Two friends and I have been reading these forums for a while and I think time has finally come to start our own project. Therefore, it's also time to seek some advice and guidance from the experts in order to plan it properly before we start.
I have to say that we owe the "little" we've learned so far to this forum, as well as to Hispasonic and Gervais' book "Build it like the pros". Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge !!
Before I ask any questions I'll try to give a complete description of the situation, aim and construction plan, so I don't waste your time asking for any additional info afterwards (although I'll be glad to give it if asked!)
So ... this is the project:
Location: 45 km from Madrid, Spain
Website for reference: http://www.casaestudio.es
Budget. about 7000€ DIY
Rooms to apply Isolation to: 2 (Total of 30m2 / 98,42 sq ft) Maybe also the CR.
Rooms to apply acoustic treatment to: 3 (1 control room and 2 studios; 50m2 / 164,04 sq ft)
Building description:
- Detached house not sharing its foundations with any other house.
- NO ONE LIVES in the house, just artists while recordings are taking place… So, some structural sound transmission could be tolerated.
- Ventilated roof with steel trusses and porexpan plates over the ceiling. The roof is about 3m high at the ridge and about 40cm at the eaves.
- Ceilings are made of plasterboard screwed directly to the roof's steel trusses. The ceilings cannot be raised unless a complete re-roofing is undertaken, which is far beyond our budget. We could actually raise the ceiling without redoing the roof but the steel trusses should stay in their position, which would render them visible from inside the house, and that would be a massive structural noise bridge, I guess.
- The “shell” of the house, as well as the wall that divides the garage and the living room are made of brick walls.
- Inside walls made of plasterboard (drywall). I don't know what’s on the inside yet.
- Ceramic tiled floor in the house,
- Concrete tiled floor in the garage
- Closest neighbours are 6 meters (19,68ft) away from the house. The rooms we'll be working on are the current living room (which we are planning to turn into 2 rooms) and the adjacent garage. ACTIVITY TO DATE
The living room has been used as the only live/rehearsal room. It has a chimney acoustically untreated (which acts as a sound tunnel to the outside!). Not special sound insulation at all in the room; just some acoustic treatment.
DIMENSIONS
Living Room: H 2.50m (8,20ft) W 3.60m (11,811ft) L 7.45m (24,44ft) ; 28,18m2 / 92,45 sq ft
Garage: H 2.50m (8,20ft) W 3.67m (12,04ft) L 6m (19,68ft) ; 22.02m2 / 72,24 sq ft
AIM: Stop bothering the neighbours, even if they are in their garden. Some noise would be tolerated but not as loud as it is today.
AIM: To turn the living room into a Control Room and Studio "B", which will be rather dead and used mostly as a vocal booth/amp room. Light/medium isolation will beapplied in Studio "B"
AIM: To turn the garage into Studio "A". Medium/High isolation. This room will be used for tracking drums / full band and as a rehearsal room for a full band (rock).
INSULATION AIM: +-60db for Studio “A” (Garage), +-50db for Studio “B”, +-40db for CR (not sure whether to insulate)
OTHER INFO
We have used the house several times for tracking and it seems that, most of the sound leakage occurs through the ceiling/roof.
PLANNING IN DEPTH
GARAGE (STUDIO "A") : H 2.50m (8,20ft) W 3.67m (12,04ft) L 6m (19,68ft) ; 22.02m2 / 72,24 sq ft
Before we started working on it, the garage had three brickwalls. The front consisted of a large up-and-over wooden garage door. There was a 70cm wide wooden door in the back wall, opposite the large garage door, and a window in the side wall to those two.
We have removed both doors and window, built a wall where the large door used to be with 15cm hollow concrete blocks and the window hole with bricks; both rendered with mortar. We are waiting to put a new door, which will be the only way in to the garage from the living room and to close the hole where the back door used to be, with a new concrete block wall. As we were able to see when we were removing doors and windows, it seems that the brick walls have an air chamber between the bricks and another layer of thinner bricks, but that is hard to tell for sure.
The wall adjacent to the living room is a load bearing wall and will be dealt with carefully as we'll need to place a window and a door in that wall. We'll hire an architect for that. After we make holes in that wall to allow the installation of the door and the window, we might be able to get more information about that wall construction and to know if it really has an air gap between the two leaves of bricks, which is a normal feature in home building in this area. But one thing we can be sure of is that there are flanking paths between those two leaves: there are metal beams at the top of the hole left by the small wooden door we're about to seal, as well as at the top of the window hole we have sealed. The hole where the large garage door used to be is framed all around with heavy steel beams.
