Hi frederic, me again. I hope you don't think this is an afront to your design abilities, as I assure you it is NOT.
Its okay Rick, I know i'm not a designer. I'm certainly not an architect. Yours and everyone else's comments are always welcome (especially John's
) Its important to say however that *my* drawing is nothing more than a floorplan. While *I* could probably build this facility from it, contractors of any sort will not. The purpose of the floorplan for me is to figure out what goes where, what fits nicely, and enable a visual aid for reviewing security, people flow, the ability to run two seperate studios under one roof without the clients intermingling too much, things like that. This is not, and never will be a contracting diagram with electrical, fire sprinkers, plumbing and HVAC simply because at this early part of the process, I'm still figuring out room shape and location. I believe I'm almost there too, its getting closer and closer to what I envisioned in the beginning. Like Kristian said - "Use the space dude!"
I haven't posted the majority of the below simply because I felt I was being too prolific on this BBS, which is aimed at home studio construction. I guess I was trying to be polite. That said, I'll bring some of the behind the scenes information forward.
I've had
extensive conversations with the local planning board, the fire inspector (and the fire chief), the town's building inspector, and the town's architect. Its clear to me each of these people have different agenda and thus different hot buttons. I will have to provide handicap parking, but based on the facility and how significantly below the 120 persons maximum occupancy I will be on a daily basis, I have been officially told that 1 designated spot with a sign and pavement markings will be fine. Coincidentally, I have the sign, the sign post, and just need to stick it in the ground
The building inspector and the architect made it very clear that the rules of construction is that all the plumbing and electrical must be done by licensed professionals. The inspector, on the way out the door the second time he visited, said "as long as it passes, we couldn't care less, we're not out to break balls". Plumbing I'm going to pay someone to do because I can barely fix plastic sink traps, but the electrical I will do myself, or at least manage the implementation as if I were a GC. I used to own an electrical contracting business so even though my license has expired, at least I know it will be done right if I do it myself. Since the "new" bathroom butts agains the old bathroom, the amount of plumbing work won't be too severe or costly. I've already gotten very reasonable estimates not including repair of the walls, since I'm going to be moving them around a little bit anyway, using better materials, thats just fine.
Its clear to me the fire inspector is going to be a sore point... we've discussed
at length fire exit requirements (I have two exits, front door and back door which meets local code) but he's insisting I install a fire door into the garage bay. My architect said to ignore this, and after its all installed, see if he still barks. If he does, install it and forget about it, if not, leave it be. Its going to cost the same whether I install it now or three months from now, so that actually makes a lot of sense. The big thing for the fire inspector (and the fire chief) is a sprinkler system. Obviously a job for the professionals, I do realize that. However because recording gear is expensive, I do not want to use water. Halon is illegal here. However, FM200 which is basically halon-similar in functionality is legal in this juristiction, so I thought that would be the ideal system. Amazingly enough from when I was a dot com, I happen to have left over 100% of a still-currently registered system minus the piping that is strewn throughout the ceilings. I have the tank, the refill module, the control module, 25 detectors, battery backup and the switching controller and four valves to create four zones. Even though local codes allow for FM200 (and is specifically permitted) its clear to me this fire inspector doesn't like it, and is insistant that I install water. This may eventually become a legal challenge, because I refuse to even consider allowing water to sprinkle on my gear. Absolutely friggen not.
The unused 1000gal heating oil tank in the upper corner of the diagram is technically an issue, and officials who has schlept through here have commented that its a hazmat condition and I have to have special people come in, neutralize it, then fill it with sand. While not the most EPA compatible solution, the scrap yard a block away said "sure, we'll take the tank, when can we pick it up?" with no cost to me. Part of me wants to do it right, part of me doesn't want to spend $15K for proper decommissioning when some monkey next door will take it out and make it his problem. I'll have to think about this one for sure.
HVAC is a sore point for me. I spent almost 30 minutes explaining the concept of running piping in the floor and running cool water, or hot water, depending on the season to maintain a constant 72 degrees. I'm not sure why these folks never heard of such a thing, but I will need to resolve that before anything is installed. I found two HVAC contractors that have expressed a strong interest in the job as well as spend a fair amount of time demonstrating they can do it successfully. Both received a faxed copy of the above layout just to give them an idea of the overall size and scope of the project. Obviously, no quotes until the architect comes up with ammonia smelling blueprints
Because I'm carving up the first floor in its entirety I will have to mount the boiler/tanks and control systems off the ground on a "shelf" which is legal here, or possibly on the 1/4 sized 2nd floor slab. Battery backup is a must, and I have a huge system in storage also from my dot com days so aside from probably having to replace most/all of the batteries, thats a major cost that I don't have to bear. Its easy to patch in too, it goes after the main breaker but before the rest of the breaker box. Three really huge wires and a ground.
Acoustically, the facility is very quiet. The machine shop (my tenant) on the other side of the wall is amazingly quiet, and even standing next to the rightmost wall (the wall that seperates he and I) I still can't hear him through the wall. What I do hear is the beep-beep-beep of the diesel bucket loaders across the street when they are in reverse, and this sound apparently is leaking in through the roof seam where it joins the concrete wall. Since each room I'll be building will have its own walls and ceiling structure, it just tells me that I need to consider extra soundproofing materials in the ceilings. Of course, I need to see if I can seal the metal ceiling against the concrete better 3 stories up. I'll leave that to a professional also. I can't see me on a 3-story latter squishing concrete patch into a roof joint. Um, no thank you.
Right now most of the place has been gutted, all the stray electrical boxes that were randomly attached to things are gone, the conduit has been cut back to the breaker box and saved, so basically at this point the only thing thats "wired" are the gymnasium-style mercury vapor roof beam mounted lights and a few 120V outlets I left for power tools and extension cords. This fusebox, while not brand new of course, has room for 60 breakers, 1200A total power capacity - more than enough. In fact, I won't need most of it. Since all the studio rooms will be enclosed, the mercury lights won't be terribly useful to me but at least for construction purposes, they'll be enough for further cleanup and creating the shell of the facility. The tank has been disconnected and most of the office walls have been torn down with the exception of the reception area, which I intend to leave pretty much as is. No sense in redoing stuff that looks good. Already have the new bathroom fixtures (american standard assisted power flush and matching pedistal sink) and fancy fawcetts so it looks nice when its done.
Since each room will have its own engineered ceiling, possibly sloping in more than one place for acoustical benefits, running the electrical for each room up the wall, into conduit at the ceiling, then across the facility above the rooms to the wall to a clamp is perfectly legal. This keeps the electrical above the facility rather than below. Not being below is good should I decide to heat/cool the facility with forced water underneath the floating floors. Regarding upwards conduit, none of the inspectors/fire marshall et al had any issue with this at all as long as the conduit is attached to the wall properly and supported every six feet across the horizontal. Thats easy to do, all the conduit runs across the top of the ceilings to a central point, join into a huge 6" or 8" conduit, then that one conduit is supported per spec to the wall, turns and follows the wall to the breaker box. Time consuming, but easy
Whew!
