Unit Studios, Herts, UK - renovation / rebuild

[admench]

Hi,

This is a project that has been 2 or 3 years in the pipeline and I'm happy to say that work is under way. We are rebuilding some floors/ceilings and adding some new areas to the studio. Its all superficial work to make the place a lot more comfortable.

I'll give you a little information on the studio:

Unit Studios is based in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK. We are approx 1 hour north of London by car, about half an hour on the train from Kings Cross.

Our most succesful project to date has certainly been recording / producing / mixing an album for Atlantic records. Artist 'Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly' album "The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager" which has sold approximately 95,000 units to date!
We have worked with other small signed/unsigned bands including Good Shoes / Targets / Park Bench Poet / Eskimo Disco / Boom in the Diamond Industry.

Our facility is a relatively small industrial unit which was originally structured to be a rehearsal space in around 2004. It soon took on a second role of demo studio for the 2 bands that used the space - the first setup was a G5 powermac and a Yamaha 01V and has gradually evolved to its most recent setup of 16 simultaneous inputs using a MOTU 896HD / RME octamic D.

The website is Unit Music Studios
and the work in progress website is Unit Studios, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, UK Recording Facility

Our aim:

We have put together a plan to change some of the aspects of the studio.

• Install air conitioning in the stuffy control room.
• Improve physical headroom in the control room by lowering the floor (which is the ceiling to the live area).
• Install a new partition wall on the first floor so there will be two areas: the control room & a lounge area for clients to relax.
• Put in a new floor for the new lounge which will split the double-height area of the industrial unit.
• The live area: To put in new flooring (wood-effect laminate), plaster the walls, create some bass traps / diffusion and install new lighting.
• The downstairs area next to the live room: turn this into a kitchenette with a kitchen top, microwave / sink etc.
• Access to upstairs is currently a steep permanent wood ladder which we intend to alter to something safer. Ideally a spiral staircase would be installed.

All major work is going to be done over the next 4-5 weeks with a completion date set for 1 december 2008.

I have some initial images of the first 2 days work which I will post up today.


Adam
Unit Studios

[admench]

Day 1 & Day 2

We have emptied the equipment over the two previous days. We had 6 lads and a van with us to move the Yamaha upright piano... the rest Andy and I moved using our cars into storage. Today we ripped up the control room carpet, chipboard floorboards and loft-style insulation which you can see in the bin liners. Also you can see in the first shot, there is a half height wall which my hand is leaning on... that was taken down. That wall occupied the exact same line which the new partitioning wall will be built.

Ordered 11 of 8"x2" @ 4.8metres of sawn timber and 4 of 4"x2" @ 4.2metres which will be used to create a new floor structure, once the one you can see has been taken out.





That's Andy.. he and I ripped all the carpet tiles down in the live room... as you can see we have a lot of sanding/stripping of remaining adhesive before Chris our plasterer can go anywhere near it!



In the shot of the kitchen area you are looking down from the control room into the double height are that we aim to split with a new floor.

The first step is to take out the control room floor/live room ceiling which at the moment consists of plasterboard, a hard blue foam material and the timber. Once that is done, the wood that I have ordered will be cut up to create the new floor. That's happening over this weekend.

More pics to come!!!

Adam

[admench]

Still the old floor in here....

[admench]

We're removing the plasterboard, blue foam, joists and large beam from the studio today.



At the end of the day Tom, our project carpenter has come in to mark out the new line to cut the walls down to. We're lowering the ceiling height so that the new, larger joists can be fitted giving us a more rigid floor structure. We'll lose about 6 inches headroom in the live room and gain about 2 inches in the control room above. It will also be a more insulated (soundproofed) barrier between us upstairs and the band below.

The wood has arrived for the new floor structure today!
More pics to come tomorrow as we begin to put in the new floor.

[Trev@Circle]

Nice work. Looking forward to see more as my own refurb commences in just a few weeks.

[admench]

So this weekend we have lowered the live room walls and then put in new batons to re-align the lowered walls. They are now way more sturdy than before!


The next day, Sunday, we put in the new floor structure using the old beam which was re-aligned to be perfectly straight...



Then we completed putting in the rest of the joists (which are all 2"x8", 400mm apart) and at the end of the day plasterboarded the ceiling...



And whilst we were busy on that, my brother Alex who is a graphic / 3d designer is on site making sketches and drawings to generate a 3d model of the studio so that we can have a 'walk through video' on the website and also fully visualize our next stages in the construction.

