Before and after pics of the studios accommodation

[TornadoTed]

I finally thought it was time to share some photos of what I've been doing for the last 3 years. The studio before consisted of a live room 19'x17' and the control room 25'x17' in one bay of a steel framed cow shed.

Because we live in such a remote and generally poor area the studio has done ok but there just isn't the client base around here. So 4 years ago I decided to convert the bay next to the studio into accommodation. The bay is 45'x17' with the ceiling 10' high at the ends and 16' high in the centre.

I am lucky enough to own my own house so I decided to rent that out and move into the studio while it was being built to pay for the build. When I first moved in I had no clean drinking water, no washing facilities, no phone, no TV and slept on a matress on the live room floor! I converted the studio entrance room into a teporary kitchen. Two years ago I got married and my wife joined me in the live room, she is a fantastically patient woman! The first priority was to finish a bedroom and a shower room. This was a huge step in the right direction as it got us out of the live room. It got incredibly tiring moving our bed and stuff out of the live room every time we had a band in!

Anyway 3 1/2 years down the line we have nearly finished, the building has a large lounge/dining area 25'x17' a large bedroom 23'x17' which will sleep 5 comfortably, another bedroom 18'x17' which will sleep 4, a small double bedroom at the back, a shower room ,bathroom and toilet. Also whilst doing the build I added a dead room 12'x10' and 2x isolation booths 6'x4'

I have done all of the work myslef pretty much and I am extemely proud of the place as the only criterea for everything was to use the cheapest possible materials!

I still have to finish the hallway and the proper kitchen, they are plastered and decorated but empty at the moment without flooring. I intend to finish these 2 areas in the next 2 months in between studio work.

[TornadoTed]

The dead room and booths.

The walls are 6" solid blocks, I battoned them out, filled with insulation and then plasterboarded.

The doors that go into the booths are on sliding runners. I made the doors from 2"x6" timber and then filled the cavity with 3 sheets of plasterboard and barrier mat and then covered the sides in ply wood. In fact I made all of the doors for the sound rooms like this. The non sliding doors have magnetic seals which work really well.

The opening in the middle photo is a windo to the live room. I used 2 sheets of standard double glazing 6 " apart.

One wall of the dead room and booths has a bass trap made from 1" air gap, limp mass membrane, 1" air gap and then 4" of Rockwool RW3 the UK equivelent of 703. I then used 4" profile foam on the side walls and ceiling, it's not anechoic, still has a bit of life.

[TornadoTed]

And finished.

[TornadoTed]

Off to bed now, more tomorrow.

[TornadoTed]

The Lounge.

The lounge is open plan with a sitting area one end and a dining table the other. I do plan to get a big dining table at some point but as I mentioned in my first thread everything has been done as cheaply as possible and all the furniture has been given to us by family and friends. There is a large double glass window at the far end but I had to draw the curtains as it's such a sunny day here in Wales that the rest of the room was really dark with them open. It is fantastic on a nice day and such a light bright room.

As you can see from the before photos the floor is on 2 levels, the higher bit was where the cows used to sleep! The floor was build up level with Kigspan insulation and a floating floor was put on top. The flooring itself is plywood which I chopped into 4" boards on my table saw and then layed like boards. It looks really effective and is half the price of even the cheapest laminate flooring! I think it worked out about £0.30 a square foot!

The ceiling beams are false but look like the real thing, I used bog standard 2" x 2" for thsmall beams and 2 lengths of 9" x 3" for the main beams. I notched them out with a chisel fairly roughly so that the small beams sit inside the main beam and made false pegs.

Before.

[TornadoTed]

And finished.

[muziekschuur]

Very, very nice.

I'd get you a beer if I lived near.


Frans

[TornadoTed]

Back Bedroom.

This is a funny little room starting at 7' one end going down to 3 1/2' at the other end. The platform is the ceiling of the kitchen down stairs which is on a differnet level. It is just about the right size for a double matress.

The massive beam seperaing the room from the platform is the original steel girder the building is made from. They are a nightmare to plasterboard, you just have to wedge chocks of wood in as tight as possible with mastic to fix the plasterboard to.

