Bulgarian Eco-build Studio..

Hi studio techie folks.. Happy New Year. About four years ago, I bought a huge concrete Bauhaus-style building in a village in Southern Bulgaria.. The upstairs is my apartment, the ground floor holds my studio equipment, and very many guitars and combos and amps and speakers and drum kits and Hammonds and many racks of synths and other instruments that I've collected.. The basement is where I've decided to put the studio. The half of the basement which will house the studio is roughly 42' x 30' x 10' high.. Yes 10' high throughout :-(( = Problems I know.. I can't use any of the six or so rooms next door because the two basement halves are divided by a huge concrete load-bearing wall, (for the two upper floors) which is maybe 4' thick, and 30' long and 10' high... As as I've spent many of my formative years (or probably most of my life) getting loads (and I mean seriously loads) of equipment together, and the rest of the building has swallowed huge amounts of cash, I decided to build the whole studio using eco- methods (in Bulgarian terms , read; 'on the cheap'..) There is no real alternative given the size of the project, and my limited income.. So, my basic materials are straw bales, rammed earth, and very cheap local labour.. (5 euros for an 8-hour day for a very hard working labourer..) The bales I bought last autumn at 1 leva ( half a euro each) and the earth comes into the building through a newly built security door, which leads from the back garden into the 'studio' (which is really a huge, concrete, freezing-cold and severely depressing place, at the moment..) However, it is of course my strong desire that it will all change into a multi-desk, multi-recorder, multi-instrument, sunlit, and supremely enjoyable place in which to work and write, and record.. The building had been vacant for many years, and the garden has many hundreds of tons of earth which was excavated in Communist times to build the foundations for the building. The whole building is is 28 metres by 10 mtrs, and three stories high, and the many thousands of tons of concrete are 'floated' on the earth by huge foundations... In the Central Bulgarian Plain, most buildings sit on 'rafts or plinths', as any 'hard' (ie. solid rock ) on which to build is sometimes 20 metres or so, below ground surface.. A 'problem' with the basement is that it has seven concrete pillars spaced at fairly equal intervals around the room, which are all load-bearing.. These pillars do tend to determine where any walls could go, and although I am slowly defining a floor plan for the place, it has not been easy at all.. A good thing about Bulgaria, is that planning controls are virtually non-existent, unless one is building a hotel or a new house, and then they involve ministry bribes in plain brown envelopes, and cash payments to the local branch of the Mafia, rather than building codes and specs and regulations.. However, since I am only erecting rammed earth dividing walls to make a control room, a vocal space, a main studio floor, and a drum booth, and a little galley/kitchen, thankfully, cash payments to shady individuals, (who are invariably called 'Ivan' ) is not part of the plan.. I shall thermally insulate the outer walls from the inner by using straw bales with rammed earth walls between.. So, inside will be rammed earth walls up to ceiling height, then a leaf of straw bales, then the outer concrete walls. Rammed earth is impervious to vermin or bugs, and they should be ok.. The building is near to a road, but it's mostly only horses and carts, clip-clopping along, rather than heavy traffic.. :-) So, work to date has got a good few tons of earth barrowed in from the garden, and heaped in what will be the main studio floor. The first of the shuttering / form-work is built, and the first 'lift' ie. three feet high by about 12' long wall is erected and drying.. Tomorrow, or the next day, the first of the form-work comes off, and we shall see what sort of walls we have.. Our first wall has been rammed using the local clay/soil, with no cement added, and compacted by hand, using lengths of wooden 4" x 2".. A rough determinant of whether your local earth will work satisfactorily without cement added, is to crush a handful into a ball , and drop it from head height onto concrete.. If it survives that without crumbling or splattering apart, the material should be satisfactory without any cement added at all...at least for non-load bearing walls . Another rough guide is that a load-bearing rammed earth wall 10 feet high must be roughly one foot thick.. Our's are 1.5 feet thick, and non-load bearing.. The walls are incredibly heavy, and inert, and hitting the shuttering formers once the earth has been rammed into them, is like hitting the inside of a tunnel.. Nothing moves at all... No sound from the impact is given off either, and even the sound of striking the ply wood shuttering is very muffled and deadened... I think it would take a huge explosion to vibrate the walls at all.. So, if all works according to plan, the walls should be incredibly inert, and I don't think that they'll vibrate or transmit sound significantly.. I shall work up some more detailed plans and post them. The control room is inherently fraught with problems, because it is 30' wide and is only around 10' x or 12' deep.. so a relatively long thin control room.. I had thought an LEDE control room with rear diffusers and side Haas kickers and possibly bass traps to suit, depending on how it sounds once I eventually soffit mount my JBL 4320's.. If I want to go the surround sound route, then a skinny and long control room has even more potential problems.. :-( I shall also post some pix and a plan soon, if anyone's interested.. All advice and tips gratefully received.. Take care folks.. richard bulgaria

Hai, viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4063 cheers.