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Having finally moved to a house with a garage, the plans for my own studio began to develop.

I made a few decisions early on that governed a lot of the design:
1. I wanted to keep a small garage / workshop available for my keeping my tools in, and working on small projects.
2. I wanted the main access to the studio to be via the front up and over door (for easy loading/unloading of the gear from my car.

From this initial decision, the basic plan was formed. I would build a wall across my garage about one third of the way back with a large (ish) door in it, and have the studio portion at the back. The front section would then be a workshop.

I then began to research sound proofing and sound isolation techniques to work out the bast way to design and build the studio itself. Although at the time my drum kit was electric (and so could be played through headphones), I like to play at a 'reasonable' volume (although 'reasonable' is a very subjective term !!!), and so I wanted a good level of sound isolation to avoid disturbing anyone else.

Searching the Internet produced pages of information, many of which said similar things, and soon you can build up a list of the best techniques to use. I opted for building a 'room within a room', but changed some of the 'professional' building techniques for my own, which may not be quite as effective, but are certainly much cheaper.

The initial wall across the garage was built using heavy concrete blocks, and the door was a Fire Door, which I then lined with one layer of Plasterboard and then an outer layer of Plywood (which made it very heavy - which is a good thing in terms of soundproofing - but it took three people to hang the door in the frame !)

This door opened inwards (because the up and over garage door prevented me from opening it outwards), and so I needed to allow room for the door swing on the inside when building the second 'room'. I debated making the room 'L - shaped' to allow for this, but it seemed a lot more work in building it for a relatively small extra area of studio floorspace, so I decided to use this spare space as storage (for empty cases, speaker cabinets etc.). This made the room I was building a simple rectangle.

I decided to construct the walls out of smaller panels, that fitted together to form the room. This meant that I could build the individual panel easily on my own, and also means that I could (in theory) dismantle and re-use them elsewhere should I need to move or redesign.

The panels are made of two sheets of plasterboard, on a 2" frame, filled with Rockwool. I managed to create a design that used two sizes of panel, that made the size room I needed. See the layout plan (above left) for details. The panels were constructed leaving 1 1/2" gaps in the frame at the edges, to allow a length of 3x2 to be screwed in between the panels to lock them together. See the panel design plan (above right)for details of the design I used.

The main theory for building a 'room within a room' is that the inner room is separate from the outer and does not touch at all. Normally this is done using neoprene, rubber and even heavy springs, but all of these can cost large amounts of money. I decided to use polystyrene as an alternative as it is cheap to obtain and easy to work with. I work in IT, and so had ready access to the polystyrene end cheeks that PC's are delivered in. I cut of the ends of these to form a 'U' shaped piece of polystyrene about 12" long, and I used these along the floor to stand the wall panels in. This keeps the walls from touching the floor, but also the inner upstand of the polystyrene prevents the inner floor from touching the walls as well. Also, the polystyrene 'outside' the room stuck out enough to form the air gap I wanted between the inner and outer walls.

The inner floor of Plywood was laid on top of a layer of polystyrene again (both for noise and heat insulation), and then covered with a layer of hardboard glued and nailed down (mainly to hold the sheets of Plywood together). The gap between the floor and the walls needed to be airtight, and so I used polystyrene coving to bridge this gap (sealed with silicon sealant where necessary. You can see how this all fits together in the cross section plan (right).

I covered the existing roof timbers in the garage with chipboard on the top (to form a 'floor' for a usable 'loft' space, and plasterboard on the bottom with normal loft insulation between.

The roof was built of three panels which sit on top of the wall panels. The panels are made of similar construction (2x2 studding, packed with Rockwool, and plasterboard on both sides). In order to ensure the roof did not sag, I fixed a length of 4x2 down the middle of the studio. This was raised up 3" on small 2x2 blocks, so that the roof panels could sit on top of the walls, and the 4x2 would be just above them. The two end panels had small cutouts in them (2" x 2.5") to go around these support blocks. The roof panels were screwed up into the 4x2 to stop them sagging in the middle, and then a length of battening was fixed around the top edge of the walls, and screwed up into the roof panels to fix them in place. See the roof design plan (left) for a plan of how this was done.

All joints were sealed with silicone sealant (more than once - I found that as I was building, the walls 'flexed' and moved, and so joints that I had sealed started to open up again). Ideally, the room is meant to be airtight (to give maximum sound isolation), but that is very hard to achieve on a 'home' conversion like mine. However, for the price of a few tubes of sealant, I made sure it was as close to airtight as I could make it!

Power and lighting was done very simply, all on the surface of the walls. This was done partly for convenience (I simply bought a number of 4way extension leads, and connected them together around the room), but also to help with sound isolation. There is no point spending a lot of time (and money) building a sealed room, and then cutting holes in all the panels for nice 'flush mounting' power sockets and light switches, as these only let more sound leak out. There is on hole through my studio wall where power comes in from the front of the garage (and in the future I may need to bring other cabling through there). This is one hole that I know where it is, and is currently sealed with a small bag full of sand (which is very dense, and pretty good at sound isolation). If this causes a problem in the future, I can look at other ways of stopping sound leakage through this hole. Lighting is kept to one ceiling mounted light (NOT fluorescent) and then one or two desk lamps over the main working area for more 'focused' light when needed.

 

Although the 'Storage Area' in between the studio and the garage wall seemed like a good idea for storgae of equipment, it has become apparent that damp is an issue in that area. I'm no expert on damp, but I understand the basic principle of condensation; warm air (from the Studio) hits a cold surface (the outer garage wall) and the moisture condenses. The 'traditional' solution for this kind of problem is better ventilation, but as you know I've worked hard to make it all virtually airtight (which greatly improves the sound isolation). Therefore I needed to look at alternative solutions:

Firstly, I've lined the inside of the concrete block wall (and the inside of the garage side wall adjoining it) with polythene membrane, and then plasterboard (nailed on 2" wooden battens). This has improved the obvious 'condensation' on the inside of that wall, but not greatly reduced the damp. Obviously the rest of the garage outer walls are unlined (as I can't get to them anymore) so damp may still be condensing there. I 'bridged' the gap between the outer wall and the top left hand corner of the inner studio with polythene (which shouldn't affect the sound isolation in anyway) in an attempt to reduce any damp coming from the rest of the garage, but it's difficult to prove how effective this is.

Secondly, I've purchased (from ebay) a small dehumidifier, and I'm running that on a timer for a couple of hours each night to try and reduce the moisture levels. Again, it's hard to prove how effective this is, but I do get moisture collecting in the resevoir of the dehumidifier, so it is doing something!

I'll continue to monitor this situation, and if I find out any more, I'll post the details here......