiently thick.

even though the brushing technique mostly worked, it's a bit of a kludge and i'd still like to try and find some way to spray this stuff on for the remaining coat(s). i'm going to investigate airless paint sprayers tomorrow. i may also experiment with adding a tiny bit of water to thin the mixture out a bit, which the literature says can help a little as long as the amount of water added is kept very minimal.

Posted by Len at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

since i can't make much more progress on the studio drywall until i get the ductwork noise stuff straightened out, i've been focusing on the bathroom area with help from aiton and disco. we got the majority of the greenboard up:

Posted by Len at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

HVAC stuff is gonna be the death of me, i swear.

so the liquid vibration dampening stuff i ordered on friday? i just called them today to check on the status of the order since i hadn't heard anything. the answer i got was, "oh. um. see, we don't actually carry that stuff anymore. we really should take that web page down. uh, sorry about that, we'll refund your money."

i went ahead and ordered the noisekiller product instead. hopefully it'll get here by early next week, as i'm behind enough as it is on drywalling. part of me wants to just say fuck it and go ahead with the drywall and just live with whatever ductwork noise is there currently. but i know if i do that i'm going to regret it every single time i record someone or something quiet.

i really wish i could be visited by a future me who could tell me this is all going to come together at some point an that all this frustration is going to be worth it in the end. all i want is a space where i can do right by musicians, a space where they can come and have a great time and make kick-ass recordings. but that goal just keeps slipping further and further into the distance.

Posted by Len at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

aiton helped me with strapping, insulation, and drywall this morning, and i put up a few more pieces after he left. the east wall and the remainder of the north wall are done now:

Posted by Len at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

dehumidifier was installed today and the remaining ductwork was completed.

i'm a bit bummed by the amount of space taken up in the basement for the dehumidifier ductwork. in fact, i'm too bummmed right now to take a picture and show people. but aesthetics aside, it's a pretty cool setup and this should help the studio stay drier than a mormon frat party (where "drier than a mormon frat party" is defined as 40% RH) year-round. i still have to play with all the fresh air intake stuff.

i'm still a tad concerned about the noise through the ductwork. even though the supply lines are insulated on the outside, nothing is lined on the inside. air on metal has a way of making vibrations and noise, so i've been trying to find a way to dampen the vibrations. lining the duct with standard materials isn't an option, since most linings are at least 1" thick. that kind of thickness would really cut into the surface area of the duct, which is something i really don't want.

this has taken me down the route of investigating liquid vibration dampeners. these spray or brush on to a surface and convert noise/vibration energy into heat energy. the two most promising products i looked at were quietcote and noisekiller. the two products are very similar in all regards, and i ended up going with quietcote for no other reason than the fact that they say it can be brushed on. i'm going to have to rip down a fair amount of non-flex ductwork, brush this stuff onto the insides, and put it back up.

Posted by Len at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

woohoo! the new furnace has been installed:

this thing is all energy efficient (not the highest 96.6% efficiency rating, but damn close at 93%). it's also damn quiet. like one of the quietest furnaces i've ever heard in my life. if i open the door to the basement, i can only very faintly hear the blower.

they're coming back tomorrow morning to do the dehumidifier.

Posted by Len at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

last night i began to suspect that the way they were going to tie the dehumidifier into the studio would be problematic from a soundproofing perspective. both the supply and the return are 10" round duct, and their plan was to go straight through the concrete block and then through the studio wall with these. doorways and windows aside, whenever something needs to pass through both leaves of a double wall, it's really a good idea to offset the wall penetrations to help minimize crosstalk. i was especially concerned with the supply being so close to a noise source such as the furnace.

we tossed around a few ideas for rectifying this situation, but nothing seemed to quite pan out, owing in part to the rather large size of the duct. larry decided we should probably just scrap the plug-directly-into-the-studio plan and hook the dehmidifier up to the main house supply over by the furnace. which i thought was the original plan all along, but what do i know.

new furnace is being installed as i speak. dehumidifier may or may not get installed today.

Posted by Len at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the dehumidifier is like twice the size i thought it was from the photos i was looking at last month. guess that's what i get for not looking at the specs:

one of the new guys working at the company specializes in airflow stuff, which is resulting in a wacky (but i think ultimately good) setup. instead of installing the dehumidifier near the furnace, where it would be difficult to get truly fresh air from the outside what with the dryer vent and bathroom exhaust vent and all, they decided it would be better to install the unit closer to the center of the house, pull in the fresh air from the completely opposite side of the house from the furnace, and plug directly into the studio. the idea is that the studio will be the first to get the fresh/dehumidified air, but it will then propagate through the rest of the house via the studio returns and we'll have fresh and dehumidified air everywhere.

this whole setup is proving to be a bit more involved than they originally thought, so the rest of the day today is going to be spent knocking out holes and running ductwork and stuff, and then they're coming back tomorrow to do the furnace/dehumidifier installation.

Posted by Len at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

HVAC guys finally came back out to finish up the ductwork and furnace stuff. i'm hoping everything will be done today, but we'll have to wait and see. the two guys who are here right now just have the dehumidifier and some ductwork pieces. no furnace or fittings. supposedly another 2 guys are coming later on with all that stuff.

Posted by Len at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

dev and disco came over last night to help with drywalling. i decided to work on the main studio area tonight instead of the smaller rooms. i think i'm going to wait until the main drywall pile gets a bit lower before continuing with those rooms, since it's such a pain right now getting in and out of the vox booth.

i was an idiot when framing and did my 16-on-center markings at 0, 16, 32, 48.... instead of 0, 15 1/4, 31 1/4, 47 1/4...not a huge deal, but when i put a 4' x 8' sheet of drywall vertical against one end of the frame, there's no stud support for the other side since the 48" stud falls just beyond the end of the dywall. i've taken to shifting pieces over 3/4" so that each side of the drywall falls in the middle of a stud.

Posted by Len at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ended up working solo today, which would've made it a bit difficult to do drywalling. so i focused on insulation stuff instead. i got insulation into most of the bays that jim and disco strapped yesterday, plus i strapped out some of the wackier bays. additionally, i got the idea yesterday that i should run all the between-room audio cabling along the floor between the room frames, which gave me the idea of adding a few little access panels to the spaces between the rooms in case i ever need to add/change wiring. i framed out one panel in the main room and two more in the iso/storage room, which will allow me to get at all the critical spaces between all the rooms.

al came by and applied his mad masonry skillz to getting the glass block installed in the bathroom. this involved knocking out a bunch of channeled blocks and brick sills and god only knows what else and then making the resulting hole a bit smaller so that the glass block would fit more snugly and not require an inch (or more) of mortar going all the way around. he also patched up the suboptimal mortaring job i did on the two bricks around the vent hood.

i need to go back and fix up the furring strips along that wall, but as soon as i've done that, all systems are go for drywalling the bathroom.

Posted by Len at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

today's work ended up being a bit more drywall prep than drywall, but we still got a lot done. tommy and i worked on drywall while disco and jim worked on installing the support straps for the insulation.

both ended up being a bit of a pain in the ass. it would have been a hell of a lot easier for everyone if i had installed the straps back when i was framing, but at the time i had not even the faintest clue that deferring this might be an issue. in spite of this, jim and disco got a huge portion of the walls all strapped up.

as for drywall, we had some complications of our own to deal with. we started with the concrete block wall at the front of the house, which called for attaching the drywall directly to the block using a combination of liquid nails and tapcon screws. space in the iso rooms was tight, there's still a huge pile of drywall blocking the entrance to the vox booth, the protruding lip from the french drain presented some complications, and for some reason the tapcon screws were being a real bitch today and we had to keep re-drilling holes and tossing stripped screws. but we did finally finish the first layer of drywall all along that wall, and fortunately this was the most difficult space to drywall and thus everything else from here on out should be a good bit easier. here are some pics of the drywall and straps:

Posted by Len at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

in less than 24 hours the studio will finally start getting walls! woohoo!

hvac stuff won't be finished until next week, so we'll have to leave the ceilings (and part of one wall) open. there's a 50-50 chance the mason will come over the weekend to take care of the glass block for the bathroom window. as soon as that's done i can start drywalling the bathroom as well.

jim, tommy and disco are all stopping by to help tomorrow. we're gonna split up into pairs and work on different parts of the studio/basement in parallel. expect lots of photos to be posted over the next few days.

Posted by Len at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

barring any problems, drywalling will begin on saturday.

electrical inspector signed off today on all of the fixes the electricians made, so i'm good to go as far as permits are concerned.

talked with HVAC guy today. dehumidifier is in, so remaining ductwork/furnace/dehumidifier installation will happen either end of this week or next week. we discussed the issue of the excessive air velocity and there are a few options on the table. one of the more promising ones involves putting tees on the problematic runs to divide the current single register into 2 separate ones, making for lower velocity across each.

the rest of this week is devoted to final touches, which at this point is just finishing up the bulkhead and corner framing in the vox booth and a few other odds and ends.

Posted by Len at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i've decided that when it comes time to paint the walls and ceiling in the studio, i'd like to enlist the help of someone with madder art and/or interior decorating skills than i. basically, i want to have a room where people will come in and go "wow, this is {cool,hip,different,inspiring,etc.}" but in a more ambient sort of way--i don't want the walls to become the center of attention of the room, but i do want them to help underscore the sorts of feelings and emotions most useful to have while recording.

anyway, do any of you know of any starving artists who would have some good ideas in this area and would like to earn a few bucks? if you know bona fide interior decorators, that would be useful too, but my preference is for current-student or just-graduated artists who really need the cash. i also want to leave the door open for wilder or more unconventional ideas that might work well in this space, so "think different' types would be a plus.

Posted by Len at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

since drywall will be starting "any day now," i decided that this weekend i should get off my ass and finish up the remaining framing odds and ends. all that's left is to finish up the bulkheads and put up a few more furring strips in the bathroom. i've just been having trouble getting motivated to knock these out with everything else going on lately.

one thing that's been causing me grief with the bulkheads is that the doorways into both iso rooms are framed for standard 80" door heights, which is several inches higher than the bottom of the support beam that passes through both rooms. i've been driving myself insane trying to figure out how to handle the bulkhead area between the doorway and the beam until today, when i realized i was an idiot and everything would be 10 times easier if i just made the doorways shorter and put a couple more bulkhead 2x4s above the door frames.

here's how the vox booth doorway looked originally:

and after dropping it down 5 inches:

i did the same exact thing to the other room and finished up the bulkhead in there. here's how it looks from inside the room:

a nice side effect of lowering the doorways is that i can now use double doors for both iso rooms, since the interior doors would be low enough to clear the beam when they open. this will provide better sound insulation yadda yadda yadda.

Posted by Len at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

wooo! 100th blog entry!

electricians came this morning and fixed all the problems turned up in the inspection. i didn't think they'd be able to take care of that this week, so that was a nice surprise. it also looks like all the paperwork finally went thorugh for the permit, so i should be able to get moving on the final inspection and be on my way to drywall.

still no word yet from the HVAC guys regarding the dehumidifier. i'm going to call kevin today and see where things stand. i'm also going to see what we can do about the remaining ductwork and my concern about noise in a couple of the runs.

since i'm still in a holding pattern on drywall, i think i'm going to dart down to baltimore this weekend for a long-overdue visit with some family and friends.

Posted by Len at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

sorry i've been out of touch lately. been too busy hauling ass to get out the new www.cmu.edu site and deal with all the aftermath. you should check it out if you haven't already.

the electrical inspector came out today to look at stuff. there were a few things about the electricians' work that i was wondering whether he might have a problem with. well, he did. and found a few other things i hadn't thought about. the ones i thought might be problematic were a few poorly-supported wire runs. he also found some wire stapling he didn't like, and we have one major bundle of wire running along the back wall of the house into the circuit panel. he wants to see that split up into two smaller bundles because of overheating concerns. he also took minor issue with the 2 no-longer-used feeds that the electricians forgot to terminate for me, but i assured him i was already on top of that and would have them fix those next time they're back.

i'm kind of bummed, because usually these guys do better work than this. i don't know if they were just in a hurry, or not as attentive as usual because i wasn't around, or what. i also noticed when looking more closely that they installed more separate circuits across the three rooms than i thought they would. they did something like 5 or 6 when i thought they were going to do just 3. oh well, at least i won't have to worry about tripping breakers.

called the head electrician back to see about getting these things fixed.

in other news, ductwork is nearly done, still waiting for the dehumidifier to come in. most of the duct runs are pretty quiet, but i really need to figure out something to do with the one above the mix area. it's pretty high velocity and noisy. i'm hoping the new furnace will take care of at least some of the mechanical noise. not entirely sure yet about the air noise. currently they're tapping into the trunk with a 7" round; i may have to get them to switch that to a 6" for the first few feet out of the trunk and then up to a 7".

Posted by Len at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

found out the other night that the electricians in fact did NOT take out an electrical permit. would've been nice if they had asked me back in september whether i needed a permit, but in the end, all permits are my responsibility (i am technically the contractor, after all) and they certainly didn't do anything wrong. i've just learned the hard way that i need to be more proactive about such things in future projects.

so anyway, the permit's being taken care of now. if i understood jerry correctly, he did the permit paperwork in person, which should help shave at least a couple of days off the processing time. jerry says it'll probably be 5-6 days before it's processed and the dude can come inspect. the lady at the permit office says at least 10 days. the dude doing the actual inspecting says 2-3 weeks. i have no idea which one is closest to the truth, so i'll start pinging them around middle of next week to see where things are.

Posted by Len at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ductwork wasn't completed today, but it's damn close. it would've been done today were it not for the fact that one of the guys got stung by a yellow jacket or 5 (long story), is allergic to bee stings, didn't have his medicine on him, and ended up having to go to the hospital (he's ok now). that left just one guy to do stuff, and much of the remaining work is 2-man material.

kevin and i spent a bunch of time talking about my concerns that several of the supply runs didn't have enough turns in them to adequatley attenuate any air noise which might be inclined to pass into the duct. each duct run is supposed to have at least 180 degrees' worth of turns in order to deal with sound waves most effectively. this isn't all that hard to accomplish in the main studio, where i tried to leave room behind the walls for exactly this purpose. however, for the iso booths things are more of a pain to deal with, there isn't as much space, and the situation with the joists above that area is....well, there's a helluva lot of joists there.

we started toying around ideas for the storage/iso room first, since that looked like it might be easier. after a bunch of experimentation with all sorts of different elbows, flex duct, and oval duct, kevin finally got the idea to bring the supply down from the ceiling with flex duct, run it inside the bulkhead and up into the next ceiling bay, then over the steel beam, past the rest of the bulkhead, and finally dropping down into the room. here's a picture from the ground looking up to better explain:

i'm insanely happy we got this to work. i was beginning to worry that i'd have to settle for some less-than-ideal compromise. which would still be way better than any regular ol' ductwork installation, but i'm really trying to make this the best i can before closing up the walls.

the supply coming into the vox booth is going to get a similar treatment, but that's going to require expanding the bulkhead a bit to give adequate room to the flex duct. they're gonna pick up with that tomorrow.

here's a shot of the storage/iso room return coming in from behind the front wall of the main room and then dropping down between the main and storage rooms:

here's an interesting picture of where the supply that runs to the mixing area comes out of the furnace. it's the insulated duct line. basically it comes out of the furnace and makes a complete U-turn up and back over the furnace and into the studio. that particular supply register is going to come out in the middle of the ceiling, so that was the only place we could get a series of good bends in.