The floor is made of concrete thin tiles, which sit on a concrete slab, which in turn rests over sand, I think.
The floor is about 1 step lower than the rest of the house (20/15cm)
The ceiling is made of plasterboard screwed directly to the roof's steel trusses.
At the back of the garage there’s an adjoining tools/machine/ little storage room (3.67m x 1.7m). The boiler and the washing machine will live in there as well. Hopefully that will work as an air lock, adding to the insulation, which would be just as well, since our closest neighbours live about six metres from this wall. This room shares one brick wall with the garage and one brickwall with the CR (current living room). The other two outside walls are made of hollow concrete blocks filled with mortar on both sides. They also share the same ceiling.
Now, the plan is to build a room within a room BUT we want to lose as little in height as we possibly can, since the room is “only” 2,50m high.
- Insulation needed: around 60db, I guess.
- Air conditioning: using Fujitsu ASY 35 UI LLCC
- Air renovation: using a silent air extractor + DIY silencers.
We are contemplating two different approaches and haven't chosen either of them yet:
- Brick/block wall building method.
- Drywall/steel framing method.
OPTION A.-
Drywall building procedure seems to be quite straight forward, cleaner and, maybe, more desirable for non professional builders. Also, the finishing touches would be easier to accomplish.
With drywall we would do something like this: Bolt the wall steel frame to the floor and build with this design: Chovacustic 35 fieltex glued/bolt to the outer leaf (existing envelope walls) - steel frame leaving 10cm air chamber - rockwool 70kg/m3 filling that chamber - drywall 15mm - Chovacustic Viscolam 65 - drywall 15mm. Estimated +-60db attenuation with this system and would "lose" 14cm from each wall.
Our main brain crusher is the ceiling, though. We know the insulation of any room is as effective as its weakest leaf... and the ceiling is our biggest challenge.
The ceiling construction method we first thought of was: Chovacoustic 35 Fieltex (pdf attached) bolt to the current drywall - Silent blocks hanging from the current drywall (but attached to the steel truss) - steel frame leaving a 5cm gap - fill that gap with rockwool 70kg/m3 - drywall 15mm - Chovacoustic Viscolam 65 (pdf attached) - drywall 15mm
This way we would lose about 8cm in height. This ceiling method was taken from http://www.hispasonic.com/foros/resumen ... ayo/461553
Then we have came up with other "crazy" ideas such as, wood beams sitting on the air gap of the walls so the ceiling could rest on them and be decoupled from the structure.
We have thought of leaving the floor untreated and laying just a 2mm layer of polyurethane on top of the current tiles and a 7/8mm laminated floor over it. The walls would be bolted to the concrete tiles and slab and the floor would be laid after the walls are finished. Should we do it the other way around?
OPTION B.-
On the other hand, It seems to us that brickwalls would give us better isolation and would be cheaper for us to build, but we would lose more room. Also, the implementation of the air renovation and aircon seems more challenging with bricks (and more importantly, harder to fix or improve afterwards) We have some experience with brick/block building but we are not skilled/experienced with "smooth finishing"..
If it were built with bricks, the plan could be this, roughly:
A1.- Eliminate air gap, in case there is one, between the two layers of the existing brick walls in the garage. As said before, we might be able to know if there really is one when we install the door to the garage from the current living room that's becoming Studio B and Control Room. To eliminate the air gap we could fill the space between the walls with sand or mortar (We are guessing but that could be nearly 2'5 cubic metres if the air gap is 5cm thick???... sounds like hard work but it has the advantage of sand being very cheap... 0,03€/kg).
We could also strip the first layer, then plaster the newly exposed bricks. That would give us a slightly wider room, and the possibility of plastering the face to which we wouldn't have access otherwise. The first layer is made of this kind of bricks: (http://almacendemateriales.com/ladrillo ... n30154.jpg)
A2.- To dig a trench through both the existing tiles and the concrete slab along the whole perimeter of the garage in order to lay a good foundation for the new brick walls.
A3.- Build the brick walls and plaster at least the inside of the "room within the room". We don't know if we're going to be able to plaster the side that would be between the two leaves (and hopefully single) air gap. Bricks to be used for these walls: (http://www.materialesdeconstruccionmadr ... ado103.jpg)
A4.- For the ceiling of the new room, we could install new steel beams resting only on the new walls. These would be 4cm high. The easiest way to close the space between those beams would be to use bricks first and then pour a concrete layer over them, but that would take upsome room height. So, we may go for the denser concrete layer only, with some steel bars inside. Bricks to close the space between those beams: (http://almacendemateriales.com/ladrillo ... n40204.jpg)
A5.- The other layer of double wall on the ceiling would be completed with the same sort of drywall the ceiling had before we started working. The one screwed onto the light steel trusses that hold the roof. Drywall with several layers I guess... maybe up to three 13mm layers, as the concrete on the new room's ceiling is going to be thin and the air gap in the ceiling is going to be about 10cm high.
