Getting started finnaly on THE METH LAB

Its funny how I draw this crap up in my head and on paper then I get in there with the nail gun and it becomes so much easier than I thought. My 2x4 spacer idea was perfect, then it dawned on me......I CAN do a stag stud wall with this design! I think Ive got the plan now dudes!!! Pictures should be up tonight fellas. They are bieng developed now.

Somewhere in North TX Before pics Outside!

I suck at posting pics! More outside shots

As you can see above this landscape is blooming with modern style. The entry way says "Welcome home" after a long day at work. Sit down with a loved one on this beautiful vintage style love seat or enjoy a cold beverage while relaxing on the swing of death. If duty calls, enjoy the natural light in this spacious master bathroom. Shall we go inside??? To your suprise a home it is not. No this is a state of the art recording facility.

INSIDE BOTTOM FEEDER STUDIO 1. This is looking into the main room from the front door. You can see the doorway to the iso room, complete with the plexi glass window! Also a drum riser that is 8'x8' placed dead center on the wall......It takes up way too much room. The center ceiling joist and the lovley insulation above. 2. Turning around you can see the work to be done above the front entry door. 3. We move closer to the isoroom above that door you can see the other cieling joist that gave me a headache. Notice the awesome drywall job! To the right of that door is the isoroom, to the left is the mystery room. 4. Drum riser removal phase 1, and my bass players butt crack!

Inside the ISOROOM From the bottom up. 1. This is the low outside corner of the isoroom (greenroom sketchup). Handsome panneling over 1/2 drywall 2. Turning around looing at the partition wall, you see the state of the art plexi-glass studio window, and at the bottom you can see the very handy 4" hole for convient wiring! The guy who built this room must have been a genius because it really works! You can hear EVERYTHING on the other side of the wall PERFECTLY :D !!! 3. Drywall removal. above the door on the patition wall reveals a single top plate attached to the metal ceiling joist. I bet thats gonna sound great!!! :wink: This is probably the most important pic, it shows the real chalenge at hand. 4. Continueing on with drywall removal shows us the proper way to insulate a room. Just fold up some carpet padding and secure it with scotch tape. Attach 1/2 drywall on 12 OC studds and dont use any tape, mud or caulking. This wall stops sound by alowing it to breath through the cracks. Almost like a comb will remove gum in your hair. The sound catches on the edges of the drywall and you just clean it off with a sponge. 8)

From the bottom up this is the Mystery room revealed! 1. The mystery door. Nailed shut years ago, the previous band felt the best way to handle the problem with the lightswitch was to take it off of the inside wall of the mystery room pull it through the wall and just let it dangle in the iso room. Now you have a light switch and the light in the same room. Electricians take note: You no longer have to run 2 switches for a common circut. Just leave the wire and swtich exposed for portable lighting control! :D I hope you can see that in the pic because its my favorite example of Texas engineering. :lol: 2. We knocked down the door and guess what we found?? More Doors and pannleing! Nothing cool like the Holy Grial, but cool in its own right. It actually was a treasure box of capentry matrials left by the original builder. Here is a check list: 3 interior doors with all the harware 10 sheets of 1978 style panneling (very nice) 8) 5 Interior light fixtures 1 complete glass shower enclosure (in the box) 1 complete bathroom vanity 20' of electric conduit 20' of PVC, conecters, bends and fittings 1 Black&decker Skill saw 1 Black&decker drill 1 black&decker jig saw 3 flashlights 2 tool boxes, with all the carpentry hand tools. Hammers, screw drivers, wrenches, TONS of drill bits, Sheet metal snips Rivet guns, chalk lines, levles and squares. Bags and boxes of faseners, Nails and Screws for wood, metal and drywall. 5 tubes of caulk, several mudding tools and razors. Paint rollers and pans. Lots of electrical line and other crap im not even sure what its for. Aside from the 2 rat skelectons a few birds nests, and a very large snakeskin it was a vitual HOME DEPOT in there! :D 3. This is a picture of the floor after we cleaned a lot of the junk out. You can see all the birds nest, material and its hard to see but there is a snake skin in there too. I dont know about you but its begining to look like a vocal booth to me! :) Imagin the inspiration you could get singing in a room where so many little animals started and lost there lives. :shock:

