Hello everyone! I'm currently looking for a house in Long Beach, CA (just south of Los Angeles) and I'm focusing on ones with detached 2-car garages because I'd like to convert the garage into a home recording studio. Ideally I'd like to split the space into a control/mixing room and a tracking/live room for recording individual instruments. The neighborhoods I'm looking at are not in a flight path, and the houses are set back at least 15 ft from the street and the garages are set back much further than that. Virtually all the garages are avg size, unfinished 22 x 22 ft with double-car-wide garage doors, concrete slab floors and trussed roofs that go from 7 ft up to maybe 10 or 11 ft. Many of them also have one wall that forms part of the property line with a neighboring home.
So I have two questions:
(1) Is my dream of a live room + mixing room combo doable in this space, or should I think about building the mixing room as an extension on one side? Roughly how much would it cost to build such an extension?
ETA: already got answers to this one, yes it is clearly doable. :-)
(2) Any tips in general on what to look for in a 2-car detached garage that would make the conversion easier? (For example, from my reading so far you can't just remove the trusses in the roof if you want a vaulted ceiling, so a non-trussed garage would be better, if I can find one.)
For the sake of discussion, let's assume I manage to get into escrow by April 30th and close by June 30th, in which case I will have an $8K budget to play with. (Fingers crossed!!!!!
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I've tried to provide as much info as possible, but certainly feel free to ask more questions!