Ok, time to start the official build thread. This is a consolidated thread, I'm going to update these posts over the next month or so until we get caught up with realtime, but the actual project started about a year and a half ago.
A little backstory, I've personally been doing music in one way or another full time for about 20 years now, the whole time building up my old studio from a booth in the corner of a studio type apartment into a busy full time room with multiple engineers working out of it.
Here are a couple shots of the old studio, getting ready to start tracking drums for a killer band named Eminence Ensemble-
Here is Jadakiss in the booth-
And a shot of the current (soon to be old) control room-
It's been a great spot to work and grow the business, but with a lot of things going on in the space it's been time to move for a while now. My wife also has a very small single chair hair salon and also has been looking to move her business into a bigger space, so we began to hunt 5-6 years ago for place for both.
Our first plan started to come into focus when we got this little house next to a brand new park. The house had commercial zoning, which we changed to mixed use, which would allow us to build on the rest of the 13,000sf lot for both the salon and studio. This wasn't something we were going to be able to afford right away, so we AirBnB'd the house and saved for a few years-
Meanwhile Denver really exploded and construction of projects here became nuts. After speaking to handful a builders, we started to realize that we were either going to have to save a lot more, take a lot of debt, or look at other options. We also realized that we would likely be creating a whole building that would fit our needs very specifically, and wouldn't likely have very good resale value. Right about that time this place across the street from the house came for sale-
After checking it out, it had a >11' clear height to the bottom of 2' tall I-joists, the space is a clear span, 3400 sf, 17 parking spaces and would be something that we could get both of our businesses into. We talked it over and while it was going to be a challenge, we realized that this was going to be the best option for us. So we closed on the loan, got the keys and dove in.