A6.- There would be rockwool (or another absorbent material) filling the air gap inside the double walls (and ceiling) to some extent, but we still have to decide the better way to do it. We have read on page 172 of the Mastermaster handbook of acoustics by F. Alton Everest that maybe low density mineral fiber balls could be used and we are trying to figure out what that is (maybe what we call "perlita"?). We're also trying to figure out how to get some inches between the rockwool and the walls, as we have read it could lead to the same results as using thicker rookwool. All this rockwall installation seems harder to build with bricks than with drywalls, as we've been told that rockwool can't be in contact with water or it will not work... even if it gets dry again... does rockwool "die" when it gets wet?
A7.- All the inner walls and ceiling of the room would be painted to cover the mortar.
A8.- The floor would be untreated. The existing tiles could serve as a base for new tiles or a non floating wooden floor as in Option B
STUDIO "B"
This room will be used mainly as a vocal booth/isolated space for other acoustic instruments during live sessions (i.e. accordion, harmonica, light percussion, vocals...).
The sound pressure in this room will not be as high as in Studio "A"... But, who knows if a drum kit could ever be played in this room... maybe if need be! It will surely be used as an amp room as well, though.
We would strip the existing drywall inner leaves and leave the outer leaves as they are.
We'll probably be using drywall in this room, but maybe we'll go for 5cm air chamber instead of 10cm. The system would be: existing walls as outer leaves - 5cm air chamber filled with 70kg/m3 rockwool - drywall 15mm - Viscolam 65 - drywall 15mm. +- 50db attenuation expected.
The new wall between CR and Studio "B" would be a double wall: drywall 15mm - viscolam 65 - drywall 15mm - rockwool 70kg/m3 5cm - rockwool 70kg/m3 5 cm - drywall 15mm - viscolam 65 - drywall 15mm.
The ceiling and floor would be as in studio "A".
This room has quite a large double glass door, which connects the current living room with the outside porch and we are still figuring out what to do with it... It's lovely to have some sun light in so, we are planning on enclosing the porch with glass in the future (a conservatory of sorts). This could occasionally be used to track other acoustic instruments when needed...
As far as ventilation is concerned, we still don't know where the best place for the silencer boxes is. IOW whether to put them inside or outside the house., or even inside the ventilated roof. Should it be inside, what is the best place? Any info on that will be greatly appreciated!
CONTROL ROOM This is still under its early planning stage. The dimensions chosen for it are taken from one of the golden ratios I've found: 1:1.4:2.1 **Update** will change it to 1:1.4:1.9, the best and prefered ratio for Louden.
Anyways, I'm still looking for a lot of answers regarding its design and I'm still reading a lot. I'll come back with fewer questions in a few days, I'm sure.
The rough drawings you see are just that: very rough.
I still don't know whether I should isolate it at all (if I do it I won't be able to comply with the ratio I've chosen) and I haven´t done much planning of the acoustic solutions to integrate in order to tune it right... I'm sure I'll come up with something! I've always treated my mixing rooms by ear and always end up finding my way learning how their sound was and interpreted correctly after some time. This is the first time I do a design before hand...
Questions:
We would love to know opinions and suggestions for the isolation of the rooms.
I think it would be quite hard to install an acoustic door on a drywall so we thought on installing 2 sets of glass slide doors in between Studio A and B. Any suggestion?
Regarding the shape of the rooms, do you think it's desirable to destroy parallelisms between walls? I'm very lost at designing them. I would really want to come up with a "sweet spot" to place the drumset in Studio A... Any advise on the geometry of the room? Should I do that in the acoustic conditioning stage better?
Knowing we have access to the ventilated roof, Is it recommended to place the air exchange silencers there?
I'm away from home at the moment but will be back tomorrow and I'll try to get you fresh pictures from the rooms.
As we say in Spain, this post is a BRICK... sorry. I just hope you can digest it well. A thousand "thank yous" for that!!
Salud!
Niko (Silvestre, and Marcio)
Did you read the information on that product provided by the manufacturer in their own data sheet? That's not what it is meant for, and would not help you at all. 
