Detatched double garage with room over, studio conversion

Hi Forum I am new here and have been reading through the posts with great interest. As recommended I have also ordered the Home Recording Studio: Build It like the Pros book and i'm awaiting it's arrival. The reason I am posting is because I am in the process of purchasing a property (UK) that has a detached double garage, with a room over the garage. I would like to use this upstairs room as a studio and band rehearsal space and I would like some idea of how easy or hard or expensive this might turn out to be. My current level of understanding is just a few days of browsing the internet for any ideas, so please bear with me! Please see the attached pictures of the building to get an idea of what I am dealing with. The room dimensions are garage 28’9 x 19’4, room over garage 34’1 x 17’9. As you can see in the picture, the upstairs room has a fairly low ceiling (aprox 6'6). Above this is a sloped roof which has 6 roof windows in it. Currently they are covered by the plastered ceiling. Unusually the upper room has cavity walls, but the lower garage is single brick. The upper inner wall is supported by 8 metal posts going down to the concrete base below. There is a further layer of plasterboard covering the inner walls, which is on wooden stud work. To the front there is a large double glazed window, and there is a smaller one at the rear at the top of the stairs. I don't know how the upper floor is constructed. The upper room was added after the original garage was built and was intended to be a snooker room, but was never finished. I hope that is a clear description, I must admit I know next to nothing about building construction, but I am learning! My primary concern is the fact that there is a residential property approx 12 feet away from the front left corner of the garage and I don't want to be disturbing them during band rehearsal. For recording I tend to use virtual instruments and DI bass & guitar, so recording is not too loud. I mix at about 80db. Band rehearsals are likely to be louder, probably peaking up about 110db ish. I think I can get away with using it as a recording space with no modifications, but band rehearsal will be more tricky. The main house fronts onto a fairly busy road and we are only a few doors away from a pub, so the neighbourhood is not all that quiet. Hopefully this will go in my favour. My initial thoughts are to build a smaller room within the large room which is soundproofed and use that as the rehearsal space, with the remaining room space left open which is where I will do my recording and mixing. But I understand from reading here that this might not work as expected as I already have 3 leaf walls and would be adding another two leaf's with the inner room. Plus the floor doesn't seem to be able to stop that much noise as normal speech can be heard through it, meaning sound from upstairs then has a clear path through the garage door and also through the downstairs windows that face the neighbouring property. In addition the wooden box you can see in the upper room's picture houses the mechanism for the roller garage door below, providing another route for sound to leak out. Then there is the rear stairwell to consider too. In practice I think the low ceiling is also going to be a problem but I don't know what might be involved in raising it without causing the roof to cave in! Or how soundproof it might be if I leave it as it is. So to summarise, my questions at this stage would be:- 1) It is feasible to build an inner room upstairs that will reduce the sound outside the building enough to not annoy the neighbours? 2) Rather than build an inner room, would I be better making the whole upstairs room soundproof? I think this means I would have to wall off the stairwell and put in an upper door, deal with the cavity wall somehow and the leaky floor and possibly the ceiling and the front window. 3) Might I be better building a room downstairs instead on the concrete base? Unfortunately the downstairs ceiling is also quite low though and I would prefer to keep downstairs for vehicles. 4) If I took the upper room's ceiling down would sound leaking out of the roof windows become an issue? Hope someone can help Thanks David

Hello and welcome to the forum, David. Congratulations on the purchase -- or perhaps we should retain our congratulations until the purchase is final...? ;-) Anyway, I'm going to start things off with a bit of a buzz kill I'm afraid... :roll: ...Study some of the "bonus room above garage" threads here and you'll see that they all have one challenge in common -- how to soundproof the space effectively while not overloading the floor and risking a catastrophic collapse. :evil: Unfortunately, it's quite a condundrum because effective soundproofing is (regardless of what myths you may have had for a long time or may have just picked up in your recent research) extremely heavy, and most structures are built with economy as a major factor, which means there's usually not a lot of additional load capacity to spare. Imagine parking a couple of large cars in that room -- would you feel comfortable standing in the garage while someone jumped on the floor between the cars? :shock: I sure wouldn't! :!: Some people don't have very strict isolation requirements -- they live out in the country where neighbors are far and few. However, coincidentally (or not), those properties tend not to have upstairs spaces being considered for studio space. Usually when there's spare land, there's little desire to save land by building "up." :roll: The book you purchased, and the further studying you can and should do here, will reveal some facts: if isolation of 110 db rehearsals is what you need, you need to go to great lengths, and you must adhere to the "two leaf rule" and decoupling concepts as closely as possible. If you do this upstairs, you're going to have the worst time with your floor, because effectively and reliably and safely decoupling your floor entails a floating floor system, which is going to be extremely heavy, and expensive, and not easy to engineer. You'd definitely need the services of an acoustical engineer and a structural engineer as well. In addition, your extremely low ceiling inside the upstairs space is going to be very awkward, and probably illegal. Even if you didn't lose any height to additional soundproofing materials (gypsum wallboard being the cheapest), you're going to be impeded with your ability to hang clouds, etc., to mitigate reflections and improve acoustics. Honestly, your better bet (and it's not a terrific bet, either) is to use the garage itself as the studio space. At least then you don't have to burden yourself with thoughts of a floating floor, as the slab is dampened by the ground which minimizes the flanking potential, as is discussed at length in [url]the "Is a Floating Floor Right For You? Answer: Probably NOT" sticky thread[/url]. I can relate to your situation because back in 2004, my wife and I bought a home with a spacious garage that I thought would be ideal for building a soundproof space for my drum kit and fellow musicians to play with me. Unfortunately, it's late 2007 and I'm still building the space, a little at a time... And if I knew then what I know now, I'd have chosen to buy perhaps a little smaller home on a larger piece of land that would accommodate the construction of a standalone building for my studio. Had I done that, I think I'd have finished a long time ago. I wish I had better news to share, but that's what I have for you at this point. --Keith :mrgreen:

grooveuk- There are several of us here who have space above the garage. You can read some about us below. Rod's book is great and will teach you a lot, but it doesn't help much for our paticular design. In Rod's book, he warns against building a studio in a room with an elevated wood deck. It seems that the floor can vibrate and resonate and is hard to sound proof. If you add enough sand or concrete to the floor, it will probably weigh way too much. Your floor may not even withstand the weight of the walls for a "room in a room." I've been trying for some time to get some common sense advice about what we can do to get some level of isolation without spending too much money, but I haven't been able to get any. I have even tried other boards, but about all I can get is "you're screwed." I would imagine there is a design where we could get some level of isolation, even though it would not be great. If we could just get some one to help us a little. http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8426 http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9178 http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... highlight= http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... ght=#60097 http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... highlight= Good Luck!

Hi Again Thanks for the feedback so far, it's given me some things to think about. The purchase is going ahead and hopefully I should be in within a week or so. Even if I can't use this for rehearsals it's still considerably better than what I have now! I am told by the current owner that the floor of the upper room is rated for 5 tonnes. There are two steel beams on top of four steel colums holding up the floor. In between I assume there are wooden joists. With the ceiling, im planing on taking the whole lot down and somehow raising the joists to give some more headroom. More info soon when I have it. Dave