Posted by Len at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ductwork is coming along nicely, although it's proven to be a bit trickier than originally planned and won't be done until tomorrow. i snapped a few photos of the work thusfar, but it's hard to get intelligible pictures, what with the maze of wall frames and all. this is the best one i got -- the return for the vox booth:

they're using oval-shaped ductwork for this run, which does an awesome job of squeezing in between the frames. it comes down from the ceiling on the right, makes a 90 degree turn to the left, followed by another 90 degree turn down, and then mates up with the register. these turns will help reduce mechanical and air noise. additionally, they sized the ducts as big as they could for these rooms, which will help further reduce air velocity, and by extension, air noise.

i'm glad that all of the elbows are curved rather than square. this should help reduce air turbulence around those corners.

Posted by Len at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ductwork is being installed as i speak. woohoo!

hizzy depot came yesterday and picked up all the excess insulation i left for them in the driveway. woohoo!

our mason dude is gonna stop by today to look at the glass block window situation for the bathroom. i don't think i've talked about this here, so here's the short version: company that made the window for me said that if i gave them the dimensions for the opening they'd be able to match the size as closely as possible. well, by close they meant with a 1.25" gap all the way around. this is a rather large area to mortar, so the mason is going to look and see what the best course of action is. we discussed several options last night.

last night i *finally* fixed the one crooked doorway frame i found a couple of weeks ago. this frame was a pain in the ass to deattach due to its location relative to the other frames, the support beam, the wiring up in the joists, an some other crap. to remove three of the nails, i had to take a 10" hack saw blade, bend it so i could fit it in between the frames, wedge it in between the two top plates, and saw very slowly so as not to risk cutting my hands. glad that's over.

in the "yet another stupid holdup" category, i called the electrical inspector today to schedule the rough-in inspection for the electrical work. he can't find a permit on file for this work, so he can't come out. my hands are currently tied on this as only the electrician can take out a permit. and if in fact one was never taken out (i assumed this was taken care of some 6 weeks ago), it takes about 2 weeks to go through. in which case i have to keep the walls open another 2 weeks. grrrrr.

waiting to hear back from the electrican to figure out what to do.

Posted by Len at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

so i'm pricing out some OSI SC175 acoustic caulk for sealing the wall perimeters. OSI caulks are sold at places like home depot, although it's not as common to carry the SC175 since its use is a bit more specific.

anyway, i found a bunch of online sources for this stuff, both regular contractor supply places and places that specialize in soundproofing. to the supply houses, SC175 is just another type of caulk. to the soundproofing places, SC175 is another product that you can beat the word "soundproof" into repeatedly with a baseball bat. and the prices reflect this.

my favorite example:

1 29 oz tube of SC175 from toolup: $3.59
1 29 oz tube of SC175 from soundprooffoam.com: $14.50

i love how the first bullet point for the description on the $14.50 page is "cost effective". yes, paying 4 times as much because your domain name includes "soundproof" is cost effective.

time and time again i talk with people about the studio construction process and invariably they ask, "are you using such-and-such soundproofing material on your walls?" a few very specific items aside, my answer to that is always "no". soundproofing is one of those areas that is very involved and understood by only a small portion of the population, much smaller than the portion of the population which is interested in having some kind of soundproofing done. companies that specialize in soundproofing take advantage of this to the extreme every chance they can get. nearly every single item i'm using that will help with soundproofing is stuff i can either drive down to home depot and buy, or have home depot order for me. the only item i couldn't order through home depot thus far was the resilient channel, and even that i could have obtained at one of the more hard-core building supply houses if i had had the time and desire to track them down. and i would've payed much less for it, too.

soundproofing is, by and large, less about the material and more about the application. all the foam, mass loaded vinyl, and special rubber doohickeys in the world don't do crap compared to what you can do with just 2x4s, drywall, insulation, and caulk. it's amazing how junk gets hyped by these companies under the guise of "it's expensive, so it must be really good."

anyway, time for me to quit bitchin and go get me some caulk.

Posted by Len at 05:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

spent most of the weekend working on other house stuff (e.g., installing the screen door). but today i spent some time working on the exterior side of the vent assembly for the bathroom exhaust fan.

i started by grabbing my hammer drill and a long bit and drilling a pilot hole from the inside through to the outside midway between the joists and midway between the top and bottom of the belt joist. that way i'd have a reference point to work from while doing stuff outside:

then i figured out where i could put the vent hood with the fewest number of brick disruptions. i managed to find a location where i'd only have to remove 2 bricks. so i hammer-drilled a bunch of holes around the joints of those 2 bricks and chiseled out the rest. first one was a bit of a pain since i didn't have good leverage while pulling it out, but the second one came out pretty easily:

then i grabbed my hole saw kit and put a 4" hole through the wood:

next i cut the two bricks i removed so that there'd be a nice rectangular opening. then i mortared the cut pieces back into place:

it's not permanently installed yet (gotta clean up the mortar joints in a bit and all that), but here's a rough idea of what the vent hood will look like when all is done:

Posted by Len at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

got the next (last?) big delivery from home depot today. this is the $1500 of insulation i ordered, the greenboard for the bathroom, and a screen door for our front door.

while the guy was there i counted everything to make sure i got what i ordered, which was 66 batts. i counted 11 packages of 6, so all was cool. for some reason it seemed like more insulation than that, but i figured i must've just underestimated the size of a rolled-up batt of insulation.

after the guy left i started to move things into the basement. i grabbed one of the packages of 6 thinking, "this is only 6 batts of insulation, so it'll be really light". boy was i wrong. this thing weighed quite a bit and it took both stacey and me to carry it into the house. at this point i knew something was wrong. i proceeded to open the plastic wrapping on the package and pulled out one of the rolls only to find it had been compressed to about 1/3 of its size for the wrapping. then i looked and found out that each of these rolls contains not 1, but 9 batts. that means instead of 66 batts i now have 594. that's probably about enough to insulate my entire house twice over.

i went back to home depot and explained that nowhere in their computer or printed literature does it say that there are 9 batts to a roll, nor did the guy who placed the order for me figure this out, nor did the owens corning people point this out during any of the 3 conversations we had with them prior to placing the order. since this obviously wasn't my fault, home depot is going to come take back the excess on monday and refund me for that portion.

so in the end, the reason this cost 9x as much as the non-special-order stuff is because there was 9x as much. turns out the price for the quantity i actually need is nearly the same as the same quantity of the faced insulation. now i'll have money to blow on kick-ass audio cabling! woohoo!

in other news, i started ripping out a couple of bricks from the back wall to drill a hole for the bathroom exhaust fan vent pipe. i've also started doing some drywall out in the garage and will start on the bathroom as soon as i get the vent pipe fully installed.

Posted by Len at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

i think this is the first time i'm able to have a truly happy post about the state of the whole HVAC situation.

kevin found that honeywell recently started making a whole-house dehumidifier system. this is much nicer than the aprilaire system i found, plus it's able to bring in fresh air from the outside, which is an added bonus. and it's really not too much more expensive. the nice thing about this too is it's a self-contained unit, rather than the lennox and carrier systems which rely on the a/c's evaporator coil to do the dehumidification. which means if the a/c goes out, so does my ability to dehumidify. with the honeywell, temperature and humidity control systems are completely separate, so if one or the other goes out it isn't as big a problem.

the other nice thing is i'll be able to have this system installed with the less-expensive furnace, and i can defer replacing the condensing unit until the spring. which means i can hold off on about $4k worth of HVAC stuff for a while and still get the dehumidification i need.

so anyway, ductwork is being installed on thursday, dehumidifier is being ordered, and it and the furnace will tentatively be installed next week.

i can't tell you how happy this makes me. i've been fretting over the whole HVAC thing since before we bought the house, and it feels soooo good to finally pick a solution and run with it.

Posted by Len at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

i'm on the verge of whoring myself out in order to pay for the mounting studio-building costs. it's absolutely amazing how quickly all this stuff adds up.

the latest sticker shock comes from pricing out the wiring for the studio. when you add up the 8-channel snakes, midi cable, connectors, boxes, plates, and various other odds and ends, the total comes to around $1000. granted, this price tag is for mogami cable, which is very high quality--but you pay for what you get. initially i was gonna cut some corners with the wiring, until i realized that much of this wiring is going to be permanent or semi-permanent, so it'd be best if i err on the side of higher quality now and know that i'll still be happy with my choice 3 years from now.

HVAC specifics are still up in the air (more on that in a sec), so to keep costs down for the immediate future i'm just dealing with the cabling that absolutely has to be run before putting up the drywall. which translates to the mic and headphone lines for the iso booths. the headphone connections are all cat5, and i just finished running 2 lines to each iso booth. i have about 120' of 2-channel mogami snake cable on order so i can do 2 mic jacks for each booth. the company i'm ordering from also makes these cool surface-mount modular boxes where you can run cat5, mic, 1/4", midi, RCA, or any other kind of cable imaginable and then get n-hole faceplates and connectors for each of the cabling types specially designed to fit that hole size. this solves my problem of needing wiring panels that both look nice and are easily configurable.

so about HVAC stuff. the ductwork is being installed on the 12th and 13th. i still have no clue yet what to do about the furnace. everything's fine except for the humidity control issue. over the past week when it's been cooler but not cold, i've seen the upstairs humidity get as high as 61%, which is suboptimal. both the HVAC guy and i are having a bitch of a time trying to find a system that can do whole-house dehumidification independent of heating cooling and not cost several thousand dollars.

currently the most promising solutions look to be the lennox humiditrol and the carrier infinity system. both use the a/c evaporator coil to dehumidify. i know the lennox system then has a reheat stage to compensate for the temperature drop across the coil. i'm waiting to hear back as to whether the carrier system has a similar reheat stage.

the only problem with both of these is that the humidity-control components aren't really modular; to use them you have to buy into a full-blown system with all these other bells and whistles, which drives up the cost rather quickly. and for both of these systems i'd have to replace the evaporator coil and condensing unit right away if i want to have whole-house dehumidification between now and spring. that alone adds at least $3500 to the price tag.

if i do the full infinity system now, then the system + ductwork would come to $12k. i suspect the lennox system will come with a simliar price tag. i might just have to get one of these systems without the a/c parts to get me through the winter and then deal with that in the spring. although it's not ideal, i could use my room dehumidifiers to hold me over until then.

fortunately at this point in the process there aren't too many more surprises with high price tags that could jump out at me. or at least so i hope.

Posted by Len at 06:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

still stuck in a holding pattern. insulation won't be in until friday at the earliest, and even then, i still have to wait until the ductwork is installed. which was originally supposed to happen this week but the HVAC peeps are swamped and can't come until the end of next week. bleah.

in the meantime, i'm spending a few minutes here and a few minutes there finishing up the bulkheads. i bought yet another drill today to help with some of the spots where the joists are really close together. unfortunately, the one area where i need it the most not even a right-angle drill can fit in there, so i'll need to figure something else out.

i'm also planning out all of the installation audio wiring. each iso room will have 2 mic jacks running to the console, as well as headphone connections and 1/4" patches to connect to the main studio room. the main room will have 3 panels spread across the room. each will have 8 mic jacks, midi in/out, and headphone connections.

i'm still a little on the fence as to what to do about the headphone connectors. currently i have the furman hds-6 headphone distribution system, which is nice, but i know at some point i'll outgrow it and want to get a hunkier headphone system. a weird feature of the hds-6 is that it passes analog data over cat5, thus requiring each mixer box to have 2 cat5 cables coming into it in order to pass all of the channels. their next model up is just as kludgy, with DB25 cables running to each of the boxes.

i think if/when i outgrow my current system (and have buttloads of money to blow), i'll look to the aviom system. nice thing about this is it uses cat5 also, but using a digital protocol over ethernet. with that in mind, i'm going to go ahead and wire up 5 pairs of cat5 jacks (1 in each iso booth, 3 in the main room). the furman headphone mixers can be daisy chained, for a maximum of about 8 mixers total (the limit of 8 is due to the mixer boxes not being powered--they get their juice over the cat5).

then there's the whole issue of hooking up to the computers out in the lounge. there are so many connections to be made there in so many different forms (vga, db25, usb, coax, firewire...) that it'd be really hard to design a panel which accommodates all of them. and is flexible enough to deal with changes down the road. probably what i'll end up doing is putting a hole through the wall just big enough to fish all this stuff through, and then pack in any gaps in the hole as tightly as i can. i'll also have to offset the hole on the lounge side from the one in the studio side to further help with sound attenuation through this weak point.

the nyquil's beginning to kick in and make me loopy, so i'm gonna call it a night.

