Help with basement design

Hello, i´ve been lurking here for a short while but this is my first post. A good friend of mine is planning to build a little studio in the basement of a building. He has no internet access and doesn´t speak any English (we live in Brazil) so i´m helping him research and plan. Initially he was thinking about a live room, a control room, and a surround room, but now has decided it might be smarter to make just a control room (with surround) and a live room, with possibly a vocal booth or drum booth. Actually that is my suggestion and it is in great part based on things i´ve found here in theforum. The main problem is an elevator shaft in a very inconvenient space. There are also two columns and a set of pipes up on the ceiling, and there´s an awkward staircase. Today we sat for a few hours making sketches and the only thing that seemed to work was making the control room face the elevator shaft (stairs to the right) and have a live room to the left and a booth to the right. But i´m thinking things are looking awfully square and maybe wasting space. Any ideas? Any help is appreciated, thanks! I´m attaching a jpeg file, hope it comes out ok. David

I just realized i wrote "columns" on the drawing, but they are ceiling beams. It´s a top view of the room. David

David - welcome - where do the stairs hit the basement floor - to the right or to the top of the drawing?? cheers john

Hi mr. Sayers! Thanks for the welcome. The stairs touch the basement floor to the right of the drawing, close to where the red pipes are. There is the possibility of changing the way the stairs go down, i´ll post below the drawing with the change my friend has considered making. Basically it involves making the steps run parallel instead of having it in the L shape it currently is. I don´t see much advantage to making it parallel, the ceiling underneath the step from the main level will still be angled, don´t think there will be any gain in space. But it can be done if needed. David

I´m here on SmartDraw trying to make my drawing and i just realized i posted a wrong measurement. The length of the room is NOT 10.5 meters, it´s 9.5 meters! Sorry about the mistake. Btw, even though i labeled 10.5 meters the drawing is to scale... David

So if i understood correctly you could go like this?? cheers JOhn

Wow cool! Thanks so much for the sdr file! It will help me for sure. I worked all day today on SmartDraw. I´ve never used it before so it takes me 3 hours to do the simplest of tasks! Grr.. I´m trying to create the original idea my friend had, one control room, one live room and one surround room. I´m not sure my objects are in scale, i tried to make the drum size basing it on a 14" snare size (converted to centimeters). But by the looks from your drawing i made them too small. No wonder everything was looking so spacious! :D I like how you used the whole width for the control room, all the way up to the elevator shaft. I´m gonna try to adapt mine to that idea. Maybe push the whole control room forward a little bit so the 5.1 room can fit in the back. No need for bathrooms or kitchens because that will be on the upper floor. Here is my attempt from today. I had trouble especially with the 5.1 room, it´s tricky to design it. David

Bummer, it says i can´t open the sdr file you posted because i´m on and older version of Smart Draw. David