[admench]

So today we installed the new ring of cabling for the upstairs sockets and also 4 separate lighting circuits for downstairs.
Also, Alex has given us an early stages 3D render of the building... you can see a rough outline of the structure and the feature spiral staircase! I'm well excited!!! We'll have a walkway video once all of the 3d model structure has been completed.

[admench]

Hi

Its been a week since my last post, we had a re-think on the ceiling structure for the live room and decided to take the advice of an acoustics expert and install resilient bars to hang the plasterboard from. This achieves a better isolation from the live room to the control room above.

[InSight]

Coming along nicely, who did you buy the resilient bars from?

[admench]

We got the resilient bars from CCF
CCF - Ceilings, Partitioning, Dry Lining, Insulation & Fire Protection thumbsup

[admench]

Hi,

Well we've finished the live room ceiling now that the resilient bars are up..
Tomorrow the plumber is coming to move the water tank out of the way.

[admench]

The wall in front of the mix position is going up...

Resilient bars and insulation will dampen some noise from next door.

[admench]

Hi,

We've made some great progess, if a little delayed in our original timeline. Here are some shots of the new floor going in and the partition wall between the control room and lounge...
thumbsup

[admench]

[mrickaby]

I've been following the build for a couple of weeks now and it looks like you're getting on really well with it! If I'm down in London visiting Apple or clients, it would be great to see the completed build when it's done. Good luck with the rest of it!

[PhilR]

This build amuses me cos I'm standing behind the counter at Screwfix where I work, picking out all the stuff I sell on a daily basis from your photo's.

[admench]

More photos...

Things are coming along nicely now, it's feeling like a studio shell rather than a building site... Good vibes all round.

[admench]

Hi,

We've nearly completed construction works on the studio.
This week we have installed the new perspex skylights, boxed off the tank & boiler, sanded floors, built the banister wall at the top of the stairs, decorated the live room, built a wall in the kitchen area for storage under the stairs and now started to biscuit joint our beautiful planed timber into large sheets for the custom control room desk. It will have a single 19" rack space installed at a slight angle and also a set of drawers. We spent about £200 - £250 on the planed timber for the desk and I think when it is finished it will be a great addition to the studio! We have saved a great deal by building it ourself and it will proudly stand for many years to come!

[admench]

As you may have noticed, this is a fairly small location for a studio, so we are making the most of any nook and cranny. Today we built a structure to house items such as mic stands etc.

[admench]

Hi, we've been getting busier now that christmas is getting closer..
Here's some photos of the preparation work towards our control room desk:

[admench]

[admench]

Hi, following some great threads here on gearslutz, we have constructed our own bass traps, and used the knowledge to create boxes for our unsightly hf-absorbers...

Oh, and you can see our great wood flooring is now in too!

[judah]

Great! You're doin' well! Keep it up.

[admench]

Hi,

Things are really speeding along now... we have cut and routed the main control room desk... I sanded back our stained staircase to pine colour again and the decorating is coming along really well.

Other highlights include fitting the solid oak door to the live room and putting in a custom made lining and door in front of the electrical consumer unit (Thanks Malcolm!). We have had a custom made door constructed for the control room which will be a great finishing piece of woodwork (Thanks Finn!).

Ahhh 3 days off for christmas now.. Put our feet up and have a Guinness or three!

[admench]

So we've been busy doing all the finishing jobs pretty much. Our first booking is on the 5th Jan so should just about be ready for then..

[admench]

The bass traps are up! The room still sounds really live and bright.. we'll have to do some tests soon, but I can already tell we'll need some extra HF absorbtion.



Also Finn has made us a custom door for the control room. You can see the triangular wedges are fitted to the desk to house the MOTU 896HD and RME octamic D, also we'll probably put in our Electrix filter factory and some blanking panels to round it all off...

[greatgreatriver]

Looks like a friendly comfy place! Good work guys!

[admench]

Hey!!

We've finally reached day where we can put back some gear into the control room - extremely exciting. Andy and I spent the day cleaning, installing rackstrips into the custom furniture and covering the sofa, followed by putting in a special 'under the desk' shelf to hold all cables and looms out of sight and out of mind!

Updates will be coming thick and fast now that we have to really tune the sound of both the control room and live room. I'll be using Fuzz measure..

[admench]

We had our first client in today after renovating the studio!

It went pretty well - the place feels 300% more professional and comfortable.

[admench]

The Chillout room



Control Room



Control Room