Posted by Len at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

work's been demanding most of my time this week, so the only major studio update i have right now is "my bank account is getting smaller and smaller every day."

i went to hizzy depot yesterday to order my 3.5" unfaced insulation. everyone who carries standard 3.5" insulation carries the faced version, because no one but studio people have a need for the unfaced stuff. in order to insulate all the walls in the studio, it would cost me around $160 to get a bunch of rolled of the regular faced insulation. i fully expected to spend more for special-ordering the unfaced insulation.

but what i didn't expect was for the total to come to $1500. that's right, $1500. i'm being charged almost 10 times as much simply to get insulation which does not have a sheet of paper glued onto it. i spent about 45 minutes talking this over with the guy at the contractor desk, and he called owens-corning 3 times to make sure we had all the right numbers and everything. in the end, it became clear that 3.5" unfaced insulation really is such a rarely-asked-for thing that it does in fact cost nearly 10x as much as the normal faced insulation.

i know what you're going to say. "dude, just by the faced stuff and rip the paper off." believe me, this was the first thing i thought of. however, i have been unable to locate any testimonials from people who have successfully done this in a studio setting. which makes me a bit hesitant to try this, because if i do it and it proves to be problematic for whatever reason (residual glue effectively behaving like another leaf in the wall assembly, insulation ripping too much, insulation being too thin and not compressing enough, etc.), i most likely won't know there's a problem until after everything is built, at which point it would cost significantly more than $1500 to rectify. so i just decided to bite the bullet and fork over the money to at least have the peace of mind that the stuff i'm getting will definitely work.

meanwhile, back at the ranch, the HVAC guy has been doing some research regarding whole-house dehumidification and hasn't turned up much, at least not for carrier systems. the $9k system he spec'ed out for me does have a dehumidifier, but that's the only drawing point of that system. however, that $9k number includes the condensing unit, and he says that like the cheaper system i was tentatively going to go with, i can wait and replace the condensing unit later on in the spring. figuring at least $3.5k for the condensing unit, that brings the price of the hefty system down to $5.5k (or less). given that a central dehumidification system will cost me at least $1500 anyway, that price gap starts closing pretty rapidly. plus the infinity system lets you control the humidity from the t-stat, which is a huge bonus.

i've been going back and forth with regards to just how important dehumidification is. like i've mentioned before, during the summer humidity isn't too much of an issue since the A/C is by nature a dehumidifier. and during the winter months, you're adding heat without adding to the specific humidity, so that process is effectively a dehumidifier as well. but the real problem is around this time of year and in the spring, when the outside temperature is such that you don't run either the a/c or the heater all that much. currently, the living room humidity is 53%. i haven't been downstairs yet today, but i can guarantee it's at least 60%, which is at least 15% higher than needed for that space.

we're tentatively scheduled to do the studio ductwork sometime this week, and i'm going to call kevin on monday to review dehumidification options. at this point, i'm leaning towards biting the bullet and going with the hefty system. if nothing else, it will solve the dehumidification problem and will be slighlty quieter and more energy-efficient than the cheaper system.

Posted by Len at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i've turned my attention to the bathroom while i track down the remaining insulation for the studio and wait for the hvac stuff. initially i thought i could start drywalling it this weekend, but ran into a few snags...

i need to cut a 4" hole through the outside brick in order to vent the bathroom fan. initially i assumed i'd be able to get something for my hammer drill at home depot in the $30-50 range to help with this, but i soon discovered that home depot carries no core drills, and even if they did, a 4" one would run me close to $200. so i'm in the process of trying to track down a source for borrowing or renting such a beast.

hit another snag with the window. the plan all along has been to rip out the exisitng window and replace it with glass block. however, i keep completely forgetting about this part of the plan and the fact that i really need to put the glass block in before i start drywalling. the window's a little bit of an odd shape and will basically require me to use 6" x 6" block in order to fit the dimensions. however, all the major hardware stores in town only carry 8" x 8" blocks, so i'll have to obtain these pieces elsewhere.

i'm also second-guessing my drywall decisions for the bathroom. initially i was going to put up greenboard in the bathroom (greenboard is drywall which has been treated to better deal with moisture conditions in bathrooms), but then i read some stuff that seemed to indicate this wasn't really necessary. so i just got more regular 5/8" drywall instead. however, i was reading some more stuff tonight that leads me to believe i was right initially. better safe than sorry and all that stuff. so i'm gonna get me some greenboard this week and put that up instead. since i'll have to have it delivered, this will give me an excuse to have a couple of other big house items delivered. like a screen door! woohoo! we've been screen door deprived since about may.

in more positive bathroom news, we've been spending more time wandering home depot and lowes and looking at fixtures for the bathroom. i've also been trying to nail down the room colors. i think i've settled on using a kind of subdued violet for the base color and white (or perhaps something sandish but not too yellow) for the ceiling. we found a kick-ass medicine cabinet with a stainless steel frame which would go absolutely perfectly with this scheme. however, i'm having a bitch of a time finding a sink that would work with the cabinet, so i may have to let that one go. besides, i found a pedestal sink that we both like, and it's probably more productive to settle on a sink and then try and find a medicine cabinet that goes with it, rather than the other way around.

the quest for ceiling lights for the main studio room continues. i absolutely loathe 98% of lighting products on the market, so it's taking me a bit longer than i'd like to settle on something i'm happy with. the tricky thing continues to be the multi-faceted set of requirements: something that won't look too awkward when mounted onto a surface-mount junction box, has a contemporary design, doesn't hang down too far from the ceiling, and works with incandescents. i've found several lights that fit 2 or even 3 of those criteria, but nothing that fits all of them. if it's anything like some of the past lighting purchases i've been really happy with, i'll probably stumble across the right thing totally by accident.

Posted by Len at 12:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

building inspector came today and signed off on my work. even though i know my electricians are total code nazis, i'll probably also do an electrical inspection anyway just as a formality and to make sure my ass is covered.

other than the bulkheads, everything's ready for framing now. well, except for the fact that i noticed this morning that one of the doorways i framed is slightly misaligned and i'll have to correct it somehow--it's just enough to be problematic. i don't know how i missed that, since i've been pretty anal about checking level and plumb on all the frames i put up.

my resilient channel for the ceiling came in today, so the only outstanding material i need before drywalling is 3.5" unfaced insulation for all the walls. the local places only seem to carry faced insulation. faced insulation is problematic for several reasons. most importantly, the facing is flammable. this isn't a big deal for normal frames, but with my double frames, where the insulation won't be sealed in quite as well, this can be a problem. then there's the soundproofing effects of the facing. if you put the facing against the drywall, you don't get the full damping effect of the insulation, which is the whole reason for putting it against the drywall. it also can introduce weird resonant frequency problems inside the wall. and if you put the facing on the other side, you're creating what is essentially a faux leaf and changing mass-air-mass to mass-air-mass-air-mass.

i'm waiting to hear back from the HVAC guy. tentatively the installation will happen week after next. this will give me some time to track down the insulation, get things moving with the bathroom, and do more planning for wall colors and all that fun stuff.

this is so exciting. everything's finally starting to come together.

Posted by Len at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

lots of odds and ends to update on....

dave, disco, and tommy all came over last night to help me plow through the rest of the framing. unfortunately, everything that's left is kind of a pain in the ass, so we collectively spent a lot of time getting very little accomplished. woohoo!

the 1x3's i originally got from home depot to use as furring strips turned out to be warped in all sorts of ways, so i had to run back and get some more healthy-looking 1x4s. originally i was going to do furring on the exterior wall of the bathroom as well as the wall behind the sink/toilet, since there isn't room to frame either of those. however, we found that the surface of the latter wall was too irregular to work with, so i'm just going to attach drywall directly to the block. as for the exterior wall, we did 1x4s and attached them with liquid nails. surface was still a bit irregular and 1x4s have a tendency to bow, so dave supplemented the glue with nails in a few places. when i came through and put up the remaining furring strips, i ran 2x4s diagonally across the bathroom to better hold the pieces in place while they dry.

i had been scratching my head for days trying to figure out a way to build the bulkheads for the iso rooms such that i sacrifice as little as possible in the way of height and still have enough strength to support the weight of the drywall and all that good stuff. luckily tommy came over and offered a fresh perspective on the situation. kind of hard to explain what we did, but basically instead of making the bulkhead completely clear the beam (the beam being the reason the bulkheads are necessary in the first place), tommy suggested instead that we rest one end of the bulkhead 2x4s on the flange of the beam and then fasten the other end to studs. this means the bulkhead framing sits ever so slightly higher than the bottom of the beam, but that shouldn't be an issue since i'll be running resilient channel there anyway, which should give enough clearance past the beam overhang.

building inspector comes in the morning for the rough-in. theoretically i should be downstairs right now finishing up the remaining framing odds and ends, but i'm just going to get up early in the morning instead.

i got an HVAC quote today for about $6k, which is significantly more appealing than the $15k solution initially quoted for me. assuming a couple remaining details check out, i'll be moving ahead to schedule them.

i've been looking more closely at lighting options this week. i think i found fashionable wall sconces which would work well being mounted on surface-mount junction boxes. still looking for suitable incandescent ceiling lighting for the main studio.

i'm starting to plan out colors for the studio walls and all. i'm trying to stick with colors that evoke moods conducive to a good recording session. so far i've found a whole of color schemes i don't want to use--finding a color scheme that really speaks to me is turning out to be quite tricky.

2 more cheese posters for the lounge arrived today, bringing the grand total up to 13.

time to catch some z's before wrapping up the framing in the morning.

Posted by Len at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ever since the drywall and stuff was delivered, the basement has been horribly cramped. i have a hauling company coming any minute now to get rid of all the bits of trash piling up in and around our house that are too big to put out with regular trash.

in that pile we have:

• concrete block


• wood scraps


• kitchen fan


• various other debris from the kitchen remodel and carpet installation upstairs


• pole from old electrical line coming into the house


• more concrete block


• remnants from the failed floor leveling


• insulation leftover from the old place that i won't be able to use


• more wood scraps


• plaster/lathe chunks


• more remants from the failed floor leveling


• an ice cream maker


• pallet leftover from the insulation delivery

electricians came yesterday to rough in the electrical for the studio and bathroom. luckily one of the guys has done electrical work for studios before, so he understands the soundproofing issues of surface vs. flush mounting of boxes and all that fun stuff. we basically decided to surface mount everything to minimize the openings in the drywall.

the only place this is causing a problem is with the light fixtures. i really wanted to get some slick-looking lighting going on in the rooms, but most of the good ones i found assume they'll be flush-mounted on the wall, and might look just a wee bit awkward if they have to be mounted on top of a surface-mounted junction box. for the vox booth and storage room, i'm going to have to do wall sconces, since the layout of the ceiling in that space makes it tricky to do decent downlighting. i picked up one candidate sconce, which is pretty nice but has a huge body that is expected to flush-mount on the wall. i'm going to have to go back and find something a bit smaller so it doesn't look as awkward protruding out from the wall.

i'm kind of bummed about the main studio lighting. i found these really slick flex-track low-voltage halogen lights that are so incredibly neat looking and are exactly the kind of thing that i was looking to do with the space. however, the electricians looked at the one i had bought and pointed out to me that the toroidal transformers that these things use tend to be noisy in terms of RFI and all, so i'm having to scrap that plan and go back to incandescent downlights. hopefully i'll be able to find fixtures that aren't too dull.

in other news, i sustained a rather nasty ankle twist whilst on vacation, so i've been walking around on a cane much of the time. this will slow me down a tad on the studio construction, but i'm going to work around it as best i can to keep things moving.

Posted by Len at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

electrician called me back today. he's going to come out right after we get back in town in a week and do all the rough-in work. he's worked on our house several times and we've discussed the studio electrical needs several times, so hopefully there won't be any surprises.

once the electrical rough-in is done, the only two major remaining things before i can start drywalling everything are the ductwork and possibly a building rough-in inspection. i need to call the bureau of building inspection after the electrical is done to see if that's an issue with my permit or not.

Posted by Len at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

heard back from the HVAC guy today. he's really worried that if we tap into the existing furnace and duct line for the studio, there'll be too much acoustic bleed between the studio and the rest of the house. he's proposing doing a completely separate system for the studio. this was my original plan for the studio and is by far the best in terms of soundproofing.

however.....

this is going to require an engineered solution. they quoted me $760 just to do the plans. once they do that, i'd be looking at somewhere around $10-15k to implement. aside from the fact that i don't have this kind of money right now, i'm just not sure i want to spend this much. i'm trying to quanitify where the point of diminishing returns is for me now to help figure out how best to proceed. the other big problem with doing an engineered solution like this is it'll affect the resale value of the house, so not only would i be dropping $15k on it, but i'd probably be taking $5k or something off the house value. several people have said to me, "they're just trying to take you for a ride," but the reality is that HVAC stuff for studios is incredibly complex, and solutions like this tend to use very non-standard equipment which comes with an added price tag.

one thing i've learned through this whole process is that you can drive yourself absolutely insane (and piss poor) trying to make everything absolutely perfectly soundproofed. especially in a space like mine where you have to deal with certain realities presented by the existing structure. for instance, if i could float the ceiling, i'd get much better isolation from upstairs. but i don't have the ceiling height to do that, so i'm doing the next best thing and using resilient channel.

i'm currently waiting for him to give me a quote for doing the original thing we discussed, which is to put in a new furnace, install a dehumidifier, and install/replace whatever ductwork needs to be done and treat it with insulation and proper sizing and all. i realize that this means there will be some noise bleed through the ductwork, but it's still way less bleed than if the ductwork weren't treated at all. what it will come down to is the "do i really want to pay $5k more for a few additional dB of sound isolation?" question.

Posted by Len at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

delivery came today. 80 sheets of 5/8" is truly a massive amount of drywall. mine was the last delivery of the day, so everything on the truck was for me:

normally they'll drop all deliveries right at the curb and i need to haul them up the driveway. but this dude was nice enough to bring stuff all the way up the driveway so it was just a few feet from the garage door.

jim and disco came and helped me move everything into the house. i'm sooo glad both of them came; this stuff proved to be a beast to get into the studio. we found the easiest way to do it was 2 sheets at a time, which meant 40 trips back and forth. plus the 12 rolls of insulation and the 7 doors. so everything's in the house now, although i'm not sure i'll be able to do anything before we go to toronto.

in other news, gotta call the HVAC dude in the morning. i'm praying he'll have some good news for me.

Posted by Len at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

today i place the insulation/drywall/door order. well, most of the order, anyway. tomorrow they'll be delivering:

12 rolls of 8" ceiling insulation (~400 sq ft total)
7 doors (2 for garage entry, 2 for lounge entry, 1 vox booth, 1 storage room, 1 bathroom)
80 pcs 4x8 5/8" firecode drywall

the bastards didn't have unfaced 3.5" insulation for use in the walls, so i'll have to track that down separately. that's gonna be a lot of insulation--got around 800 sq ft of wall space to fill.

i also need to place my resilient channel order soon. i'll probably do that tomorrow so that it'll be in by the time we get back from toronto.

