First up, the foundation. This is a pier and grade-beam style with piers at the corners and the middle of the long walls joined by a standard perimeter foundation. The walls are going to be heavy so I want this to stay stable in California's expansive clay top soil.
Then sink J-bolts and the pressure treated sill plates.
Next, after digging out the interior, a sand base and rebar/screen for the isolated slab/floor.
The finished slab.
Then the framing of the outside walls:
And start sheathing it with OSB for both rigidity and mass.
Next is building the roof.
Eventually, the whole thing is sheathed and the roof is covered with underlayment.
Start wrapping the building with the combination moisture barrier and chicken wire for the stucco finish and putting the composition shingles on the roof.
Then the fun of putting up the stucco. I used fiberglass reinforced one coat stuff. Mixing this in my little 5 cu' mixer and putting it up on the walls was more work than the foundation. Thanks to my wonderful wife for her help with all the mixing. And helping with the finishing too.
Next up is the second layer interior framing. I did this with steel studs as according to the research I did, these transmit less sound. And since they were only holding up the interior drywall, they aren't structural. This is done as an offset wall on the same 2x6 footer and header. Only the centers were set to be 24" instead of the standard 16" used on the structural framing. This further helps to absorb interior sound.
I did a box bend at either end of the steel stud and there are neoprene pads under them, although I'm not sure how much additional isolation this provides with the Spax screws run though into the footer.
The walls and ceiling were filled with R19. The ceiling has Whisper Clips with hat channel running lengthwise on 24" centers. I checked this out with the folks at the Sound Isolation Store and it is apparently a common ceiling technique.
The walls were sheathed with 2 layers of 5/8 type X drywall with Green Glue in between. I bought a 5 gal and a 2 gal pail and their reloadable cartridge gun. A bit messy but it works as advertised.
The drywall was set on the Sound Isolation Store's rubber strip to both float it and seal the bottom edge. This stuff is cheap insurance to getting the bottom of the wall right.
Another tip from various forum posts of people doing this is to rent a drywall hoist. $33 from Home Depot and it went up like clockwork. Safely too. I can't imagine wrestling with the sheets and trying to brace them in place.
Spread some Green Glue on the second sheet, put it on the lift, and then crank it up into place. The holder swivels so you just keep cranking and it fits up there.
Next comes all the taping and sealing of the gaps.
I had one of my QSC K10s with an iPod to keep me company. I had to open it up and blow out all the dust when I was finished, though.
Spray texturing with a hopper gun and then paint the inside walls. Didn't get any pictures of these steps either. After buying several bottles of premix texturing from Home Depot, I started playing around with thinning regular pre-mix mud. Worked great and saved a small fortune.
Next up is putting in the laminate flooring. I used that bubble insulation/moisture barrier. I had previously sealed the concrete slab with garage floor paint, but better safe than moldy.
With the basic room together, it was time to put in some ventilation and electrical. At the moment, the electrical is a 10AWG pigtail coming out of a plastic conduit outside the building, plugged into a 10AWG SOO extension cord that is plugged into my garage. Eventually, I'll get a trench and proper electrical service run to the room. We're going to be putting in a spa this spring and it will take upgrading the service panel. I'll have the electrician permit and put in a couple of circuits. I can run out a trench to the room, then a homeowner permit to hook it to the room. All the wiring is surface Wiremold stuff. Nothing in the walls so it can all be inspected. I talked all this through with one of the code enforcement folks who checked out the basic structure.
The ventilation is a couple of insulated ducts going through the end wall. These will eventually be run to an outboard "doghouse" with a small window HVAC unit in it, plumbed to the ducts. One duct goes up to the ceiling for the input. The cold air return is hidden behind the corner bass trap on the other corner.
Now it's time for some acoustical treatment. Corner traps made from OC703
And covered in velour fabric.
2' x 4' clouds with 6" deep frames, hardware cloth on the bottoms let into a 1/4" groove I routed into the frame, covered with more velour fabric and filled with R12 fiberglass that I ripped the moisture barrier backing off of.
You can just see the cloud in this picture after I put some gear in there.
I built an RPG using QRdude software. I went to the back wall with my Phonic PAA3 RTA and looked for peaks while playing pink noise from the other end of the room. Couple more OC703 panels on either side wall as well.
While all this is going on, I was also dolling up the outside, painting the room the same scheme as our house (basic white with black trim), added some shutters and a false window by framing in and put double glaze glass in the frame that I painted the back of flat black. Ends up looking like a dark window. Hang a planter on it and the WAF (wife acceptance factor) goes up considerably.
The "window" thing on the short wall was something we found at the TJMax home store. Installed vinyl gutters and downspouts and it's ready for the weather.
Back inside, the "workstation" end has an overhead rack through bolted to the steel studs and covered in the same velour used elsewhere. The fabric store remnant table ran out of the stuff so the corner traps on that end used a different color.
I had to build the desk as there wasn't anything that really fit in there. I need to make some isolation pads to lift the KRK monitors a bit. The Digi001 interface is going away and the computer is being replaced by a new Windows 7 machine running ProTools 9 to go with the Project Mix interface. The rack holds an old Ashley stereo compressor, a DBX 160X compressor, A Lexicon effects box I had sitting around, a Rane parametric along with a couple of DBX graphics and an Alesis amp for the monitors. I'm still working on a drop snake to go back in the middle of the room by the drums, along with wiring up things to the patch bay. I recently got an M-Audio DMP3 pre to go along with the old BlueTube to track with the outboard.
The long wall opposite the door has some Hercules hangers for guitars. When I get the HVAC stuff in and a constant temperature, I'll bring out the Gibsons. For now, I just leave a couple Fenders out there. Below that is a '55 Hammond M3 (nothing sounds like a real Hammond) and a Yamaha M06. The Hammond is run through a Pro3 and a single 15 bottom (run off a Crate Powerblock I have as a spare gig head).
The EA bass amp is used for practicing bass and listening to the synth. I run the bass direct through a Sadowsky DI when recording. You can see how the outboard rack is angled down to make getting at that stuff easier.
