Doubt on my walls...

[casaestudio]

Hello. I already started to do my walls. The rooms I'm building are a Live Room in the Garage and a control room and a vocal booth in the adjacent living room. The garage and living room are separated by a brickwall with an air chamber and drywall in the living room side... So we took off the drywall so we could make a cement rendering on the brickwall, make the airgap wider (and fill it with rockwool) and finish the wall with drywall-Viscolam-drywall...

...But that wall had a surprise hidden inside: After taking off the drywall we found a framing system we have never seen before! Its a light galbanized steel frame that appears to be welded into the frame used to hold the drywall ceiling... That wall frame is also touching the brick wall, becoming a massive structural sound bridge. It looks like we can't take that framing off)

IMG-20160902-WA0012 small.JPG

Sooooo... we are searching for solutions.

We thought we could embed that frame on the wall by plastering the current brickwall and then adding another layer of bricks so we would double the mass of the wall. After that we would build an air chamber of about 10cm in the garage side and then drywall-Chovacustic viscolam-drywall. The rest of the walls in the garage would have the same structure but without doubling the bricks on the outer leaves. Would embedding the frame be a good idea? Would that increase the ammount of sound being transmitted through the walls to the ceiling?

I've noticed that frame in the wall is in contact with the brickwall only through chunks of cement in certain places. Should we take that cement off and detach the frame by wraping the whole frame with acoustic detacher such as fonodan before embedding with bricks?

Just as added info: We're planning on building the ceiling using silent blocks, rockwool fitting the gap, drywall-viscolam-drywall but I am very worried about the sound transmition to the ceiling upper frame coming through the problematic wall.

I would appreciate some feedback/help even though we still keep on smiling.. Thanks!

20160902_145517.jpg

[Soundman2020]

To be honest, I would not do anything more in there until you get a structural engineer to come in and take a look at what you have, and tell you what you can do, and cannot do. Only a qualified structural engineer can do that. Get it in writing.


- Stuart -

[casaestudio]

Thanks a lot. Already contacted 2 architects and a proffesional dryboard installer.

I'll keep on updating.

[casaestudio]

Just to update and close.

The framework on the pics is a light steel frame that is actually the "skeleton" of the house. In this case, no problem embeddind the frame in the adjacent wall. Confirmed by an architect.

Cheers.