Posted by Len at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

less-than-stellar morning today. on my way into work, i got pulled over by a cop because my vehicle registration is expired. i've been so busy getting moved in and working on the studio and all that this keeps completely slipping my mind. he was very nice and sympathetic to my cause though, especially since i have my drivers license as proof that i moved and my inspection is still valid, and doesn't follow the same schedule as my registration. he was like, "yeah, that's a pain in the ass to keep track of when they don't expire at the same time." so he had to write me up, but he told me to get my new registration today and plead not guilty; given my circumstances, he said the judge will almost certainly throw the ticket out.

but before that, i had an HVAC guy come over to look at the studio and see what we have to do for the ductwork. i explained that if possible, i'd like to avoid having to replace the furnace and condensing unit until next year, and just worry about the ductwork over the studio area. but after looking over the setup, it sounds like i'll have to do a more hard-core solution.

kevin's big concern, as is mine, is with mechanical noise and air noise passing into the studio, and studio noises passing through the rest of the house. his current thinking is that we might need to do sort of a 2-zone system so that the studio area ductwork is more isolated from the rest of the house. this may involve having to rip out and redo the main supply/return lines running down the middle of the basement.

one issue that needs to be resolved is that one of the supply lines dropping into the studio is right above the mix area. having any forced air around the mix position does weird things to the air in that space and can introduce phasing problems and mess up the stereo imaging and all. kevin's thought is to run a new line 2-3 joists back, and use the existing duct run to go straight into the storage room.

so all this ductwork was starting to add up, but i was like, "well, at least i might not have to replace the furnace right now." but i lose there too. our furnace has a flue vent and no fresh air intake, and this introduces a problem i hadn't even thought of until kevin brought it up: with the studio space being all sealed up, that's significantly less space from where oxygen can be pulled into the furnace area. this means that we could easily end up with negative air pressure around the furnace, and all the gasses being vented through the flue would get sucked back into the basement. which is bad.

i've also been really concerned about the humidity factor this time of year. humidity is much easier to control in the summer and winter, because evaporator coils are dehumidifiying by nature, and when heating stuff up in the winter, you're taking colder air, which can only hold so much moisture, and then heating it up to a higher temperature with the same absolute moisture content, but because the temperature is higher, the relative humidity is much lower.

during the spring and fall, things aren't running as much and as a result the humidity can really build up. the current plan is to put a new furnace in, with a fresh-air intake to maintain proper oxygen for the furnace and air pressure balance. said furnace would be quieter than our current one (bonus), would be variable-speed (bonus), more efficient (bonus), able to have a dehumidifier added on (bonus), and cost several thousand dollars (!bonus).

kevin's passing things off to his brother, who's the engineer at the company. he's going to go over stuff more closely and come back with final recommendations. but i suspect that unless he discovers some sort of loop hole, i'm looking at anywhere from $7k-9k to do the new furnace, ductwork, ductwork insulation, and all that other fun stuff. fortunately, i should be able to hold off on replacing the condensing unit until next summer, so that'll help save a few bucks this year.

Posted by Len at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i'm kind of in a holding pattern right now while i wait for the HVAC and electrical peeps. HVAC peeps are coming on tuesday to look things over and give me an estimate. i'll probably have to wait a couple of weeks until we get back from toronto before getting the electricians in. i'm going to get a hauling service to come out this coming week and remove a bunch of shiznit from the basement so i can have some room to move around.

in the meantime, i'm trying to get my ducks in a row for various other studio odds and ends. i've been scoping out laminate flooring and have narrowed my choices down to about 4 or 5 laminate wood flooring models. i'm shooting for woods that are neither too light (maple) or too dark (cherry), and have a decent grain and pseudo-plank width.

i've also been spending lots of time on ebay looking for posters from cheesy bands to line the walls of the lounge. thusfar i have purchased posters for:

menudo
krokus
toni basil
donnie & marie osmond
taco
milli vanilli
stryper

i have bids in for posters from:

gary numan
tiffany

still looking for suitably cheesy posters from:

right said fred
gerardo
nelson
falco
meatloaf
hall and oats
captain and tennille

if anyone has any other cheesy bands to recommend, let me know.

i'm still shooting for getting drywall, insulation, and doors delivered this coming week. i'll have to order resilient channel separately, which may take a little while depending on which kind i end up getting. while there isn't a ton of drywall work i can do right now, i can do the exterior walls of the vox booth and storage room as well as some of the walls in the lounge while i wait on HVAC/electrical. i'm thinking of working on these chunks of drywall wednesday, thursday, and/or friday of this coming week. if any of yunz are interested in helping out, let me know. drywall's pretty fast-moving and very rewarding to put up -- it's the point where rooms really start to look like rooms.

Posted by Len at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

woohoo! disco came over last night to help with the framing, and this morning i erected the final frame for the doorway going into the vocal booth. check out the latest pics in the extended entry.

things to do next:

do some massive cleaning in the basement. it's a mess.

get a hauling company out to haul away a bunch of wood/concrete debris that's begining to fill up the basement.

fix some framing odds and ends, better reinforce a few areas.

build out the bulkheads for the vox booth and storage room.

get the electricians and HVAC peeps out there.

order the drywall, insulation, doors, and resilient channel.

and now for the pics...

Continue reading "all frames done!" »

Posted by Len at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

disco came over on sunday and helped me put up the other frame where the window goes between the studio and vox booth. thanks to a combination of some sloppiness on my part and the floor joists above being kind of annoying around this area, i didn't fully finish attaching the frame until last night.

all that's left to frame in now is the doorway to the vocal booth. the inner doorway is causing me some grief, again a combination of the floor joists being a pain and me being a bit sloppy with my measurements on the adjoining frame. i unfortunately didn't have any reason to suspect there might be any problems until i had already raised the adjoining frame, nailed it into place, and then came back to start stick-building the doorway some time later. long story short, the top plate over the doorway needs to be about 1/2" higher where it meets up with the other frame. rather than rip apart the stuff i've already put up and fight a losing battle with the joist unevenness, i'm just going to give it the ghetto solution and route out a shallow channel through the plate right under the nearest joist it attaches to. i hate to do stupid hacks like that, but at least that'll make the top plate be more level than it would be otherwise and will help the adjoining plates match up better.

not only that, but this give me an excuse to by a router! woohoo!

i'm still on the fence about whether to use furring strips for the exterior walls in the vox booth and storage room. either i get hosed on sound attenuation, or i get hosed on temperature/humidity control. after reading this posting i'm leaning back towards passing on the furring strips and just gluing 2 layers of drywall directly to the concrete block. it's sounding like no matter what i do, i'll never be able to get great temperature/humidity control in this space, so i may as well go the good sound isolation route.

Posted by Len at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i got a ton of stuff done the past couple of days, although it's hard to capture the progress with photos -- among other things, i permanently attached a couple of frames which previously were just temporarily clamped in place, i ripped apart the frame with the vox booth window and rebuilt it to lower the window a bit and better center it on the wall (originally it was pretty centered, but then i decided to make the storage room double as a second ISO booth and that resulted in adding a second wall between the two rooms and throwing things off a bit.), i cleaned up a bunch of corners, and i put up the walls between the vox booth and storage room.

storage room walls are all framed in now. here's a shot of the corner nearest the storage room exit. this might give you some idea of how tedious it was trying to work around the support beam and have all the weird angles and stuff. it's still not completely done -- you can still see a pie-piece-shaped opening going the length of the corner between the 2x6 on the one wall and the 2x4 on the other -- i need to rip a 2x4 and wedge it in there:

i'm putting the finishing touches on the vox-booth-side wall between the booth and storage room. we ripped another 2x4 at 17 degrees, slapped some liquid nails on, and attached to the exterior wall. here it is braced in place as it dries:

here's a shot from the studio looking in to the vox booth where the doorway will be. now you may be asking yourself, "didn't he already put up a doorway there a couple of weeks ago?" well, yes, i did, but i then found i mismeasured and didn't take into account the fact that the interior and exterior doorway frames need to be different lengths in order to accommodate the weird angles at the corners. so i ripped it out and am in the process of rebuilding it, starting from the interior doorway:

here's a view from inside the vox booth looking towards the console area and storage room. this angle does a wonderful job of capturing the jumbled mess of studs in close proximity where the inner vox booth walls, inner storage room walls, and studio-side wall all come together:

Posted by Len at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i finally got around to finishing framing out the bathroom tonight. this should be like the easiest space to do out of the whole studio, but every time i pick up a hammer to work on this space i run into stupid problems. like the floor being really unlevel, the existing walls not being entirely square or level, problems with finding an adequate way to attach one one of the frames to the space above, trying to settle on a door width, all that fun stuff.

this part of the basement is kind of a mess right now, but i was able to grab at least one semi-decent photo:

Posted by Len at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

among other things, today i'm working on the weird corners for the vocal booth and storage room. why are they weird? well, it all begins with the exterior walls. unfilled concrete block walls are already considered a mass-air-mass system, since the middle part of a concrete block of this size is mostly empty. this means i can't do a normal frame up against these walls -- that would introduce a 3-leaf system (mass-air-mass-air-mass), which would reduce the soundproofing ability. general wisdom in this situation is to attach the drywall directly to the concrete wall, thereby preserving the 2-leaf system. i'm trying to find a way to do this while at the same time dealing with the french drain lip around the perimeter and a need to maintain a reasonable amount of thermal insulation in this space.

while it's not ideal, my current plan is to use furring strips on the wall. this will help me create the smallest air cavity possible, while still allowing room to clear the drain lip and giving me space in which to put up foam insulation. the frame walls meeting up with the exterior walls form a weird corner, since the frames are coming in at an angle. so i have to rip a 2x4 at an angle in order to provide sufficient support and drywall-backing surface. here's an aerial view of one of these corners:

i haven't yet committed to using furring strips on the exterior walls. another idea i had today is based off the fact that i'll probably use 2 layers of 5/8" drywall on the exterior walls, like i am everywhere else. i might be able to get away with attaching the first layer directly to the concrete, cut to leave room for the drain lip. then the second layer of drywall would go all the way down to the floor. this is all speculative though, since the lip is just a wee bit deeper than 5/8", so i'll have to see if the plastic has enough play to compress a bit without cracking. i also need to think through thermal insulation issues -- a layer of 5/8" only has an R-value of 0.56, whereas foam insulation would provide an R-value of around 4 or 5.

the other issue i've had to deal with is how best to attach a ripped stud to an exterior wall. in a perfect world, studio walls would never even have to touch exterior walls, but dealing with this whole mass-air-mass thing with the concrete block walls makes that a bit hard to do while preserving the structural integrity of corners. initially i tried using my ramset to drive nails through the studs and into the wall. but this barely held and the stud came loose again with just the slightest agitation. i think this has to do with the ramset really being intended for doing perpendicular drives. next i thought about using tapcon screws, but here again i worried whether going through the concrete at an angle might weaken the connection. so i ended up going the liquid nails route. much as i hate to put things up using liquid nails (they're a complete pain in the ass to take back down at a later date), this really seemed to be the best way to attach these guys securely.

Posted by Len at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

some minor adjustments were made to the floor plan here and there as i was putting up walls and working through various issues.

the biggest changes are with the walls around the vocal booth and storage area. i had to tweak some wall details in order to deal with things like the support beam, considerations for the interior french drain running around the perimeter, and making sure there are sufficient accommodations for ductwork.

also, as i started getting everything in place i began to realize that the storage room might not be an ideal place in which to put the computers. pretty much all of my rack gear is going to have to go off to the right of the desk, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to have the computers all the way back over on the other side. also, i've been a bit concerned about having 2 heat generators running 24/7 in such an enclosed space, and their noise level limits what i can do with that room. so i've changed things up a bit and the computers will go in the lounge area. this opens up the potential for using the storage room as a second iso both should the need arise. initially i hadn't been as concerned about soundproofing in that room, but i decided to give it the proper treatment to maximize my options. there is now a double frame between the vox booth and storage room to better decouple those spaces.

more framing is happening this week, pictures to come.

Posted by Len at 04:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

got some more framing done today. i would have done more, but i ran out of 2x4's after home depot closed. here are some pics of how the studio looks now:

looking towards the vocal booth window...

looking toward the front left of the main room...

looking from inside the vocal both toward the console area...

looking from the vocal both through where the doorway will go to the back of the studio...

the more astute viewer might notice that a couple of the frames are missing their topmost plates and in fact are not yet attached. the more astute viewer might also notice that the front left portion of the main room is missing a short segment of framing. this all comes back to the continuing saga i started writing about yesterday regarding my attempts to do bevel rip cuts through 2x4s.

i got up bright and early this morning to go to home depot. lately, this is how every day of my life begins. anyway, i got there around 7:40 but then realized that on sundays they don't open until 8. so i killed 20 minutes then came back. time: 8:07. i decided to go ahead and get the ridgid 14" band saw i had been eyeing down yesterday. it's a tad expensive and maybe a bit of overkill, but at this point i don't really care. i just want a damn saw that can do 4" cuts at an angle and without choking. is that really so much to ask?

anyway, i look around and can't find any boxes for the saw i want. so i flag down one of the guys who works there and ask him if he can get one for me. he leaves and comes back 10 minutes later to inform me that the computer says they have 3 in stock, he just needs to locate them. he leaves and comes back 10 minutes later to inform me he's still looking for them. he leaves and comes back 10 minutes later to tell me the same thing again. apparently the computer isn't telling him what pallet the saws are on, so he has to get the forklift, look fora pallet that has gigantic ridgid boxes on it, drop it down, find that it's the wrong thing, put it back up, go to the next one, drop it down, ad nauseum.

this pattern continues for quite some time until eventually he locates one of the boxes and gets it on my cart. it isn't until then that i realize that this sucker is 178 pounds. anyway, i finally make it to the checkout line. the time on my receipt is 9:24, which means i was there for almost an hour and a half while this guy tried to locate the saw.

fast forward a few hours to when i'm back home again and finally have a chance to assemble the band saw. i notice the box is pretty dinged up, but that isn't too terribly uncommon with tools of this sort. but then i open it up and find that the styrofoam is insanely broken up and ripped and stuff, indicating that this thing may have had a bit of a rough life. upon further inspection, i find that this thing comes with somewhere on the order of 300 or so screws, washers, and nuts. and lo and behold, the neat little package which had all of this hardware in neat little compartments had come completely undone, flinging these 300 or so pieces all through the box. i was down on my hands and knees repeatedly like a hubba pigeon trying to find all the stupid little washers and stuff i could.

i started assembling the saw. and continued assembling the saw. and continued assembling the saw. after about 2 hours and the realization that i was still short a few screws and nuts, i decided to take a break and see how much more was left to assemble. to my dismay, i was still only on page 5 of 10 pages' worth of assembly instructions. i decided to say fuck it and return to framing and deal with this tomorrow.

i'm beginning to suspect that some higher power has nothing better to do than to make sure it's completely impossible for me to rip a 2x4 at 12 degrees.