Here is some pics to make it more personal! 1. This is Carp at a gas station just after playing a road gig. Im the fat dude in glasses 8). We look so excited because we were just paid 100 bucks and the gas pump was reading about 80 bucks and still rolling. We also had the unfortunant experice 20 mins earlier of finding out our drummer didnt shut the door on the Uhaul properly. We heard the sounds of cymbals hitting the highway at 70mph. :shock: 8 of us trecked down the highway and collected all of them unscaved, except the most expencive one. Just yards away a mac truck located the $400 Z-Ride cymbal in the dark by hitting it head on........it was toast and so is the life of a rocker. 2. Told you I was a Dad! This is my boy Tayte showing you that The studio design forum deos indeed rock! 3. Rocking in Denison TX last week or so. 4. Never send a woman to do a punk rockers job! This is our bass player, Roger That. You want something stupid done this is your man. You may also want to ride with the windows down on a long trip to a show after he has consumed any type of Mexican food. 5. Yours truly in the foreground looking all cool

Ok so nobody has anything to say about the Methlab now huh??? Maybe your all mad that I messed up the layout and you have to scroll, go ahead and ream me for it, I suck at posting pics! Come on at least admit that shit was funny though!!! :lol: Ok well Its official I am the man with the nail gun. I went up there tonight to hang my 2 main beams BY MYSELF! Get this, they are actually freaking plumb.....(I think :? ) Anyway the bubble says its stright.....I put a joist up there and it still reads right on the money. I just had to come home and post because there was knowone out there but the mosquitoes and me tonight. You try hanging a 12' 2X6 on 2 brackets over your head without a helping hand! To Guitardad- That post I made a while back about the furring strips? That was made by a dude named Brian Ravnaas at the AVS forum. He sure seems to know his stuff over there, and he explains things in a way morons like me can understand, especially an analogy he made about isolation rooms being an aquarium, "make a hole anywhere in an aquarium and all the water will hit the floor somehow. If you only have 200 bucks to build your room spend it on caulk" I have linked to that site a few times through this forum with my reading. Ok knightfly, I have a few pretty serious questions. #1 Im positive my my design will be an aquarium (air tight) but my design will sort of be more like a fish bowl. The sound will be able to (SEE) my insulation above the interior ceiling drywall. Another way to put it is that my ceiling will be a single leaf system. :cry: I have a few fixes to make it a little better but its going to be a single leaf dew to the metal cross beam over my wall. Remember my room will be the only one in the building with an actual drywall cieling, I dont even know why Im asking you this, but how bad is that going to hurt me? #2- If anyone has looked at my sketchup of the whole building could you tell me how important is double drywall on the 2 outside walls of the green room. Remember isolation from the outside is not an issue. I only want isolation from the red room.........or the best I can get without a room within a room design #3 This is a stupid question but here goes. I was driving through New Mexico one time and I saw all these mobile homes in every town with tires on the roof. Im mean HUNDREDS of homes and ALL of them were covered with tires. I dont know if that was just something they do for heat protection or wind or hell maybe they are not allowed to dispose of tires in New Mexico? I was thinking though a large thin metal roof with a few big rubber tires on it would have to dappen the drum effect a little wouldnt you think?

You try hanging a 12' 2X6 on 2 brackets over your head without a helping hand!

I've been sistering 14 foot 2x8 joists over my head (mostly) by myself.... Arduous.

Oh, the humanity!!!! :lol: You've got your work cut out for you! Sorry you didn't get a comments on the pics -- I'm sure the rest of us are still unconscious on the floor, having passed out at the mere thought of having to fix that place! Your commentary on the photos is also hilarious, such that the tears of laughter that fill our eyes make posting difficult (if not impossible)! OK, so here's an answer to a practical question -- tires on the roof... No. Substitute the word "tire" for "mosquito breeding petri dish." It kind of takes the luster out of your "spacious master bathroom." ;-) Oh, and about the pics that you "suck at" posting... ;-) ...You need to edit each one and trim off all the white stuff around the edges ("trim the crust off your photo bread," so to speak). Your pohotos are 90% wasted white stuff" and it trully does make your thread impossible to look at without having to scroll from side to side. The official forum rules state that they need to be less than 700 pixels wide... Or 750... Or 800... depending on which "official" post you use as a guideline. (I say 700 is a winner.) I've got about two days' worth of work to do today, otherwise I'd say more. (And I'd say you're probably busier than I am -- if not, you should be! :lol:) Seriously, thanks for sharing!

Hey Sharward where have you been latley? I thought youd get a kick out of the pictures. :) Your absolutly right about the tires, thats a real bad idea........the mosquitos are horrible right now as it is. Yesterday I had to drive to 3 stores before I found one that wasnt sold out of Deepwoods Off About the pics. I tried to up-load the pics as full pictures but the file was too big for the forum. I will see if I can scale down the next batch.....which will be the progresion and probably the after shots. I dont plan on spending 2 years fixing this place. It should be done by mid June thats really just calculating the finances. If I could afford all the drywall and insulation right now Id be finnished by next week.

