Kelly's (Bedroom Conversion) Studio in Progress

Okay, after much help from you guys I finally broke ground a little while ago and started construction. Below are a few photos of progress leading up to where I am currently. Oh, and of course, if you guys see anything wrong or potential problems I'm running towards, please feel free to blast away. This is my first actual studio build and my only fear is that I'm going to miss something along the way that'll sabotage everything I've worked toward. The pics are as follows: 1) The basic plan I'm working off of. The back wall will be cloth covered 4" Rockwool and the closet behind it will have bass hangers in it. 2) After framing in the Iso Booth, you'll notice the inner dimensions are slightly different than the ones of the original plan. What I'm plannnig is this: 4'4" wall will be a flat resonator; 3'4" will be cloth covered rockwool; the booth/control room door will be drywalled; the 3'3" will be a slanted resonator and the house/booth door will have cloth covered insul on one side. The floor will be wood and the ceiling will be lowered from 9' to 8.5 with cloth covered 4" rockwool panels. 3) The booth/house door from inside the booth and some floor plates. 4) My Door (I'm very happy about this deal,,,,$25 - Clearance at Lowes, Right place/Right Time 8) ) 5) Some more secured floor plates. 6) The iso booth to date, in its semi-framed state I'll post more pics as soon as I can.. Kelly

Aloha Kelly, Glad to see you starting your Studio Journal! :D Say, I was wondering about a couple of things in your plan: - What angle are you using for your soffits? - What angle are you using for your side walls? Aloha 8)

Aloha Kendale great to hear from you. The soffits are 30 degrees off the front wall and the sides are 6 degrees (12 inches out every 10 feet). I reduced the length of my side walls to 8 feet so I decreased the distance from the walls to preserve the 6 degees.

Well, I've sealed off the windows with drywall and caulked the old existing walls and some of the new ones. I put up a few more studs and received my custom wall plate from RCI :D . I'm going to use Mogami Cable to run between the wall plate and my console. QUESTION I'm trying to find the right place for my wall plate in the iso booth. Below is a picture of the short slot resonator wall in the booth. The wall is only 3'3" wide. Is where I placed the horizontal 2x2's okay for my wall plate or will this hinder the effectiveness of the resonator wall? Kelly

Are your slats going to go over this framing? If so, I think you should save yourself the time and trouble (not to mention money) unless you just want the LOOK of a slat wall. You will have virtually NO DEPTH and therefore the frequency is going to be very high. Did you use the slatted wall calculator on this site? It will tell you what frequency(ies) you can expect to get out of it. Just throwing wooden slats up on a wall won't do very much for you but it might look nice. len

What are you going to do about the outlets your making inaccessible? Do you have a construction permit? You live in California, so there are strict codes here in earthquake country. --Keith :mrgreen:

Hi guys and thank you for coming by and sharing your thoughts. Len - Yes, I was planning on putting 6" slats over the framing. The air space behind the framing ranges from 0 to 4.5 inches, although only across 3'3"(length of wall). According to the Helmholz Calculator (which it is possible I'm using completely wrong, but hope not :wink: ) if I alternate slat widths (2",4",6") I should be able to cover between 215 and 759 hz. Does this sound right? Also, below is a drawing from this site, that I was kind of modeling my booth after. Keith - Your question about the outlets have been keeping me up at night :roll: . To be honest with you, I had considered drilling a hole through the sole plate and running a power strip through it, then caulking around both sides of the cord. I had also considered extending the outlet to a 2x4 on the resonator wall, similar to what I am considering doing with the wall plate in the booth. What would you suggest? Oh, and no I haven't gotten a construction permit yet. Someone told me I didn't need one since I was not affecting anything load bearing. (should I have ignored my friend :shock: )

Kelly S. wrote:

Keith - Your question about the outlets have been keeping me up at night :roll: . To be honest with you, I had considered drilling a hole through the sole plate and running a power strip through it, then caulking around both sides of the cord. I had also considered extending the outlet to a 2x4 on the resonator wall, similar to what I am considering doing with the wall plate in the booth. What would you suggest?