Posted by Len at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

more walls went up this week. i've been really busy with work though, so i haven't really had a chance to update stuff here. i'm gonna get some more pictures up tomorrow.

west wall is all done now and i'm working on the south walls, which are the last ones to do. west wall was a little tricky because it runs through where the fireplace used to be, and that area essentially has no joists, so there's nothing to attach the frame to. plus it's right by the main support beam for the house and the furnace and all that, so it's a bit tricky working with the ceiling in that space. disco came over on thursday to help me run a 2x4 where a joist would have been. i would've liked to have done a 2x6 or 2x8, but there's cabling and stuff running through that space which precluded this. only part of the frame runs through this space anyway, and i'm using double top plates to brace to adjoining frames, so it's all pretty sturdy. i also had to be careful with the bottom plate in this space, since both the footing for the old fireplace and the french drain run under the frame. since the topmost concrete layer is so thin above the footing, i was hesitant to use the ramset to drive nails for fear of cracking. i decided instead to drill and run tapcon screws. i was smart this time and got shorter screws. although i was a little too smart and got them just a wee bit too short. i'm sort of annoyed by their sizes. i really wish they made 2 1/2" screws, but they only have 2 1/4" and 2 3/4". i got the 2 1/4" but i'm worried that they're not quite anchoring deep enough into the concrete. i picked up a box of 2 3/4" today to replace them.

house settling is so annoying to deal with. working on the south wall, i've noticed things like one of the joists having twisted a bit over time and being almost 1/2" higher than all the other joists. for a couple of the frames i've been doing, i've had to take individual measurements for each stud and test fit before assembling the frame. fortunately i'm on the home stretch now so there isn't much more of this to endure.

one of my biggest problems as of late has been doing wedge studs for the weird-angle corners. these are used when you don't have a 90 degree corner, so when the frames meet up there's a bit of a stud gap that needs to be filled in with a wedged stud to secure the corner and/or provide an adequate drywall-attaching surface at the corner. most of my attempts to do beveled rip cuts on 2x4s with my table saw have ended in failure. much of this is due to the fact that many of the angles i need to cut at come close to the diagonal through the 2x4, so instead of having to cut 3.5", i might have to cut like 4" and some change. all of my saws bottom out right around 3.5".

i spent way too much time today running around to various stores trying to find something that can cut deep enough for my needs. no one has table saws > 10" or circ saws > 7 1/4" in stock, and even if they did, they're quite pricey. my plan now is to get a band saw that can bevel and use that to do my rip cuts. i picked up a 9" band saw this evening, but it's really underpowered and could just barely accommodate the 12 degree rip i was trying to do. about 3 inches into a test cut, the blade got stuck in the wood and eventually snapped. so i need to go back tomorrow, slap down some more cash, and get a band saw that's at least 10". i'm tempted to just bite the bullet and get one of the 14" ridgids they carry at home depot. i've had really good experiences with their stuff thusfar.

Posted by Len at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

started working on the beast that is the south wall. this is where all the funky stuff with the angles and double frames and stuff happens. so far i have one of the main studio walls and the studio side of the vox booth doorway framed in (yeah, i know, the lens is all dirty):

the splaying of that studio wall will help eliminate parallel walls in the main space, and an added bonus with all that space between the frame and the exterior wall is that it'll give me room to tap into the return duct in the ceiling and bring it down and route it into the vox booth to help maintain proper air pressure in there.

framing is getting a bit trickier now with all these weird angles. i've had a horrible time finding good references on framing walls at angles, so i've just taken what i have found and supplemented it with a bit of trial and error. at every corner i'm taking the side of the frame that forms an angle bigger than 180 and wedging a stud into that corner by rip-cutting it at an angle. for everything else i just make pretend i'm in 10th grade geometry class all over again.

mating up with the vocal booth was a real challenge and took a while to plan out. i had several factors to work around in terms of deciding how to start into the doorway and all: there's this annoying support beam that gets in the way of everything, i have to deal with my double-frame requirements, i need to make sure there's adequate space to wrap a return duct around into the booth, i need to make the interior booth walls mate up properly with the exterior walls (don't have room to frame those out, so i'll probably just use furring strips), and the design of the interior french drain means the bottom plate has to stay at least a half inch away from the wall. i think i have all the bases covered now, but the real test will come tomorrow when i do the frame for the booth side.

my original plan had been to use tapcon screws to attach the bottom plates to the concrete floor, but i've had a tough time getting them to drive in all the way. i think part of the problem might be that the screws i got are just a tad longer than normally recommended for this kind of application. anyway, as much as i like the idea of using removable fasteners since it makes it so much easier to rip stuff out down the road, i just didn't feel like wasting any more time putzing around with this. that's where the gunpowder comes in.

putting any kind of perforation in concrete is a bitch, and that includes nailing. so i picked up a ramset hammer driven powder actuated tool. imagine sticking a nail into the barrel of a gun and firing it -- that's sort of how this things works. you put a specially-made nail with a rubber flute into the end, slip in a 22 caliber load, and then give the thing a single solid hit with a hammer and it drives the nail straight through into the concrete. and leaves the room with a "ted nugent was here" kind of smell. i've decided i'm more than willing to give up the idea of removability in exchange for using tools that contain gunpowder and come with a manual that has the word "death" at least once on every page.

in other basement news, i came home last night and found a bunch of water on the floor between the lounge and garage. looks like our bathtub upstairs is leaking and coming down through the garage ceiling. it's official now: since we've moved in, every single plumbing fixture in our house has had at least one problem. on the plus side, we have a plumber who's already working on other stuff in our house, so i can have him fix this next time he's here. on the minus side, said plumber is insanely busy, so god only knows when that'll be.

Posted by Len at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

after 50 billion years, the studio finally begins to look like a proper construction site. nearly all of the north wall is in place now. all that's left for that wall is another couple feet or so of framing. the only reason i haven't done that last bit yet is that the length of that section depends on several details which aren't set in stone yet, like the wall splay around the console area and the width of the wall in front of the console. here's how things look presently:

one thing i realized this morning is that i've been framing the studs 16" on center rather than the original plan of 24" on center. 24 OC helps reduce coupling between the drywall and frame, not to mention it uses a good bit less lumber. since the walls are only about 7' high and non-bearing, this would have been fine in terms of building code and all. however, my brain is just hardwired to put my stud markers on the plates every 16 inches. i briefly thought about switching and doing the rest of the framing 24 OC, but i figured it would be best to maintain structural consistency throughout the room.plus i just know that i'd be making this same goof through the whole project and would be constantly jumping back and forth between 16 and 24.

the only downsides of doing 16 OC are that sound isolation performance is reduced somewhat and i'm using more lumber than planned. i underestimated my 2x4 count as it is, so i'm probably going to need to pick up another 40 or so of them before all is said and done.

Posted by Len at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

did the rest of the framing for the wall between the studio and garage today:

you may be wondering about the unframed space to the right. that's intentional -- the wall that meets up at that corner will be splayed. that will also leave plenty of space with which to do any funky ductwork turnaround stuff that might have to be done for sound isolation purposes.

you might also be wondering about that 2x6 on the left. that's not really too common in standard corner framing--usually you just use a 2x4--but for studio stuff where there are 2 or 3 layers of drywall applied in staggered fashion, this extra width is needed in order to make sure the edges of all the drywall layers will have something to screw into.

it's a little tough from that photo to differentiate between the studio-side frame and the garage-side frame, so here's a closeup of the base of the frames to give a better view of the space being left in between for the air cavity:

Posted by Len at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

good news: framing has finally begun in the studio!

bad news: the kitchen sink backed up after dinner tonight. and of course i left my snake at our old place when we moved, so i had to run up to home depot and get another one. long story short, in retrospect i think the problem was only a few feet past the cleanout and was in fact fixed after a couple of quick snakings, but i ended up spending several hours getting filthy and trying to figure out why the snake keeps getting stuck further down, about 15 feet past the cleanout. at the time i thought this was where the problem was, but given that all the drains in the house appear to be functioning normally now, i suspect that this is either a red herring or one of those things that needs to be looked at eventually but not necessarily right away.

i originally intended to spend the evening doing more framing and getting the pics and details posted, but fate decided that a better way to spend that time would be covered from head to toe in sewer sludge. i was going to just put up the studio pics and stuff i currently have, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow -- i'm totally wiped.

Posted by Len at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

been busy moving the house and studio and everything the past couple of weeks, so no major studio updates right now.

however, i am starting to plan out and order the wall decorations for the lounge. i'm going to go ahead with my plan of getting band posters from mega-cheesy musicians to adorn the walls. that's where i need everyone's help. i need some more names of really cheesy groups. i don't mean like journey or bon jovi cheesy. i mean absolutely positively horrible cheesy, barely even having nostalgia value and only referenced as the butt of a joke. i'm thinking like milli vanilli, tiffany, vanilla ice, don johnson's failed music foray....you get the picture. i prefer better-known cheese acts, but i'll probably take lesser-known cheese acts as long as they all had amazingly bad mullets or something. i'm also trying to get good coverage of the 70s, 80s, and 90s and multiple genres. mmm....cheese...

Posted by Len at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Len at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i got my soybean mastic remover yesterday and worked on the floor last night and this morning. nitin came over last night to help me and we poured the stuff out on the floor and i spread it out with a push broom to cover the whole floor without being too thick. we waited about an hour and then started getting the stuff back up. it was really nice not having to worry about ventilation during this whole process and this stuff had a pleasant orange smell.

the company's literature says that after their stuff sits for a while and pulls up the mastic, things will have the consistency of "very old motor oil." my hunch, which was proven correct last night, was that the consistency would actually be closer to what one would see if 5000 rednecks from alabama all congregated in our basement with chewing tobacco.

we picked up a 35-lb container of cat litter to assist with the cleanup. my initial plan was to squeegee everything into one area and then toss the litter on top to absorb it all, but i found it really hard to adequately move all that goop with the squeegee. what we ended up doing instead was sprinkling the litter all over the floor and pushing the litter with the squeegee, letting it absorb the goop as it moved along. this worked amazingly well, but did leave a whole lot of litter morsels on the floor that we had to deal with later.

while we were waiting for the mastic remover to do its thing, we went out to home depot and i bought a pressure washer. the initial plan had been to pressure wash the floor last night to clean up all the remaining residue, but i ended up getting a gas model and by the time we were ready to start this part of the cleaning it was past 10pm so i decided to wait until morning. i'm glad i did, as we found out today that this little bugger is LOUD.

we sprayed the floor with a standard pressure washer cleaning detergent and then pressure washed everything. in a perfect world, i would've had us go really slowly with the pressure washer and get every last bit up, but given that the now-defunct floor drain in this part of the basement has already been sealed up, this would have generated quite a bit of water to contend with. instead, stacey manned the sprayer and did the back-and-forth at a less OCD pace. she started at the end furthest from the laundry area and then worked her way towards it, steering everything towards the functioning floor drain in there. i followed up afterwards with a mop. because i have some sort of weird fetish for wet mops and suspect that in another life i was stanley spadowski.

i was an idiot and forgot to take some pictures before i left the house, but the end result is that the floor went from a black color to more of a light brown. in talking with the asbestos contractor who was at our house way back when, it sounds like all mastic removers leave floors this color--it all comes down to the whole mastic-concrete interaction. not that i particularly care how it looks, as the bathroom will be tiled and the lounge area will have some sort of yet-to-be-determined floor covering. there are still a few spots that have a bit of mastic on them, but i think we can live with this seeing as how the vast majority is now gone.

Posted by Len at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i've been feeling increasingly uneasy about the leveled floor in the lounge/bathroom area ever since a couple of weeks ago when i noticed that around one of the doorways it had formed a really poor bond with the floor below and a chunk of it actually broke off wihle i was tapping out the 2x4 that had been in the doorway providing an edge for the floor.

i've been suspecting more and more that the rest of the floor might have a similarly weak bond, what with this being that first crap-ass brand leveler i used and all. rather than find this out the hard way a year from now, i decided to play it safe and just rip up the leveled floor. which, as i've mentioned previously, never came out all that level anyway and has caused me nothing but grief.

i hooked up a chisel bit to my awesome new hammer drill (yes, i've purchased 3 drills since we bought this house) and started hitting spots on the floor at the point where the concrete floor and leveled floor meet, at a really small angle to the floor. my suspicions proved correct, as the majority of the floor started coming up with barely any chiseling. at one point, i managed to pull up an intact chunk roughly 12" x 18". call me cynical, but i'd say the primer i applied to the floor prior to the leveling didn't do shit.

so right now i'm about halfway done removing the floor, and i need to start thinking about what to do with the mastic residue and also how best to deal with the floor area where one of the bathroom walls will go, since the wall will be right over where the shower used to be and that part of the floor is pretty heavily sloped towards the old floor drain.

no definitive solution to the floor-sloping issue yet, but i have made some progress on solving the mastic issue. way back when i was removing the tile in the studio, i started researching various floor solvents but quickly abandoned that endeavor when i realized that most of the things i turned up were highly flammable and/or gave off all sorts of nasty fumes. well, this week i stumbled across a newer breed of floor solvents made from soybeans. yes, soybeans. these things have a high flash point (usually around 450F for the stuff i was looking at) and are nontoxic/noncaustic.

one of the more frequently-occuring names in this market is franmar and so i decided to order their mastic remover product, which i should have by the end of the week. it looks like the part where you remove the mastic from the floor is a no-brainer: you pour the stuff, let it sit for an hour or so, and then you can just push the mastic away from the floor with a squeegee. but one of the trade-offs of this being environmentally-friendly and all is that cleanup and disposal is a bit more of a hassle than traditional chemicals. you basically end up with a floor covered with this goopy stuff which is about the consistency of motor oil and you have to get it all up. basically you have to get something down to absorb the goop--i've heard things like sawdust recommended, and i'm pondering trying something wacky like cat litter. then you have to do a thorough cleaning of the floor to get rid of the rest of the goop, and i'm told this is easier said than done and may involve several passes and possibly even different cleaning chemicals. but it's all worth it. especially when i get to tell people my studio has a vegan floor.

in other floor news, ardex was closed yesterday and today so i haven't yet been able to call them to see what to do about the hairline cracks in the studio floor we poured last week.