Before and after as I only have a couple of photos of this room.

[TornadoTed]

The main bedroom was a challenge as it is built above the live room and control room. The ceilings are sloped around about 30 degrees so the floor stradles the 2 ceilings. I also built in platforms just wider than a single bed. The window is a masterpiece made for me by my friend as a wedding present! It had to be that shape to follow the metal girder of the main frame of the building.

In the one picture you can see the 2" x 2" frmaing inside the main beams of the roof. That was a nightmare job to do and took ages but it looks good. I plasterboarded inside the main beams to have them exposed.

Before.

[TornadoTed]

And finished. I just had a band in so the beds have been stripped and washed, it looked great with the beds made. I still have to shelve the cupboards out so not quite finished

[TornadoTed]

Some more, the one photo shows the slope of the roof below. The photos don't really do the room justice, it is far more impressive, especially the window!

[judah]

Congrats Ed, great craftmanship, the rooms look great! Back in the days when I had my studio fully booked I had bands sleeping in tracking and control room. Very mucho guerrilla....

[TornadoTed]

Originally Posted by judah

Congrats Ed, great craftmanship, the rooms look great! Back in the days when I had my studio fully booked I had bands sleeping in tracking and control room. Very mucho guerrilla....

Yeah I've done a fair bit of that. After a few days the session almost gets abandoned just because of odours

[TornadoTed]

The landing and stairs. Off the main landing are the 3 bedrooms, a shower room, a bathroom and a toilet. I've tried to make it so people can get going in the morning as efficiently as possible. There is also a shower in the bathroom and a seperate toilet. It's hard to take good pictures as I can't get far enough away from the rooms to get a good amount in the photo. The bathroom isn't quite finished yet as I still have a load of tiling to do a little painting.

Before.

[TornadoTed]

And finished.

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And some more.

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A quick picture from outside. This is one of the things I'm most proud of. The opening is 10' x 10' as I used to need to get in through these doors with a tractor to clean all the cow sh*t out! Under the planning laws around here if there is an opening it has to be filled with glass. I got the doors and windows on eBay for £200! They were only 6 years old and had a 10 year guarentee, they cost the guy I brought them from £3000 new.

There were 4 of the big windows and the doors so I chopped one of the big windows down to make the smaller window for above the doors. I had to buy glass for that but there was already glass for everything else. The cart whell on the wall is actually from the old cart my Grandfather used to use to move hay with horses! The cart was trashed but the wheels had been removed and were ok. I have another cart in fairly good condition which I hope to restore one day.

Before and after.

[westwood]

its a credit to you Ed, well done!! you single handedly turned a piece of shit into a palace, I bet wifey is impressed. you should be in the building game instead of music. looks like a lovely part of wales too. you say you're renting your house and had to live in there before you completed works, what can I say? you're a legend in your own lunchtime...

[TornadoTed]

Thank you for your kind words Westwood.

To be fair I couldn't have done it without my wife, she has been fantastic. She has had the odd low spell but has put up with constant upheival and living out of boxes! There are not many woman who would have put up with it.

Yes I've lived in here since the start of the building. It has cost me around about £30,000 to do all the work. I get around about £5,000 a year for renting my house. I intend to live here until the rent from the house has paid for the whole project. I have been here for 3 1/2 years so 2 1/2 more and the studio will have wonderful accommodation and it won't have cost me a penny! Hopefully we will be able to move out just as the accommodation and studio are starting to get booked more solidly. Incidently my house is only 40-50 yards away so I haven't got far to go!

I have upgraded the equipment quite a lot too but that has been paid for by selling the old equipment and money I have made from the studio. I have kept the studio really quiet as I haven't wanted to get too much work in as the place wasn't finished but the later part of the year I hope to advertise and make a push on marketing the studio. I had the first band in using the accommodation about a month ago and have another couple booked in for pretty much all of July without any marketing at all so lets hope my master plan pays off!

Am I insane, yes quite possibly