SonicClang
Part 4720981 coming soon!
6 years ago this week (!!!!!) I started constructing my recording studio. At the time of course I thought it would only take me 6 months because I had construction experience. Yeah… I was wrong about how long it would take me. Well, my brother-in-law is coming over this weekend so I took the whole week off work to prepare. My goal is to finish the major construction by the time he goes home. I've been working harder this week than any other in my entire life. There were a couple major hurtles I hadn’t gotten over yet, and now I have finally cleared them. This is what I want to share with you.
Hurtle #1: At the bottom of my stairs there used to be a 90 degree turn to the left through a door and into my studio. See the picture.
On the other side of that wall straight ahead and to the right is the laundry room. I've been wanting to cut that wall out for years so if my wife wants to do laundry when I'm playing drums or something she doesn't have to come into the studio, she can just go straight to the laundry room. The other reason I wanted to cut that wall out is because it's impossible to get anything big into the studio if you have to take a 90 degree turn right away. We tried moving a couch down here once and we couldn't fit it so I had to settle for a crappy old love seat. So what I wanted to do was make it so the whole area at the bottom of the stairs open up if I wanted to, which meant I had to build a 4 foot section of wall either removable, or make it swing. I've never attempted something like that, and I've never built a door, so this was a bit ambitious. Well, after many hours of work I finally got that huge piece of wall swinging, which means I now have an opening about 6 1/2 feet big to bring stuff down.
Here's a picture of the wall after it was cut out.
After cutting that out it was easy to see what needed to be cut out of the remaining wall section to get the whole thing opened up.
And after bout 10 minutes of cutting with the sawzall...
Now you can see why opening up this area is beneficial to bringing big items downstairs.
The next step was to build the swinging wall section. The first step was to put down a stationary base and top section so the "door" has something to seal against.
Since I knew a wall section this large was going to be extremely heavy, I attached a heavy duty caster to the bottom.
The next step was to frame the wall section just like any wall you'd frame, except I was using OSB as the top and bottom plate to make sure everything was true. 2 X 4's and 2 X 6's are natorious for being warped and twisted. After I had that all together I set it in place to make sure it fit and then I screwed the hinges on. The wall section swung freely. Here's a picture of it with the first layer of OSB from the live room side.
The next step was keeping it from swinging freely, so I installed padio door pins at the top and bottom.
Pull the pins...
And swing away...
The other hurtle I had been putting off for years was the pole in the middle of the live room. See picture (this picture is a couple years old).
What I wanted to do with this, since cutting it out would cause a catastrophic failure of the structure of my house, was build a frame around it. But I wanted it to be a little more than JUST a frame; I wanted to have a couple outlets in the base, and also have a shelf about 4 feet up for setting drinks on, because who really likes setting drinks on their amp? So here's the first part of the framing.
And then the top tapers down to allow for a small shelf. The studs on the top section were glued directly to the pole to make this as small as possible.
The next step was to build the shelf out of some oak I had laying around from a project from a couple years ago.
And there it is...
I'll post more pictures when I get some new stuff and when I get all my old stuff organized. I just wanted to show you guys what I've been working on this week.
Hurtle #1: At the bottom of my stairs there used to be a 90 degree turn to the left through a door and into my studio. See the picture.
On the other side of that wall straight ahead and to the right is the laundry room. I've been wanting to cut that wall out for years so if my wife wants to do laundry when I'm playing drums or something she doesn't have to come into the studio, she can just go straight to the laundry room. The other reason I wanted to cut that wall out is because it's impossible to get anything big into the studio if you have to take a 90 degree turn right away. We tried moving a couch down here once and we couldn't fit it so I had to settle for a crappy old love seat. So what I wanted to do was make it so the whole area at the bottom of the stairs open up if I wanted to, which meant I had to build a 4 foot section of wall either removable, or make it swing. I've never attempted something like that, and I've never built a door, so this was a bit ambitious. Well, after many hours of work I finally got that huge piece of wall swinging, which means I now have an opening about 6 1/2 feet big to bring stuff down.
Here's a picture of the wall after it was cut out.
After cutting that out it was easy to see what needed to be cut out of the remaining wall section to get the whole thing opened up.
And after bout 10 minutes of cutting with the sawzall...
Now you can see why opening up this area is beneficial to bringing big items downstairs.
The next step was to build the swinging wall section. The first step was to put down a stationary base and top section so the "door" has something to seal against.
Since I knew a wall section this large was going to be extremely heavy, I attached a heavy duty caster to the bottom.
The next step was to frame the wall section just like any wall you'd frame, except I was using OSB as the top and bottom plate to make sure everything was true. 2 X 4's and 2 X 6's are natorious for being warped and twisted. After I had that all together I set it in place to make sure it fit and then I screwed the hinges on. The wall section swung freely. Here's a picture of it with the first layer of OSB from the live room side.
The next step was keeping it from swinging freely, so I installed padio door pins at the top and bottom.
Pull the pins...
And swing away...
The other hurtle I had been putting off for years was the pole in the middle of the live room. See picture (this picture is a couple years old).
What I wanted to do with this, since cutting it out would cause a catastrophic failure of the structure of my house, was build a frame around it. But I wanted it to be a little more than JUST a frame; I wanted to have a couple outlets in the base, and also have a shelf about 4 feet up for setting drinks on, because who really likes setting drinks on their amp? So here's the first part of the framing.
And then the top tapers down to allow for a small shelf. The studs on the top section were glued directly to the pole to make this as small as possible.
The next step was to build the shelf out of some oak I had laying around from a project from a couple years ago.
And there it is...
I'll post more pictures when I get some new stuff and when I get all my old stuff organized. I just wanted to show you guys what I've been working on this week.