Posted by Len at 01:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

good news: this was by far the smoothest floor leveling i've done. there were a some blemishes, like some dimples and whatnot throughout the floor, but i was able to fill these in with a featheredging patch and get things pretty smooth.

bad news: as i was down on my hands and knees troweling the patch, i started noticing these little hairline cracks. as i moved around more i started noticing more. upon closer inspection, the entire floor has hairline cracks about every 6-12 inches. i'm going to call the company that makes the leveling mix that i used tomorrow and see if they know of any conditions that might cause this.

regardless of what they tell me, i'm really bummed, since i'm 99% certain whatever they tell me is going to start with "well, you'll need to rip up the stuff you already laid down and then..." given that i've already spent $500 pouring this stuff, i'm not exactly eager to sink that kind of money into doing it again.

with my streak of bad luck with floor levelers thusfar, even after finding the best brand possible and getting useful advice from everywhere, i'm feeling inclined to say fuck it, i don't care anymore if the floor isn't level, and just pummel everything with a hammer drill and rip it out.

this still leaves the second reason i had for leveling the floors, which was to encapsulate any mastic residue from the previous floor tile which might contain asbestos. i'm thinking i might just attack this with some sort of pressure washer, which is more or less what the asbestos contractor would do if i paid them about $2000.

Posted by Len at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

good news: this was by far the smoothest floor leveling i've done. there were a some blemishes, like some dimples and whatnot throughout the floor, but i was able to fill these in with a featheredging patch and get things pretty smooth.

bad news: as i was down on my hands and knees troweling the patch, i started noticing these little hairline cracks. as i moved around more i started noticing more. upon closer inspection, the entire floor has hairline cracks about every 6-12 inches. i'm going to call the company that makes the leveling mix that i used tomorrow and see if they know of any conditions that might cause this.

regardless of what they tell me, i'm really bummed, since i'm 99% certain whatever they tell me is going to start with "well, you'll need to rip up the stuff you already laid down and then..." given that i've already spent $500 pouring this stuff, i'm not exactly eager to sink that kind of money into doing it again.

with my streak of bad luck with floor levelers thusfar, even after finding the best brand possible and getting useful advice from everywhere, i'm feeling inclined to say fuck it, i don't care anymore if the floor isn't level, and just pummel everything with a hammer drill and rip it out.

this still leaves the second reason i had for leveling the floors, which was to encapsulate any mastic residue from the previous floor tile which might contain asbestos. i'm thinking i might just attack this with some sort of pressure washer, which is more or less what the asbestos contractor would do if i paid them about $2000.

Posted by Len at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

dave and rob came over tonight to help level the floor in the studio room. we were faced with having to level out 400 square feet by mixing and pouring 4 batches of leveler mix in the shortest amount of time possible, so we optimized the whole process as much as we could. we pre-opened the bags for each batch and placed them near the part of the floor where we would ultimately pour the batch so that we could start the mixes and pour them out as quickly as possible. we also had 2 drills with mixer bit attachments going at the same time so that we could mix 2 batches in parallel. i manned the speader and smoother to get the leveler mix spread out and in position as quickly as possible while it was still flow-able. in the end, it was about 12 minutes elapsed time between the pouring of the first batch and the spreading and smoothing of the last batch.

this was definitely the best leveling pour i've been invovled with thusfar, but the end result was still far from perfect and i'll need to go back and do some touch-up this weekend. in talking with people who do this sort of stuff for a living, you really have to do several floor-leveling gigs before you really learn the ropes and develop your own techniques for making the process go as smoothly as possible. whilst picking up stuff at the floor supply place this morning, i managed to talk with a couple of guys and get some more really good advice i was able to apply to the pour we did (e.g., take the area where 2 batch pours meet and hit along the whole seam with something like the edge of a trowel to help make sure the batches flow into one another and reduce the potential for creating a hump at the seam).

i'm so close to starting on framing i can hardly contain myself

Posted by Len at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the lumber was delivered this morning. 120 pieces in all (2x4s, treated 2x4s, 2x6s, furring strips). they dropped everything off at the end of the driveway and i got to make about 20 trips getting everything into the house:

i bought a kick-ass miter saw over the weekend:

my first use of the wood and saw was to create a temporary frame around the door opening leading to the garage so i can square everything back up and put in half-blocks to make the concrete all flush with the door frame which will go in there eventually. here's the opening i started with:

after putting in the temporary frame, you can see how out of alignment each layer of block is:

you can also see the bowing of the wall near the opening, undoubtedly the result of me hitting other parts of it repeatedly with a hammer and chisel to create the opening:

i corrected the bowing at least somewhat by placing a 3' length of 2x4 against the wall at various parts and tapping it with a hammer. i'm being as careful as i can with the blocks that immediately surround the opening, as their bonds to the other blocks are already a bit weakened from the chisel action and i don't want to make the condition too much worse.

i also totally emptied out the studio room in preparation for tomorrow's floor leveling extravaganza. i just need to apply a coat of the primer solution in the morning and we should be good to go with pouring the cement in the evening.

by the power of greyskull, i will have at least one wall framed by the 4th of july.

Posted by Len at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

my concrete planer arrived yesterday:

i'm going to use this to smooth out the remaining blemishes in the floor and get everything level. the only thing sexier than a power tool is a special-purpose power tool, and this thing is awesome. i gave it a run this morning on the floor--that diamond wheel gets spinning and plows right through the cement with little effort. the only spot that's going to need work is the edge adjacent to the laundry area; when i poured the batch of crap-leveler, it built up against the 2x4 i had along that edge and so the floor slopes up there and is higher than everything else. i used the planer to level a portion of it, and it worked great but took several passes to shave it all down.

Posted by Len at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the excavation phase of the basement waterproofing happened today. they trenched along about 2/3 of the non-garage exterior walls and dug the pit for the sump pump.

Continue reading "studio moat!" »

Posted by Len at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

one thing i kept putting off until tonight was the question of where to put the bathroom door. the plans thusfar have all had the door in a default location, which kind of works except for the fact that it gets in the way of the other things i have planned for that area (some sort of table surface with a microwave, coffee machine, etc.). on the other hand, sticking the door on the other wall has its own complications since i have to work with an existing 28" run of concrete block. to preserve all that block and then frame out a door along that wall would make for a rather large powder room (and somewhere between the block wall and the door i'd want to have enough framing to do a recessed double junction box for lights and the mandatory sink-area GFCI). i decided to go back to one of my earlier ideas, which was to frame the door at an angle.

this allows me to have enough framed wall adjacent to the concrete block to do the recessed electrical stuff, keeps the door free of the table area, and makes for a sanely-sized bathroom overall. an added bonus to the angling is it gives a couple of square feet back to the lounge and gives a slightly more open feeling to the space as a whole.

Posted by Len at 02:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i loaded up the sawzall with a tungsten-carbide blade and tackled the funky drain pipe in the floor. the drain pipe is iron and is really thick, not to mention pretty big (3"), so it took a good 20-25 minutes to chop through all of it. here's the extracted piece.

i grabbed a 3" rubber cap for the remaining stub and got it nice and tight around it:

then i tossed a bit of coarse gravel into the hole and filled in the rest with concrete (yes, i know, i'm the sloppiest concrete person ever. at least my floating skills are getting marginally better):

meanwhile, back at the ranch, the floor primer in the lounge/bathroom area finally dried and stacey and i mixed and poured the ardex K-15 leveler to fix the problems of the crappy-ass leveler we got from home depot. i came more prepared this time. i bought a pair of cleats so i could slosh through the pour without messing anything up. i decided sort of at the last minute that a gauge rake would be extremely helpful in getting a nice even spread. but it's a little hard to locate such a contraption oon a sunday morning, so i made a ghetto gauge rake--we roamed the hardware aisle of home depot until i found these little window-lock contraptions that i could totally bastardize and screw onto each end of my concrete spreader to lift it about 1/8" off the ground.

since the instructions call for mixing 2 55-lb. bags for each batch, we got a couple of heavy-duty plastic trash cans to hold each batch. fortunately, the space is small enough that we were able to do the whole floor with 2 batches. once it hits the ground, you only have a few minutes to work the stuff before it starts to set. so we had to work really quickly, especially given that we were trying to fix a horribly-uneven floor and had to work around all sorts of obstacles like the water main and the space around the toilet drain. a few hours later, the floor was dry to the point where i could walk on it (nevermind the wavy gray look along the base of each wall--that's just an artifact of me aggressively spreading the leveler toward the walls and it sinking back down to find its level):

overall, this stuff worked great. however, the trash cans we bought aren't flush at the bottom, so in both batches we ended up with small-ish chunks of cement that didn't fully mix with the water. after pouring, i pulled out the bigger chunks by hand, but a bunch of smaller ones still made it into the pour, giving this sort of concrete measles look in certain areas. also, i didn't quite work quickly enough to spread everything out before it stopped flowing. so there are a few level blemishes throughout the floor, but they're extremely minor compared to the lumpy set of the other crap we used. i'll probably just go through with a chisel and knock out any chunks, and then do some spot leveling of any remaining level inconsistencies.

Posted by Len at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the original plan for today had been to pour the new floor leveler in the lounge/bathroom area. however, i applied the floor primer a little before noon and as of about 7am it still hadn't fully dried yet. yay humid basements. so we're going to try again tomorrow morning.

in the meantime, i decided to tackle the drain pipe in the floor of the studio left over from the mondo bar. as luck would have it, our contractor was over today working on our new kitchen and he let me borrow his hammer drill and his sawzall to help with this endeavor.

i've never had to cut through concrete slab before, so this was pretty exciting. i loaded up the hammer drill with a mason drill bit and set it on the hammer-and-drill mode. then i drilled a whole bunch of holes all the way through the concrete and attacked the area with my hand sledge and chisel. it's kind of surreal the first time you poke through your basement and hit dirt, this feeling of holding soil in your hands and realizing this may very well be the first and last time you're touching the stuff underneath your house. here's how the area around the drain pipe looks now:

the next step is to lop off the top of the drain pipe. i have to get in under that weird flange thing with the sawzall and cut through the iron pipe there and then throw a rubber cap on the pipe. i picked up a couple of tungsten carbide blades for the sawzall tonight to help with this.

in other masonry news, i removed some more concrete block between the garage and the studio to make more room for framing studs around the doorway which will eventually go there. i'm trying to make sure i leave at least 8-9 inches on either side of the door so i can have enough space to properly frame in the cripple studs above the doorway and all that. one thing i hadn't checked before today was whether the various layers of concrete block line up. they don't. i put a 2x4 along one side of the opening and all of the blocks are a good 1-2" off from one another. i still have to put in half-blocks on every other layer to make a rectangular opening, so probably what i'll do is frame some temporary 2x4's through the opening (making sure everything's square and level, of course) and then use a combination of concrete block, mortar, slivers of concrete block, and maybe some cement to get everything flush with the 2x4's.

and this of course is a roundabout way of making an excuse to buy some sawhorses and a chop saw! woohoo!

Posted by Len at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i spent some time a couple of weeks back trying some radically different designs, but none of them really panned out and i kept coming back to the basic layout of design #2. after some minor tweaks, here's how it currently looks:

here i got more consistent with my room-within-a-room framing for the main room. also, i incorporated some of rod gervais's door design concepts to provide single-door entry to the vox booth and storage room (more on that later). i also decided to give in and put the door to the storage room in the studio rather than in the vocal booth. i know it'll screw up L/R symmetry around the mix position, but i'm hedging my bets on that being a relatively minor flaw and that whatever acoustic shortcomings it might present will be greatly outweighed by the convenience factor.

Posted by Len at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

civil engineer finally came out this morning to look at the two places where we have water coming into the basement. sounds like the root problem is that the terra cotta perimeter drain is cracked, clogged, or otherwise inoperable and during heavier rains the water level is coming up higher than the level of the basement. so, no really major surprises in terms of the culprit.

we can either fix this problem externally or internally. externally, they would dig down to the foundation all along the side of the house, remove the old drain, install new PVC piping, pack it in with gravel, fill the ditch back in, grade away from the house, and then dig an equally-long ditch in the backyard to lay the drain runoff. this involves a ton of digging and, since there's no way to get any machinery up to that part of the property, they'd have to do it all with shovels. which translates to a price tag of $13-14k.

the other option is to fix it internally. essentially, they'll dig out a trench along the perimeter wall on the inside, deeper than the current perimeter drain. then they install what's more or less an interior french drain which flows all water into a sump pump, and fill the trench back in with concrete. this costs about $4k and only takes 2-3 days to install.

both solutions have their pros and cons, but given that the external solution costs 3-4 times what the internal one costs, we're inclined to go with the latter. added bonus: they can start work on this next monday.
the sooner they get this resolved, the better, seeing as how i can't start on any studio construction until this problem goes away.

Posted by Len at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i laid down the floor leveling today. unfortunately, home depot doesn't carry the stuff i wanted and i ended up getting this quick-set stuff. turns out this stuff starts setting before it finds its level. GAH! what a waste! no matter what i did i couldn't get it to smooth out. a minute after pouring the stuff, if i poked a section of the poured area with the squeegee, the impression would stay and harden that way.

i tried putting down a second layer to smooth things out a bit, but i just made it worse. things also ended up a bit thicker than they should be. we tried adding more water to the mixture to make it a little more runny, but that didn't seem to help. i'm trying to decide now whether to track down of the better mixtures that spend hours finding their level, or rip this up and start from scratch or what.

Posted by Len at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

nothing major to report. i was out of commission yesterday due to some sort of infection which was causing my throat to swell up. what should've been a 3 hour ER visit or thereabouts turned into 9 hours, thanks to UPMC switching to a completely new computer system this week which was confusing everything, plus stupid little things like the lab losing the blood samples that were taken from me. joy.

anyway, my throat's doing much better today and while i wait for the comcast guy and the carpet-measuring guy to show up, i'm prepping the lounge/bathroom area of the basement for pouring the leveling mixture. with any luck i'll get everything poured this afternoon and be able to take some nice photos tonight.

we have a civil engineer coming out on friday morning to assess the water problems we've been having. i've been told by people in the trade that these companies that specialize in this kind of stuff charge an arm and a leg to do the same type of repairs that one can do on one's own. which is pretty much what i suspected, but given the proximity to the neighbor's property and all her concerns, doing it ourselves isn't really much of a choice if we want to get off on the right foot. i was talking with our mason today, and he says probably what they'll do, which is very similar to what i was going to do this past weekend, is dig down to the foundation, cover the entire exterior wall with portlant cement and continue this down to the foundation and make it curve away from the house to provide a lip of sorts, cover all of this with tar, fill the dirt back in, and maybe provide some sort of ground covering. grading away from the house may or may not be necessary (or doable, seeing as how this would require altering the neighbor's yard), same thing with french drains.

