Unfinished Basement Design Help?

I’ve just been approved to build a new house a few miles away from my current location that will have an unfinished walkout basement. It will be in a subdivision just south of Nashville, TN, but on ½ acre. Noise is only really going to be an issue to my family in the 2 floors above. The houses are 30-50 yards apart. And since the front half of the basement is underground, I plan on putting the drums in that area to minimize noise outside. Construction on just the house is scheduled to be completed in February 2008. I can then start in on the basement studio. I am a professional producer/engineer/programmer, so getting a killer layout is crucial. I’ll be spending all day down there and have several clients in daily. I currently have my gear setup at two different locations. My Trident 80 console and outboard gear are at a semi-commercial location that I use about 5 days a month. After tracking, I then usually work at my home studio above my garage. It’s just a control room with a tiny vocal booth. The goal in buying the new house is to bring both of my studios under one roof so that I can always have my tracking setup available at home. It will also hopefully provide enough space to get multiple iso rooms, a large control room and a lounge. I’m having a tough time finding a good layout that will fit my needs since there are some load-bearing walls in place, an existing bathroom, a staircase, a pole and windows along the rear wall. I plan on building most of the studio myself. I’ve built a couple of others in the past and have a good idea of studio construction. I’m not too concerned with the budget. Since this is what I do for a living, I’ll make whatever I need to work. The basement walls will be poured concrete and will stair-step down from the front of the property to the rear. There are a few large windows and an entry door along the back wall. I’m told that the ceiling height will be about 8.5 feet. While the whole basement is probably close to around 1800 square feet, I imagine the studio portion should come in around 1350 or so. There’s a bathroom, storage area, guest bedroom and office that I’d like to include down there that won’t be part of the studio. (And by the way - in the pic below, the inner walls will actually be wood studs and not fully built walls. I couldn't figure out how to insert that correctly.) Here’s some of the issues I’m dealing with and some criteria I’d like to see: (1) There are outside windows and a door along the back wall. Ideally, I’d love for the lounge to be in this area. It makes sense to have the door enter into the lounge first as to not disrupt sessions in the control room as people come in and out of the building. (2) The inside staircase from the upstairs living portion of the house should enter into the lounge area as well. I’m willing to have the staircase make a left turn at the bottom. It’s the only way that I can think of getting it to open up into the lounge area and the front door. (3) There are some load bearing walls that are supporting the other 2 floors of the house that we’ll have to work the design around. (4) There is one pole in the basement. (5) Since the walls at the front of the house are concrete all of the way up to the ceiling, I’d like for that area to house a drum room and/or live room. I’m also trying to put the drum room on the opposite side of the guest area. (6) I’d like the control room to be of a decent size. Not only because of the Trident console, but many times the band, the label, and management will all be over and the room gets small very quickly. (7) I’d also like good line of sight. This has been tricky since some of the existing walls are there (I assume they will only be studded). (8) There needs to be a guest bedroom near the bathroom. The bathroom location cannot change since it is already plummed. (9) I’d love to fit a small office somewhere in the layout. Thanks for your help! I'm not sure how to upload a smaller version of my .skp file. It's sitting at 5.5Mb right now. (?)

if you save a copy of it, then in the copy, remove the materials in it (select everything and on the materials window click the "default materials" button) then open the tools -> model info -> statistics and hit purge unused, it should remove all unused, hidden components, groups, maerials, etc and this should clean it up. you can then zip it as well.

"I’ve just been approved to build a new house a few miles away" " The bathroom location cannot change since it is already plummed." I'm confused about what phase your in with this construction.

Construction on the home has just begun, and it is a spec home. The basement walls are up. Framing should start soon. Per the builder, I can't make changes to the original plans. I've asked for the basement to come unfinished, but since they usually build them with the basements fully finished, they agreed to an unfinished basement - yet the plumbing lines would have to already be in the concrete floor. They do this because if I were to back out of the deal, they still want to be able to sell the house to someone else the way they normally would -- with a finished basement. The drawing shows what it will look like the day I move in and can start building the studio. Hope that makes sense.........

Gullfo, Please forgive my ignorance, but I'm having trouble finding the "default materials" button. I'm able to find the materials window, but don't see a button for defaulting anything. I'm on OS X and am using SketchUp 6.0.514. I was able to purge, though. Am I missing something? Thanks,

ahh.... on the materials window is a blue/white square which looks like a semaphore flag. select it and then "paint" your selected objects. there is also a nice Ruby script which remove material from the selected objects as well (which is my preference since it deals with nested components etc) http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDep ... terials.rb

Gotcha - I definitely don't think I see that feature anywhere in the OS X version. Here's a pic of my materials window. I've been able to get the file down to 3.7Mb, but I think that still too big to upload here?

maybe download the remove materials script and select everything and run it, then purge. remove any complex components also... i made this based on your jpg but i'm sure its a bit off here or there.

Here's the SketchUp File.