Indiana Home Studio Build

One of the side walls:

More insulation! (Did I mention that I hate insulation?)

Here you can see the other side of the control room, with the door opening just visible on the left:

Here is the ceiling with resilient channel on the back half of the CR:

Here is the a closeup of the window frame so far. The first picture shows the bare wood frame, and the second picture shows the window after the addition of a layer of neoprene rubber between the walls.

Here is the airlock. The door opening to the left leads to the control room, the door opening to the right leads to the iso room.

Believe it or not, we are about to enter the drywall phase. I know I have been saying that forever, but we are truly at that point in the process now. In fact, we almost hung a single sheet yesterday just so we could say that the drywall had begun, but we were hot, tired, and itchy from all the insulation work. We will try to get some work started on the drywall this week, but the main work is going to have to wait for the weekend before we can really spend any length of time with it. As I said at the beginning of this thread, this is really a home studio built into an existing structure, rather than some of the cool places that are described around here that are actually real studios with purpose-built rooms. It will hopefully give a slightly different perspective.

Look at this picture of the layout of my resilient channel on the ceiling. While doing some reading on resilient channel use, it seems pretty important to make sure that the drywall screws do not go into the wall (or ceiling) studs. Did I install the RC in the wrong direction? Should I have hung the RC so that it is arrayed perpendicularly to the support boards (parallel to the floor joists) rather than the way I have them now? Will that be strong enough? See the pic below:

Bump! Please, any comments on the RC?

DH, sorry I didn't see this till now - what you did is bad.......... the channel is running in the right direction - BUT - it should be attached directly to the bottom of the joist - The furring will be the cause of the short now - when the screws pass through the channel they will hit the furring - which is (in turn) directly connected to the joist. The idea is to be able to attach the drywall with the screws in between the joist - and they only touch air............ So loose the furring and reinstall the channel.......... Rod

Thanks Rod, that is what I was beginning to suspect from looking at pictures of walls with RC. I actually already started taking down the RC as carefully as I can to help save some of it. Thanks for confirming!

Also, just as a point of reference... The 2x4 furring studs that I added are needed to drop the ceiling height that additional 1.5" below the ceiling/floor joists to provide clearance for a gas line that could not be moved. So in this particular scenario, I am going to keep the furring boards, and re-orient the RC 90 degrees.

I pulled out all the old RC today (pretty much destroyed it in the process), and replaced it with new RC in the opposite orientation. It is not the first, nor will it be the last time I have to re-do something that I have done wrong!

We hung our first sheet of drywall!!! Ya-hoo!!! You can see the 1/4" slats on the floor in order to give me the spacing needed for the backing rod and acoustic caulk.

I'm a little worried that you're still going to short out your resilient channel at the points where they intersect with those furring boards. They appear to be 3 1/2" wide on 24" centers. If that's the case, that's 1 3/4" of every foot, or about 30% of the linear spacing. That means every screw you drive into the RC has a 30% chance of hitting the furring board unless you are extremely careful and plan ahead. It's too late to put nail plates (like the one that's protecting the blue pipe) at the intersection points, so I suggest you mark the walls where the furring boards meet them, then use a chalk line or something to mark the location of the furring boards as the drywall goes up. This becomes especially critical when multiple layers go up. I'm also concerned about the kraft paper on that insulation. The advice here has always been to avoid the use of kraft paper backed insulation, or if it is necessary, to make sure the kraft paper is flush against a surface:

In Kathy's Barn Conversion thread, knightfly wrote:

. . . it actually, as thin as it is, STILL creates somewhat of a "third leaf" effect by dividing one large air gap into smaller, stiffer ones, thereby worsening low frequency TL a bit and, in the process, slightly improving the mid-range TL. (Source)

--Keith :mrgreen:

Keith: Thanks for your post... The RC is setup 16" on center. The paper-faced insulation issue bothers me... any suggestions on how to fix this? Actually, other than the front walls, all of the paper is going to be against a surface. I could remove the inner layer of insulation from the inner wall, and then remove the insulation from the outer layer and either remove the paper or replace with non paper-faced versions. This only happens on the front existing wall, all of the other walls are newly built, and have the paper facing towards the drywall. Would this work???

doublehelix wrote:

We hung our first sheet of drywall!!! Ya-hoo!!! You can see the 1/4" slats on the floor in order to give me the spacing needed for the backing rod and acoustic caulk.

What a rookie!!! This was the first piece of drywall that I have hung in many years, and was sooooo proud, that it until I went to hang the adjacent piece of drywall and realized that there was no stud as the edge to attach the new piece, which of course means that the first piece has no firm attachment point at the edge. This is now fixed. Wow it sucks having to do everything twice!

We are just about done with the first layer of drywall! 3 words... "I hate drywall..." We have about 4 more ceiling sheets, and then the first layer will be complete. We will finish that today for sure. Next it will be on to caulk, tape and mud for the first layer (actually, I have done some caulking as we went along, but lots more to go). Here are a few progress pics: These first 3 are of my able-bodied assistant! This is my 18 YO son, Pierce, who is a lot of help, but I won't admit that to his face!!!

Next a few random shots around showing work in progress. In one of the pics you can see the control room couch that we have been working around since day one! What a pain! We keep moving if from one side to the other as work. One nice feature however is that we have a comfy place to sit when we take a break!

Here is one corner of the iso room. This is where we are going to put guitar amps, bass amps, Leslie speakers, etc.

Here is one of the CR corners... and there is that damn couch again!

Here are a couple of shots of the control room... just random stuff...

Here is a shot looking from the live room into the air lock (hallway!). The door to the left is the entrance to the control room, the door to the right is the entrance to the iso room.

Dust, dust everywhere!!! Did I mention earlier that I hate drywall??? WELL I DO!!! Here is Pierce armed with the trusty shop vac stirring up more dust than he is vacuuming! You can see the dust spots in the picture.

Here is the rented drywall lift, used to get the heavy 5/8" sheets up to the ceiling. Best invention ever invented!!! Absolutely essential to the process!!!