Posted by Len at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

bleah. so on friday i went over to the house to do some work and found a huge pool of water in the basement. apparently all that rain we got brought more water down to the foundation than usual. further inspection of the side of the house revealed that the neighboring yard is sloped towards ours and there's a depression right around where we're seeing the leakage. i'm not sure that this counts for all of the water, but it's at least one culprit. all said, i ended up sucking up around 20 gallons of water with my shopvac throughout the course of the evening.

the plan had been to dig down about 8 feet to the foundation, drain out the water that has accumulated down there (we already know that there's water inside the bottom few layers of concrete block around the problem area), and fill this back in with a slope away from and towards the rear of the house. however, the weather kind of turned against us today. and we discussed this plan with our neighbor and she's concerned that in doing this we may end up just pushing more water back onto her property. in the interest of being a good neighbor, i'm gonna have someone come out there and look at it with both of us to see if we can find a solution that meets everyone's needs. which of course is going to push the start of the main studio construction back to god knows when.

in other news, we started preparing the lounge/bathroom area for floor leveling so i can at least make some progress there while we figure out what to do about the water leakage. we sealed off the shower drain and got the floor all clean, which gets us most of the way there. we picked up 10 bags of the self-leveling mix as well as a power mixer for my spiffy new heavy-duty drill since the leveling stuff can't be mixed by hand. i'm hoping to pour all the stuff tomorrow night so it'll be ready before the end of the week when people start coming in to do the kitchen installation upstairs.

Posted by Len at 07:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

started today on our first truly non-destructive mod to the house. we filled in the gap in the floor where the fireplace was.

this was the first time i worked with concrete, so it was a crash course in mixing and pouring, screeding, floating and all that fun stuff. probably wasn't the best area on which to learn this stuff, given that it's triangular, in a corner, and what with having to use the existing floor as the screed surface, there was no place for the excess to fall off. on top of that, in hindsight it appears that i bought the wrong float for the job (hand float instead of a bull float). end result: the finish is insanely lumpy. probably not too big a deal, since it appears to be mostly cosmetic and i'll be pouring leveler across the entire floor anway. i'll confirm with the mason tomorrow when he comes to get the rest of his stuff.

there's still one problem with the area around the fireplace that will need to be dealt with eventually. there's a fair amount of water buildup inside the base of the wall where the chimney is. when the area under the fireplace was fully excavated, there was a fair amount of water seeping in and pooling there. it doesn't seem to be as bad now that i've filled in this space, but i can still see a bunch of wetness in the first 2 rows of block. this has probably been like this for quite some time, but the thickness of all the fireplace layers helped mask the problem. i'm going to seal it as best i can once the concrete cures, but i think we might eventually have to put in a french drain. before we do that, though, i want to investigate the possibility of reworking the slope along the side of the house to try and divert water towards the back of the house. right now, there's a bit of a depression right around where the chimney is, plus the neighbors' yard is a higher elevation than ours, so everything heads in that direction when it rains.

Posted by Len at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i want to decorate the lounge area in an interesting way. this space is going to ultimately have a book/video library, a tv/dvd/tivo, and a fridge and microwave and all that fun stuff. oh, and seating, of course. i'm thinking of covering the walls with the cheesiest band posters i can find. you know, like those old maiden posters and shit. what do y'all think?

i've been having this idea for a while now, but it was further reinforced today when we were tearing down some old shelving in the garage and came across this:

Posted by Len at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

woohoo! the destruction phase is now complete. we ripped out the bathroom sink, the skanky-ass toilet, the 300-pound utility sink, the kitchen cooktop and oven, and a whole bunch of other odds and ends. al came over to fetch most of his masonry stuff and grab some of our unwanted copper and aluminum to take off and recycle. i am still amazed at how quickly one can fill up a dumpster.

i brought my dehumidifier over to the house last night. the basement is extremely damp, a combination of the humidity and the fact that water has been tossed everywhere during the tile removal and all that. wet footprints would stay wet for hours and hours and wet areas of the floor were staying like that for days. over the course of 12 hours, the dehumidifier sucked up about 2 gallons of water. it would've gotten even more had the tank not filled up. i emptied it again today and it's been running non-stop and the floors are finally drying up.

the bathroom is still smelling skanky. i found in the course of removing the toilet that it wasn't actually bolted to the floor. looked like the only thing holding it in place was residual glue from long-gone flooring. i have rags in all the exposed drains except for the shower drain--hopefully this will be sufficient until we install the new fixtures. once the floor finishes drying, i'm going to sweep up the rest of the debris and give this whole area a good cleaning to see if that helps with the odor. but i still need to see about sealing off the old shower drain, plus i need to have the drain pipe coming down from the kitchen above checked out--it's looking rather funky right around the floor area. part of me wonders whether we shouldn't have all the DWV assemblies checked out just to make sure there aren't any problems or vent clogging or anything like that.

Posted by Len at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

woohoo! after pulling up about 350 or so tiles today, all of the floor tile is outta there. of course, the subfloor underneath is mostly black, so i'm now dealing with a room where the floor and half the walls are all black. it's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. none more black. fortunately, there's nothing more to remove from this room now other than the door frame and the drain pipe stub from where the bar was, so things can only get lighter from here on out.

i need to go back this weekend and rip out the bathroom fixtures and utility sink, after which point the destruction will be essentially done and i can switch to focusing on building things back up.

Posted by Len at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i'm just about to the point where i'm ready to order all the main building material for the studio.. here's how it's looking thusfar:

63 sheets of 5/8" drywall
70 2x4's
25 pieces of resilient channel
250 pounds of drywall compound
700 feet of joint tape
1200 drywall screws
??? insulation ???
6 door frames
6 solid core slabs

Posted by Len at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

here's the last picture i took of the remains of the fireplace before al started working on it:

here's how it looks now with the walls all sealed up and all:

all that's left for the fireplace is filling in the floor.

Posted by Len at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

al finished filling in the cavity between the removed fireplace and the chimney. woohoo! i think all that's left is sealing off the flues at the top of the chimney and removing the leftover bricks and block.

dumpster #3 is being delivered tomorrow. this will be a small dumpster which i'm going to use for disposing of the remaining floor tile, the disgusting sink and toilet in the bathroom, any remaining masonry stuff, a whole bunch of shit that's been piling up in the garage, and possibly the old stove and oven upstairs if no one bids on my ebay listing for them.

speaking of floor tile, i had one of those caveman-learns-to-use-tools moments today. i've bitched before about what a pain in the ass it is ripping out floor tile with a floor scraper, especially one that isn't designed to let you thrust it with your foot. well, i decided to try pounding the hell out of the tiles with my hand sledge, and then use the floor scraper on them. this worked beautifully. i was able to cut the time probably in half--i removed about 100 tiles in under an hour. only problem is, the tile fragments go flying everywhere when you whack them like this. if you're thinking about trying this technique, wearing full wraparound eye protection is an absolute must.

Posted by Len at 07:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i picked up this table saw today:

this is really going to come in handy when i do the framing, as the non-parallel walls are going to require lots of miter and bevel cuts. i'm normally not a big fan of ryobi's products, but this is a pretty decent unit and the price was great, too.

i gave it a test drive by cutting a piece of MDF to fix a cabinet in our current house. don't worry, i didn't have any emo philips incidents. it really shined on the rip cut, but it had a little more trouble with cross cuts. i cut a total of 3 boards, and on all 3 it either kicked back about 1/4" before finishing the cut, or threw the short side of the cut back about 4-5 feet. this may have been because i wasn't using any sort of push stick to gide the short side of the cut along--i'll do that next time.

Posted by Len at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

pretty early on in the planning phase, i made the decision to put the studio on a separate HVAC system from the rest of the house. this would keep studio noise from travelling to the rest of the house and would also allow me better control over temperature conditions in the studio.

this is turning out to be a huge pain in the ass.

since a soundproofed room when closed is essentially airproofed as well, it's imperative to bring fresh air into the room to prevent musicians from passing out. but since the room is so sealed, you need to exhaust some of the return in order to maintain proper air pressure within the space. this is doable with some larger systems, but it's really hard to find conventional split systems for spaces as small as this, and probably even harder to work fresh air and balancing into the equation with them. lots of people have been talking about the mitsubishi mini-split, which requires no ductwork and is supposed to be sufficiently quiet that one can have it running while recording. however, the major drawback of these units is that no one has been able to find one that has a fresh air intake.

most of the other options i've seen people pursuing for spaces this size involve portable and/or window units. one common guerilla tactic is to put a window a/c in a really tiny room, chill the hell out of it, and run ductwork from there to the studio space. this isn't really feasible in my situation for a number of reasons, plus it's basically just a hack job.

then there's the whole issue of needing to maintain humidity in the 45-50% range year-round.

so all in all, it's sounding like it's going to cost an insane amount of money to do perfect climate control in the space, and i'm not entirely convinced yet that the benefits would be enough to justify the cost. i've decided to take a gamble with using the existing system in the house, with appropriate treatments to make it more studio-friendly.

for starters, all ductwork coming into the space is going to have to be insulated to reduce vibration. i might have them do flex duct as this helps even more with that. the ductwork will need to be oversized in order to help slow down the velocity, and will have to have more than 180 degrees' worth of turns. i'll also need to get a humidifier into the air handler, but that'll help the house as a whole--i hate waking up in the middle of the night during the winter feeling like i've been sleeping in a dehydrator.

Posted by Len at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

here's some info about self-leveling concrete: http://www.quikrete.com/diy/PreparingSurfacesforCarpetResilientFlooringandTile.html.

it's basically a very watery concrete mixture designed to be poured onto the floor and flow freely until it finds its level and bond to the concrete underneath. i'm going to use this to level out all the unevenness of the concrete slab before doing any flooring.

Posted by Len at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

al the mason is working on finishing up the fireplace/flue removal and sealing up the giant cavity between the exterior wall and the chimney that had been created when they built the fireplace and was then packed with filler. since i have very minimal experience with masonry in general and chimneys in particular, i wanted to get someone with more clue than me to deal with this part of it.

al's also going to take all the remaining bricks off our hands (yay!).

once the fireplace stuff is done, i'm going to turn my attention back to the floor. anyone wanna come over this weekend and help with floor tile removal?

Posted by Len at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

some things have been bugging me about the first studio design for a few weeks now--all the HVAC stuff is in the furthest corner of the house, there's a lot of dead space and awkward space, there'd be inadequate space for moving in and out of the vocal booth once the console and monitors are in place, and the main room seems a bit small.

i've been struggling with this for about a week now and i've made some changes and compromises to arrive at this design:

pros:

• more cubic footage in the main room


• easier access to vocal booth


• HVAC stuff now over by existing furnace and more detached from studio space


• 2 fewer doors


• less strict adherence to room-within-a-room design gives more simplicity and flexibility to the vocal booth and storage room


• better use of space


• not having to worry about the sliding glass door in front of the console means i can soffit-mount the main monitor speakers, as shown in the plan. (oh, in case you're wondering about the dotted lines going from the speakers to the chair, those are guide lines for speaker and listener placement. basically, these 3 need to form an equilateral triangle for optimum listening.)

cons:

• room dimensions are not ideal in terms of minimizing room mode problems (L > 3*H). i've heard mixed opinions on how problematic this might be. some people say that for small (for a studio) rooms like this, it's more important to increase room volume than to get the perfect ratios. other people would say split it off into 2 separate rooms, which will allow getting more ideal ratios for each room. my take on this is that the laid-back-ness and big-ness of the 1-room design are what are most important to me and i'll deal with any room mode problems as best i can once the space is built and start doing room analysis and tuning.


• main room is no longer symmetric. this is a bonus for tracking, but for control room purposes it's imperative to have left-right symmetry in the mixing position so that you get proper stereo imaging. i've maintained the symmetry as far back as i could given the other constraints. not ideal, but given the constraints of the space i think this is a reasonable compromise.


• no more line-of-site from the desk to the vocal booth. i've been toying with the idea of installing a window on the booth wall that faces the desk. it's kind of suboptimal having all musicians behind me when recording, but on the other hand i really don't like staring at people when they're recording and under the microscope enough as it is.


• storage room is now a double-captive room. i'm in the process of trying to determine whether this violates any building code. probably not, since it's essentially a closet. worst case, i can move the door to go into the main room, but this will violate L-R symmetry in the mix area.


• less adherence to room-within-a-room wall framing means the soundproofing won't be quite as effective. but as with many other things in this space, i've decided to stop pursuing "perfect" and be content with "good enough".
  

Posted by Len at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i pulled into the home depot parking lot this evening and my car started shaking like crazy. initially i was like, wtf? and then i realized that it was a person who was rocking my back bumper. i first i thought it was one of the hizzy depot parking lot panhandlers being a little more crazy than usual, but it turned out to be mo.

he informed me that the woman working the cash register in the tool department was named "ninja." i figured this was just another case of mo confusing surrealist poetry with reality. but i ended up buying a heat gun in the tool department and sure enough, the woman working the cash register was wearing a home depot apron which said "ninja."

right around the time i was thinking "wow, that's kinda random," this older guy walked by and asked her, "how are your exams going?" to which she replied, "great! i got an A in funeral." that statement seemed to make a hell of a lot more sense to him than it did to me. i'm not making this up, and i was fully awake and (mostly) sober when this all occured.

so anyway, i got some more destruction work done tonight. still convinced i could remove the rest of the fireplace bricks without having to resort to pneumatic tools and/or explosives, i grabbed the hand sledge, cold chisel, pry bar, and circular saw. i very carefully chose the sequence of which bricks to remove when and used either the chisel or the circular saw to make enough of an opening between bricks to wedge the pry bar in. with the chisel, i really had to pound the hell out of it to get through that fireclay mortar. there were a few cases where i wasn't getting anywhere at all after pounding like crazy; i resorted to the circular saw in those cases. as long as i made the right decision of which brick to remove next, things went pretty smoothly. i got essentially all of the upper layer of brick out. since the top of the lower layer of brick is only a fraction of an inch above the basement subfloor, i'm somewhat inclined to just let that be, especially since i'm going to have to level out the whole floor anyway (more on that in a sec).

i turned my attention to the floor tiles. i have to be a little bit careful with these since the mastic used to bond them to the floor is about 12% asbestos. that actually sounds worse than it really is--since the material containing the asbestos is non-friable, it's really quite safe to deal with and it can even be disposed of normally rather than having to go through all the special asbestos disposal procedures.

taking the advice of the asbestos contractor i had out there a while back as well as general hazmat removal common sense, i'm wetting the tiles to be removed in order to keep any dust-kicking to a minimum, and then attacking them like crazy with a floor scraper. just to be extra safe, i'm wearing my heavy-duty respirator as well.

pulling up tiles with a scraper takes *forever*. one website i was reading recommended removing vinyl tiles by heating them with a heat gun and then prying them up with a putty knife. i got me a heat gun and tried this technique on a tile, but it took several orders of magnitude more forever to get up, so i just stuck with the scraper technique even though it's a pain in the ass and creates blisters in really weird locations on my hands. i managed to remove about 200 tiles before calling it a night, which means i have somewhere around 500 tiles left to remove.

one nice side effect of getting the floor all wet is it allowed me to get a feel for how level the floor is. which is to say not very. it's amazing how much things can settle over time. once i get all the tile up and fill in the excavated fireplace area with concrete, my plan is to hit the entire basement floor with self-leveling concrete to level the subfloor out so i can put down laminate flooring or something along those lines.