Deep breaths... Kelly, there's a reason this is keeping you up at night. Listen to that voice. You cannot cannot cannot simply plug an object (in this case, a power strip) into an outlet and then permanently or even semipermanently block access to the outlet. In fact, you can't do that with an outlet even with nothing connected to it. You can't even move the outlet to the inner wall frame and use the original outlet box as a junction box, because the junction box needs to be accessible too. All of these are serious electrical code violations that I don't even need to "look up."

Oh, and no I haven't gotten a construction permit yet. Someone told me I didn't need one since I was not affecting anything load bearing. (should I have ignored my friend :shock: )

Yes, you should have ignored your friend. That's B.S. Please, stop what you are doing and carefully review these two threads...

Permits, Codes, Licenses -- and WHY YOU SHOULD CARE! HGTV has done the right thing!

Not to discourage you, but it took me about eight months of planning and research before I finally got my permit. Others have done it in less time, of course. You can too. I want to emphasize that my city building department was very helpful to me in my research. I'm sure they'll help you too if you ask them. If you have time, you can look at my monster thread to see the planning obstacles I faced and how I ultimately designed around them. It wasn't easy, but it was worth it. I'm now well on my way with construction. In fact, I passed my second inspection last week (or, truth be told, two halves of one inspection). I'm the first to admit that I've done things without permits in the past. That was then, and this is now. Today, knowing what I know, I would (and will) get a permit every time. Listen to that voice inside of you, Kelly. :) I think that deep down I'm telling you what you already know. --Keith :mrgreen:

Keith - Thank you for the advise on building permits. So far I've gone through the first two threads you linked to and I went through a series of emotions as I invisioned the piles of 2x4's that I had worked so hard to put up and caulk, etc, etc..., be taken down and turned into firewood, only to start over again. I'm definitely going to look into the permits further, in the mean time I spoke with another friend of mine who's a local general contractor and he's agreed to come over and give me a "pre inspection." He also has a couple of ideas for the electrical boxes - he insisted that all of the electrical that we do be permited though. Gosh I'm learning a lot, I'm just hoping this education doesn't end up bankrupting my studio project before it gets off the ground. Thanks again, Kelly

Glad to hear from you again, Kelly, and glad to help. I do understand the emotions you're going through -- you're not the first to go through that here. I do my best to keep the permits and codes topic alive around here to keep awareness high so as to hopefully avoid the pitfalls of the type you've fallen into... Yet, you're fortunate to not have come along too far in your build. Imagine if you had gone much farther -- or, worse, finished it -- and then faced this challenge. Please keep us posted with your next steps, even if they go no further than deep thoughts. I would argue that deep thinking is a huge part of our projects -- if not, it should be. It's been said here before that these things are 90% planning and 10% doing, and the 90% planning includes a whole lot of deep thought. :) --Keith :mrgreen:

Hello everyone, I was just wondering if I was on the right track with my booth resonator wall, a couple of posts ago I typed:

Len - Yes, I was planning on putting 6" slats over the framing. The air space behind the framing ranges from 0 to 4.5 inches, although only across 3'3"(length of wall). According to the Helmholz Calculator (which it is possible I'm using completely wrong, but hope not ) if I alternate slat widths (2",4",6") I should be able to cover between 215 and 759 hz. Does this sound right?

Hi all, it's been a couple of months since I posted and just wanted to provide a brief update and hopefully get some advice :-): I've finished framing, building, painting the vocal booth wall/door, and hanging bass hangers in rear closet. I've also installed most of the rockwool (4" in soffits & 2" in resonator walls). Not sure which to put in the front wall between the soffits. (?) So, I'm making progress (slow but sure). Still wondering about the vocal booth though... If anyone can tell me for sure if I'm wasting my time with the slot resonator wall Len Morgan was kind enough to give me a heads up on, I'd appreciate it. It's still early enough that I could change it to an absorbant wall with no slats and be okay. Thanks, Kelly