Looks to me like there's a TON of "white space" around the pix; but one way or another, you need to redo ALL thepix so we don't have to scroll sideways... Steve

Carpwftx, Cool man PICS :D After reading your description I thought it was going to be worse then what the pics show. Not to say the building looks good or a friendly building site, I just expected worse. I take it you're scanning the pics. Look for the "crop" function when your scanning or well after scan and that will let you "cut" the white parts of the pics out. The you can resize to correct max width. It's really hard to read this thread now. Once resized you can edit your posts and replace previous versions of pics... simple.... AND if you can't figure it out PM me, I'll send you my email, you can email full size previous pics to me AND I'll crop, resize and send them back to you. Marc

I hope the "insulation" shown in the "insulation.jpg" photo is a "BEFORE" picture. It looks like carpet pading I think that it a) doesn't work, b) is HIGHLY flamable, c) when it DOES catch fire, the smoke is toxic. Mineral wool is your friend here (and pretty cheap I found), since it really doesn't want to burn and actually works. len

Yeah, not to mention a mold festering ground. :evil:

Len- Yeah the carpet pad is the before pics. All of these pics are before pics by the way. Just wanted you to see the funny stuff before I get serious Guitardad- Let me ask you this will the scrolling stop when we reach page 4? If I have screwd up the whole thread, which really sucks I will try to fix that. Im glad you think its a little better than I made it out. You missed all the green shag carpet removal, and the outside pics where taken after the first truck load of trash....so it was a little worse to begin with. Now that I think I have a good plan, I see light at the end of the tunnle.

Scrolling will stop once we get to the next page HOWEVER that's not the point. Any moderator could delete the pics or the entire thread if they wish becuase your not following the guide lines for pics. Future & current forum users are going to have a hard time with the scrolling. Marc

i don't think they are scanned because they are perfectly straight aligned. i think you are reducing the size of the pics, but for some reason the way you are doing it the background is not reducing, only the "content" ... there must be a "crop" tool somewhere in your software man! crop off that white space, replace pix (there is a button for this when you edit the post). that is maybe why not too many comments, nobody wants to scroll thru these pics, it's too much of a pain. sorry :P

guitardad72 wrote:

Any moderator could delete the pics or the entire thread if they wish becuase your not following the guide lines for pics.

True. Heed John's warning.

Ok ok ok!!!!!! dang........ :lol: I got rid of the pics.......... The scrolling was even pissing me off! Dan was right I was scaling down the pics but not using a crop tool. I will try to fix it but the only ones I needed to see them was you guys. Lets face it, my build aint gonna make Sticky status, that is unless they add one for ways NOT to do it. Ok back to buisness, I left a lot of questions out on the table but the picture catastrophy took the front seat. Update: 1. The Rats are history!!!!!!!!! I swear not one new piece of rat poop has been spotted since I sealed up the building. It smells pretty good in there too! Moth balls have a nice grandmas closet smell, that mixed with sawdust and greatstuff foam makes a real nice aroma. 2. Air conditioning!!!! Awww YEAH. Get this: We took out the window units so my other guitar player (certified AC man) could take a good look at them at his shop. The contacters where all clogged with mud dobber nests! He cleaned them up, charged them up and they are running like a top now..........total savings $500 3. If got 3 options for my ceiling and Im going to try and make a diagram in PAINT to show you these designs. Knowone responded to the single leaf ceiling question so Im just going to assume that a single leaf sucks! Dont kill me if my diagram screws up my thread again...I will fix it.

Ok here is the cross section of the partition wall so far. The Spacer was my way of dealing with the steel cross beam. I nailed a 2x4 to the top plate then a 2x6 on that.

This was the plan. I wanted to add a 2x4 sole plate then stagger some studs then add 2x6 on top for the celing joist. It gets me around 8' before drywall. The problem is that the sound will (see) the insulation through the metal cross beam above my cieling making it a 1 leaf system.

This is the safe way to do it I guess, but with dry wall it will make the headroom below 7'. I have an idea to add a layer of drywall above the joist as well? kind of like a wall for a cieling?

Or keeping with the wall on the cieling idea, I could actually put a wall on the cieling using 2x4's on brackets. This will gain another 2" headroom but that's the differnce between reaching up and touching the roof or standing on your tippy toes ya know? every little bit counts especialy when absorbers are added. Maybe you have another idea? You should know that Im not going to let the sound see the roof through the metal joist without a fight. I have a butt load of 4x6 x1" cieling tiles, tons of caulk and expanding foam. I know its not going to be a lot of mass, but Im not going to let the sound just look under my skirt for free. Plus the dry wall on the other side of the wall can actually extent a few feet and be cut to the contoure of the insulation of the metal roof, I doubt I can seal it off perfectly and Im positive what ever I seal wont have a lot of mass, but still I got to do something to make it hard for the sound to get to me right?