Posted by Len at 01:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

i never thought i'd define the bane of my existence as 2 layers of brick, but goddamn, the bane of my existence right now is the 2 layers of brick that were underneath the fireplace. some combination of fireplace heat, really thin mortar layers, mud, and god only knows what else, has caused all the bricks to essentially fuse together to the point where it's actually easier to chip away at the brick than the mortar. it's insane--i get one brick out and i'm so exhausted from the ordeal i have to take a break. it can take a ridiculous amount of pounding just to get the chisel halfway through the joint.

i picked up a mason blade for my circular saw today. it cuts through the mortar, but it kicks up a hell of a lot of dust in the process and in the end it doesn't really buy much because it barely cuts to the bottom of the top brick layer, and wedging a pry bar in there doesn't do much good at all as the bricks are still fused to the layer underneath and will not budge. i've had only limited luck thusfar being able to get in underneath the bottom layer and pry up from there. i was able to do that for a couple of bricks on the far left, but the general structure of things precluded me from continuing this technique as i moved to towards the right.

i'm busy recording tomorrow, but i'm going to attack things again on wednesday. i may round up a few people to come brainstorm on ways to attack this problem. i almost bought an air hammer and compressor today, but talked myself out of it. after tonight's utter lack of progress, i may revisit that idea. especially if i could manage to position the hammer such that i could hit things from the side break up the joints between the 2 layers.

Posted by Len at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

matt and i headed for the fireplace and busted shit up old sk00l. i got off to a slow start with the brick removal, as i had to continue the reverse tetris for a bit to make sure things wouldn't collapse on me. but as i started heading towards the firebox, i eventually hit critical mass and things just came right out and collapse was no longer an issue.

now for the progress pics. i apologize for them being all so dark; it's really hard to get good photos in that room right now.

this is how it looked shortly after we started and i yanked out the bottom-most piece of the flue pipe:

and right after i broke through to the firebox:

and right after matt left to go get ready for his hot date:

tomorrow's activities won't be quite so profound. i'll just be focusing in on a few things, like sealing off the flue at the top of the chimney and removing the rest of the floor pieces to see how much of the basement concrete was ripped up when they put in the fireplace and figure out how to go about filling that back in.

Posted by Len at 07:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

dave came and helped me tonight. we plowed right through the shower side of the bathroom:

the space that this freed up will become part of the lounge area.

i also managed to get another 30 or so bricks and blocks down from the fireplace. at this rate i'll have it fully disassembled around the time chinese democracy is released.

Posted by Len at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

we filled up our 20-yard dumpster, so we had to have them come and haul it away and give us a 15-yard dumpster. switching out dumpsters is an interesting ordeal when there's just one guy and one truck. he had to drop the new dumpster off up the street, pick up the old dumpster, dump it off in the zoo, pick the new dumpster back up, drop it off in our driveway, and then pick up the old dumpster and haul it away. the whole process took almost an hour. i was kind of amused by this:

last night matt and i plowed into removing the horrible tile from the bathroom (well, the outer layer of horrible tile, anyway). we made some pretty decent progress:

assuming we get all that tile out by this evening, we'll start tearing down this wall:

i also hopped up onto the roof last night to further investigate the chimney and the fireplace flue. originally i was going to seal everything off myself after removing the fireplace, but now i'm thinking i might have a chimney dude handle this one, as it's a little different than the chimney designs i'm used to seeing and i want to make sure i don't totally screw things up.

Posted by Len at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

so last night, rob dropped one of the stones from the fireplace on his foot while picking it up to move into the garage. turns out that broke his toe and he's on crutches now. the only person who should be injuring themselves during this whole process is me, so i'm kicking my "safety nazi" setting up a few notches so make sure this doesn't happen again. and rob now has a lifetime supply of studio time.

matt came over tonight and helped with the next phase of fireplace destruction. this is how it looked when we started:

after removing a few bricks, i began to get a feel for how the whole structure was laid out. there's one nice brick layer, and then everything behind that is a completely unstructured mish-mash of brick and concrete block. rather than removing layers from front to back, i'm having to do more of a top-down removal and assess the structural integrity pretty regularly to make sure the whole thing isn't going to come toppling down and crushing me.

we managed to remove a lot of bricks in the 3 hours we worked on it, but there are just soooo many of them that progress feels really slow. we removed somewhere on the order of 150 bricks tonight, around 130 of which were in good shape and will be donated to construction junction or something. this is how the fireplace looks now:

the excavation is starting to hit the core of the fireplace and i want to examine the flue connection and stuff more closely under better lighting conditions before proceeding, so we put the rest of that work on hold.

i started doing some exploratory destruction of the top-secret eastern european black site which the CIA has codenamed "bathroom". i've seen some pretty horrid pittsburgh basement bathrooms in my time, but this one really takes the cake. here are some "before" photos, although they don't come anywhere near close to capturing the gestalt of the space:

that big drain pipe running down through the middle of the shower is coming from the kitchen sink upstairs. it's looking (and smelling) a bit funky, so i'm going to have the plumber look at it when he comes out to do all the kitchen stuff.

i had planned to crack open the window in there to air out the intermittent sewer smells that sometimes grace the room, but when i went to slide the window it just kind of fell apart. you can kind of notice it in the photo. it's no biggie, since that space is going to be filled with glass block eventually.

that shower tile is something else. it reminds me of the building where i went to high school. except this is white tile instead of green. it's some of the thickest tile i've ever seen. it's the kind of stuff that falls into that gray area between "tile" and "wall". i guess back in the 50s you could seem all intellectual for having existential shower tile (note: i get first dibs on the use of "existential shower tile" as a band name). you can see to the left of the drain pipe where i pulled off some of the tiles to see what they're all about. for one thing, they're damn sharp when they crack. i sliced up my finger pretty well while trying to retrieve a shard that got wedged between the drain pipe and the wall. you may notice the pink tile behind the tile-wall i removed. for reasons not entirely clear to me, they felt the need to cover one layer of hideous tile with another layer of even more hideous tile. i feel i will go through my entire life never understanding this shower, which is fine since it will be showererd with destruction any day now.

Posted by Len at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

rob came over tonight and helped us start taking down the fireplace (thanks rob!). we took down all the stones from the facade, which came apart more easily than i had anticipated. stacey's thinking of using some of them for her flower bed, and i'm going to check with construction junction to see if they'll take the rest.

behind the face is a layer of brick. behind the layer of brick is another layer of brick. we don't know yet what's behind that layer, but all current theories have converged on infinite layers of some form or another. if that's the case, i'll have to check with the dumpster rental people and see if we can extend our rental period from 1 week to something a little longer like, say, an eternity.

the brick is going to be a pain in the ass to take out. it's not as stubborn as the concrete block wall was, but there's just so many bricks, so even if they aren't a huge pain they'll still take a really long time to remove.

Posted by Len at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

so i only have the dumpster until friday, and i'm beginning to get worried that with everyone who volunteered to help me bailing out and with all the remaining work left and only myself and stacey (and only when work's not kicking her ass) to do it, i'm not going to get everything removed by then. so i'm offering $10/hr to anyone who wants to come help me destroy things during evenings this week. i will also provide you with food and drink if you so desire, and, if you're in a band, i'll give you a studio time credit for any future recordings you want to do with me. all i ask is that you email me only if you're absolutely serious about helping.

the work that remains to be done this week:

remove fireplace
remove 1.5 concrete block walls from the bathroom area
remove floor tile
clear out any remaining debris and random furring strips and stuff still attached to the walls/ceiling

Posted by Len at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

today we yanked out all the electrical stuff in the studio area as well as the remaining drywall and insulation. the exterior walls are coated with this black tar-like waterproofing substance. if you look at one of the walls in just the right angle, it says "FUCK YOU" in big letters. i've never had a wall curse me out before. i'm not sure how to process that.

it's been getting progressively more difficult to light the space as we go from white walls and recessed lighting to black (or at least very dark) walls and worklights. i picked up a couple of 250W halogen worklights today. they seem to give off a lot of light, but a lot of it just gets sucked up by the walls. it's not too terribly bad during the day when we get at least some daylight into the space, but evenings can make for difficult vision.

Posted by Len at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

this is the weekend of wall destruction. the existing drywall in the main area is about 80% removed. part of the concrete block between that room and the garage has been removed to make a doorway.

i've also started pulling out all the electrical wiring in the room. found more crazy shit. there was a junction box which had wires running into it and everything, but they neglected to cut out a hole for the receptacle when they put the drywall up. so if we hadn't pulled down the drywall, got only knows how long it would've stayed buried behind the wall like that.

i also discovered that part of the wiring for the space was done with 4-wire. why, i have no clue. so in a bunch of junction boxes there are these spare red wires. sometimes they're tied together with a wire connector, other times they're just curled up inside the junction box.

Posted by Len at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

woohoo! the last of the known electrical fire hazards has been removed. they abandoned the wiring going to the problematic light socket down in the laundry room and ran new wiring there from a more reasonable location. which means we also have power to the doorbell now. not that it really matters since we won't be moving in for several more weeks, but it's just nice to know that one of the first things i started fixing as soon as we got the house can now be marked "done". i had way too much fun standing outside and ringing the doorbell.

electrical inspector came and passed everything. we made sure the door to the studio space was closed so that he wouldn't be tempted to look in there and see the mess of code violations which are going to be removed within 48 hours anyway.

i ran through the building plans with the electricians and ran my electrical plans past them to make sure everything's cool. all junction boxes are going to be surface-mounted in the rooms to minimize the number and size of openings in the drywall. this will help cut down on sound leakage.

lighting is going to be all track lighting. i've had a few people recommend doing halogen lights, but i read in one or two places that halogens can generate interference sort of like fluorescents, but to a lesser degree. i've had a few people now (including the electricians) tell me that's not the case, so i may go ahead with the halogens. i definitely want the ability to have bright lighting when people need it, but also have the ability to do darker mood lighting for situations when people prefer that.

i need to figure out whether i'm going to just poke a couple of holes in the drywall and run conduit to everything, or do what the elecricians proposed, which is to run drops behind the walls and just poke a hole through the drywall behind where things are going to be surface mounted. the latter will be much cheaper, but i have to think that through and make sure that's not going to be opening up too many holes. i guess i can always do a hybrid, worst case.

Posted by Len at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

yup, it's hammer time. sledgehammer time, that is. i just got back from dahntahn with a building permit and a copy of my floor plan stamped with the biggest stamp i've ever seen in my life.

for those of you who live in the burgh and are thinking of doing any work to your house, i strongly recommend getting a permit. for all the stuff i'm going to do to the basement, it only took an hour of my time and less than $50 to have the peace of mind to know what i'm about to do is kosher and to not have to worry about getting fined or anything like that. it especially puts my mind at ease with regards to insurance. pittsburgh bureau of building inspection web site: http://www.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/BBI/

as luck would have it, the dude who helped me at the zoning desk is involved with a studio on the side. he has this prog band, and the music this prog band does is so amazing and groundbreaking and original that no studio in the area could understand the genius of their work and adequately capture them to tape. their stuff is so innovative and awe-inspiring that words alone cannot describe it, so he decided to not even try. since only they are capable of realizing their vision (and thereby changing humanity forever), they started their own studio.

i'm tentatively planning to start ripping stuff out this coming weekend. anyone wanna help?

Posted by Len at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

there will be about 3 or 4 different wall situations in the studio design, and i'll need to tackle each one separately. the most solidified one right now is the wall between the main studio and the vocal booth:

this follows the typical mass-air-mass (M-A-M) design for soundproofing which has become the prominent model the past 10 years or so. the wall side in each room is on its own frame to provide maximum decoupling between the rooms. M-A-M dictates that both frames be open-faced, otherwise you'd have mass-air-mass-air-mass-air-mass, which is actually *less* effective, particularly for lower frequencies.

the only change i might make to this plan is to remove the resilient channel in the rooms. it's not really necessary when using 2 open-faced frames like this, at least not for sound transmission between the rooms. the main reason i have it in there is that the frames will be attached to the floor joists above, and this *may* provide a useful decoupling for that. i'm also hoping to add some sort of material between the frame and the joists and the frame and the floor in order to better decouple those connections.

UPDATE: the RC is now gone from this plan. it's not going to offer any real benefit in this scenario and is just another layer of stuff to have to worry about.

Posted by Len at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

lots of people have been asking me about soundproofing, and i'm currently trying to finalize some of the details myself, so i figured i'd share with the class. i'll start with the ceilings since they're the most finalized of all my plans...

more information about resilient channel can be found here.

Posted by Len at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

we yanked down most of the ceiling drywall today. i finally got to see what's going on with both the old and new wiring. stuff like this makes me cringe:

thankfully, i'll be ripping out all this wiring anyway.

for the circuit that's still having problems, i decided to trace the wiring into the room and came across this:

i'm *really* glad i shut off all the breakers for the overhead wiring before we pulled anything down.

in other news, we got these kits from home depot which have safety goggles, a dust filter, and earplugs. after getting to the house and putting them on, i realized why the kit was so inexpensive. the dust filter wouldn't create a good seal around my nose no matter how i positioned it or how tightly i closed the metal clamp. every time i breathed, my glasses would fog up. so i decided to be stupid and yank down the drywall without wearing it. it didn't take us long at all to rip everything down, but i did manage to inhale a fair amount of dust in that time. from what i've been able to gather on the internet, i probably don't need to be *too* worried about it, but it is messing with my system a little.

next time i'm doing it right and getting respirators. i really should have known better.

Posted by Len at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)