John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

John et al:

First of all, tanx for such a great site!

The boss (aka - wife) and i are currently buying a new home (ok, she's getting a new home, i'm getting a new studio. ) The current plan is to buy a home with enough land to put up an outbuilding, and leave enough budget to get the building up with a fairly finished ("finished" meaning isolated and treated) control room, tracking room, machine room, and (if budget holds out) a bathroom and an area for clients to relax.

We would likely be getting a 3-car garage size of a building, but that's obviously flexible, since we don't even have the house yet... I'm moving from a basement studio, so anything in an outbuilding would be a big improvement. My clients have been varied from VO work to jazz and hard rock bands.

Enough about me... My question is a vague and tough one: How much would it reasonably cost to put up an outbuilding, run power, HVAC, and construct a reasonable studio? Obviously, there are too many variables to get anything even close to accurate. I'm simply trying to get an idea on cost to see if this is a reasonable path.

Tanx much! I'm sure i'll be posting more specific questions when we get the new house!

Hello,

Welcome to the site. I guess the bottom line question you have to ask yourself is...what's your budget?

Depending on your geographical area, and with the costs of building materials going up anywhere from 15-30% each month right now here in the US. BTW...Prices are jumping up again the beginning of May. So right now, what may have cost you $30k a year ago, is going to cost you 60-80k now or more.

(Only reason I know, a friend of mine does commercial drywalling and framing. 6-8 months ago it was a $40k job just in materials. When they finally narrowed down all the bids, the cost of materials was over $100k for the same amount of material.)

Not to mention, I'm building mine right now. Everytime I walk in to buy material, the price has gone up. It's almost a daily occurrence.

However, depending on the size of your room, square footage, how much isolation (is it critical for extensive isolation?), etc. all play a role in what the cost will end up being.

Since it sounds like you're starting from raw brand new construction, it may be different than doing a retro into an existing building. But at least you get to design it from the ground up literally and do what you want with it.

Maybe someone here can give more of an answer to the question, but it's a pretty broad question, and it basically comes down to what you can afford. You can spend 20k or 200k+.

If you have some more specifics, details, or plans of what you want, and the size of rooms etc. Are you doing floating floors? This all adds to the cost of construction. A year ago, typical construction for a house would have been from $150 SF to $400 SF average for home construction. For studio construction, better add to those numbers, especially at todays cost of materials.

Hope this helps, yet trying not to discourage you at the same time. That's just the reality of it.

Aaron

Veatch, first of all could you update your profile with at least the State you live in, possibly a town? Makes it much easier to make recommendations, we have members from Tunis, England, Scandinavia, Serbia, etc, and material cost and availability are as "all over the map" as locations.

If you're here in the states, and VERY DIY oriented (as in, maybe farm out concrete and electrical but do everything else yourself) you might get by for around $75/SF (we have members who've done that, but as Aaron mentioned if your price quote is more than 15 minutes old, guess again)

One method I'm looking at seems to be good price/performance - Insulated Concrete Form construction. Basically you put up these hollow foam "lego blocks", then have a concrete pump fill them with concrete, and instant STC 55 walls, before you even put inside walls up. Cost of the "lego"s varys with manufacturer, but a 24 x 36 x 12' tall set of walls(8" thick concrete) (no floor or ceiling or roof) would cost around $2600 (@ $70/yd) based on 36 yds of concrete - Concrete for slab would run around $1k, around $500 for the pumper truck ($100/hr) and probably around another $2k for labor, and you're at around $6k for a shell with no roof. That does NOT include the cost of the "lego" blocks either - I don't have pricing on that part yet, so far I've emailed a couple of companies and no replies - maybe they don't want to answer generic inquiries

Anyway, hopefully that will give you SOME idea of cost ranges... Steve

I'm in the Detroit area. Prices are jumping up around here as well.

I'll definitely look into the Insulated Concrete Form idea. I'm fairly DIY, but time is what it is. I have friends/relatives that are in construction, so i'll likely farm some of it out to them (might as well keep the money in the family, yeah?)

At $75/SF to $400/SF, i'm getting a little nervous. Already scaling back the design.... I'll probably start with the control room and a basic tracking room to try to keep under "budget" (which is yet to be defined....)


Tanx much! I'll post more specific q's when i get closer to building.

One of your first concerns should be to make sure you have enough available power! Not only will you need AC power for the studio gear, you'll need enough for HVAC etc.

If your located in Detroit, the winters there can be as bad as they are here in Illinois. I had several bids from HVAC companys. I ended up with a commercial unit that is outside of the building, AC unit with a heat pump and an aux heater. The unit is extremely quiet and efficient. Here there is no natural gas lines, everyone uses LP gas. At the moment electricity is somewhat cheaper the the LP. (Of course, that could have changed while I typed this, if you know what i mean).

My "outbuilding" is 300 feet from the house. Even though the house has a 200 amp service, burying cable (required here) all the way through the yard with water lines, sewer, and cable TV would have been crazy!!
The power company here, required that I install a "commercial service" if I did not branch off the house. In the end I have 200 amps off a new transformer taken directly from the primary. The cost in the end was about the same. It just took months working with the power company engineer to get it done.

IF you do have questions, and you will, this is the place to ask.

Tom
First Bass Audio

Power supply is a good point.

I have 60amps running into my building. The main draw is as mentioned HVAC - typically a AC compressor is 25 Amps or so - 220V, the electric heating in HVAC is about 40 Amps - 220V, so worst case, leaves 20 Amps which is sufficient for the gear and lights (plus I'm in New Orleans so you need heat for about 30 mins a year and AC the rest of the time )

fbars wrote:I ended up with a commercial unit that is outside of the building, AC unit with a heat pump and an aux heater.

How many cubic foot is your building? How much did the HVAC cost?

Tanx much for the info!

veatch - there are two things you need consider.

1) how much isolation do you really need - where are the neighbours. STC is expensive so if you don't need a lot you can save heaps.

2) a sound isolated building will be heavily insulated so any HVAC system you choose will be very efficient.

cheers
JOhn

HVAC...I'm learning this cost right now.

My upstairs unit in my house burned up about 1 1/2 months after moving in. (Real bummer). The first quote I had for a 2 ton unit was $4800.00. The second quote I just got today (this is also a gas unit for heat), labor and all is $2900.00. (And this is through a friend). On the same quote to redo just duct work for me in the studio to an existing unit, is $1400.

From what I'm learning, you need to have 1 ton for every 600 SF. So I've been told.

Once again, isolation is a factor here. If you need critical isolation, you'll want separate units: 1 for the control room, and 1 for the tracking rooms. (Ideally) If not, you can get away w/ one. Just may have to turn it off during tracking.



Aaron