Bedroom conversion - Finally, a house I'm allowed to modify!

I'm using this space to think out loud for now. Feel free to offer advice but I'm still in the info gathering phase and wanted to put stuff in one place. I am only able to go out to the new country house on the weekends currently (work in a different city) but I have all my construction friends coming up the last week of December to implement all the plans I'll be working on until then. I've gone through three apartments in the last 5 years.... each had it's only bedroom converted to a upper class ghetto studio (auralex but no isolation). It was largely for my own writing and production but I badly want to sell services from mixing to scoring. The room does have 2 external walls of the prefab house. The entire ceiling mimics the slope of the roof. The bad stuff... -Both the outer walls are thin paneling trim nailed right to the studs. I can hear/feel engine rumble from the sparse residential (gravel) road. -The house is on stands not directly on a poured foundation. (I will get under it this weekend with a flashlight.) -The closet messes up the back wall. The good stuff... -The shape of the room! Slopes away from front wall mixing position.. yay! -It's mine! What I really want... to be able to record vocals and mix (DAW) in both stereo and surround. I would give up on the surround if it compromised stereo mixing by a large amount. It going to be me alone most of the time so if I were to build a vocal booth it would be me running back and forth (or shooting my mac remote through a window :D). My budget to fix up this room is around $2,000USD I could stretch it hard and put off other upgrades and possibly go to 2500. I have a positive ton of auralex foam 2"wedges and pyramids as well as 8 2' bass traps. I understand that wall surface treatment is absorptive and diffusive but does nothing for isolation and I will have to mount new walls on the studs. Right now I'm leaning towards 2 layers of 5/8 drywall on a resilient channel. I would keep all four walls separate from each other with acoustic caulk. I'm still researching ceiling options.

looks like a nice room. can you remove the closet? are the exterior walls exposed where you could beef them up? if not, what are the interiors walls made of? how about the floor? how much of the rumble is coming through the floor? vs say the windows?

You are one active forum dude, gullfo! Yes, I can remove the closet.. right after we determine if it is load bearing :D ... i would like to see the closet go.. more space for sure. Hmmm... exterior walls exposed? I can get to the inside of the outer wall if i remove all the interior paneling and insulation. Most of the sound transmits through the window.. but the lower frequencies pass through floor..... if i block off the window ... I still get the bassy feel when a truck passes (more than 20 yards away). Interior is crappy 1/8 paneling nailed straight to stud.

I ordered rod's book today.. amazon says that should be here tomorrow.. I will spend this weekend at the house measuring and getting down materials of everything I find. After reading other's room conversion budgets, I'm a little worried now that my 2500 dollar budget isn't going to go very far even with me doing all the labor myself. I really don't want to do this wrong for less money as i hope to be here fore a long while. So I'm thinking one big versatile room with a possible vocal booth. The materials don't seem bad.. Where would the bulk of expense come from?

yes, i would go with the single room well treated and isolated as best you can to stop the rumble from interupting your recordings... if th closet is load bearing (i'd be surprised...) but you could replace it with a beam to take the load and gain the floor space...

Well, Im on chapter 4 of this very informative book... i"ve spent the last couple days reading it. I'm a little discouraged by what i've been reading. First off, I thought 2500 dollars was a considerable budget for what i wanted out of the room. It doesnt seem to be. The biggest block being that I can't find a way to verify the results I'm achieving and it seems wiser to spend 500 bucks i know will help over 2500 that may make things worse. I'm going this weekend to model the room on my laptop while sitting in it. I will post the google sketch up file them and I am very curious others might suggest. The other thing I found was my room is well below what is considered small... so even though the space is nice shaped it is still only around 1500 cf. And last and the thing that stops me from major modification the most is the reoccuring control room shape I see everywhere and was explained in the book. No parallel walls and widening towards the back. If i'm not able to afford persuing that shape, why do anything beyond surface treatment?

Closet is gone.. now it looks like this... scale and all.

Well, I've been laboring on this room for a while now. I decided to leave the 3/8" up and put a layer of 1/2" on top of it on every wall but the back one. The back wall (tallest one) has been insulated and covered with 5/8" drywall. I bought stopgap for all the drywall seams and put fresh sealant on the window. The room is MUCH improved. The reasoning to not gut and rewall was to keep the house in salable and livable condition. Still transmission has not been a problem and I don't foresee it coming up. My next step (hopefully next week) will be to figure out what sort of absorption/diffusion treatment needs to go where. I know the general layout of foam (heavy toward the mix position and lighter as you move back or down) but I want to tune this small room though as best I can. The slope makes for some tricky placement if I buy premade stuff.

consider building a soffit on the peak to hold a bunch of rigid insulation and make that space a nice big trap.