Music school, store and studio in one!

Slowly learning the value of planning... yikes my brain is full!!! :? So here goes - or rather here comes Mississippi Mills Musicworks, located in beautiful Almonte Ontario, home of the Wee Mississipp! Please bear with my lack of Sketchup expertise, I'm trying! This is a rather large first time venture for me. I'm building a music school with a fairly large capacity (500 students/week), a storefront, and (obviously!) a studio. First off, when I export a .png from Sketchup, I seem to have no control over the size of the image, so hopefully it won't be too big! Enclosed you'll see my basic floor plan (without doors), it'll be much faster for me to text in dimensions - we're really coming down to the crunch - already behind schedule. Between hiring staff, learning payroll/scheduling/p.o.s. & accounting software, ordering strings/books/etc., (trying to find money!-) and attempting to design one sweet studio, my simple musician's brain has never been so taxed! :oops: I've never gone so long without mixing! Anyways - now to the point(s)... I'm trying to save some money (to buy some sweet guitars and such!) so my objective here is to establish reasonable separation at reasonable cost. The way I see it, I will build according to this plan (and some help and mods ;-) and afterwards, if I am unhappy with a particular rooms performance, I can reinforce the STC with another layer of Quietrock 510 or better. The complex is 40' by 50' - 2,000 sq. feet. 1: The teaching rooms. These rooms will feature standard wall construction with metal studs and Roxul Safe'n'Sound in the cavity for the non-shared walls and ceiling. When two teaching rooms share a wall, I shall use one layer standard drywall and one of Quietrock 510. According to my research these should (but probably won't) yield respective STC values of 52 and 65. Because the waves will need to travel through one wall of 65, or two of 52, I believe this to be an effective plan. The doors are exterior solid core with a metal shell, magnetic seals and dual thermal panes, (so that concerned parents...) 2: The studio (double) walls... like so: 1 layer standard drywall 1 layer safe & sound 3" gap 1 layer safe & sound 1 layer standard drywall 24" Steel studs One thing I'm unclear of is if there is a particular distance I should use for the gap - obviously not 3 1/2", so I ran with 3". ( ? ) The doors leading from the hall to the live room are super heavy laminated jobs I picked up and should easily do the trick - maybe need some foam on the inside. The live/control room access are two sets of exterior, dual pane thermal sliding doors, and the vocal booth is accessed by two sets of the same exterior doors as the teaching rooms, both of these providing excellent visibility. I thought of angling the two sliding doors, but think my gain would be minimal and rather difficult to do to boot, without angling the wall as well... The live room features a 12' high (let's call it north) back wall, and angled ceiling up to 14' 7" on the south wall where it joins with the control room. To design the control room, I used one of L.W. Sepmeyer's golden ratios, (using the average distance between walls to calc it), and have achieved a comfortable 2, 600 cubic feet. The ceiling is vaulted and angled upwards from east to west. The plan is, once there's some cash back in the kitty, to hire a professional to come and tune it. I'll likely be building some bass traps before then... Both control and live rooms feature hardwood floors, but "engineered" I don't know about. When I can get 1/2" maple at a scratch and dent for $2/sq. foot, that's saving a whole lot of beans and rice! See attached for the plan of how I think I ought to lay it down. The vocal booth I'll run with as many layers of Quietrock 510 as it takes to shut that piano up, and foam padding to kill reflections. One concern I have with that stuff (Q-rock), I hear it's metal content wreaks havoc with cell phones and such... dunno. Anybody disappointed with Quietrock? My biggest concern - where I'm completely clueless - is HVAC. I mean, all these rooms need ventilation, but won't that completely waste all my efforts? And oh yeah, I'm going with floor lamps for the teaching rooms, and all electric outlets (where possible) are on exterior walls. So, after a lot of planning and little time left, I humbly plead for your experienced opinions, and pray like mad you don't tell me to throw the whole thing out the window and start again!!! :lol:

After a full day of hair pulling, I finally got my floorplan drawn up to it's full height. Man that Sketchup is both really cool and frustrating too. I'll upload a .png and a .skp for your amusement... somebody ought to make an emoticon with a guy like me pointing a gun at his head! :roll: