Warehouse Studio

[frederic]

Howdy,

I've attached the floorplan of a 3-story warehouse that I have an opportunity to purchase out of a commercial bank foreclosure, BEFORE the public bidding process, based on the numbers I've discussed so far. I did a walk through of the facility last weekend, and all the funiture, the copier, cubicles etc are all included in the price. The outside dimensions of the facility is 70' x 45' and 3 stories high. The "warehouse area" is the full three stories high, with what looks to be 2' lost on the ceiling for girders, with 10-12' long conduit hanging from the ceiling every 20', with what looks like gymnasium lights on the ends, at about the 2-story height. Totally open in every way.

On the roof, there is a 25KW generator on the roof that started and ran just fine, however the voltage meters displayed 185V instead of 220V or thereabouts. Also on the roof is a huge unlabeled air conditioning unit of unknown origin.

The tank for the rooftop generator is located in the upper right hand corner of the diagram, and measures 15' wide x 4' deep x 5' high with rounded edges across the top and bottom of the tank. The tank sits on cinder blocks. Huge!

Inside the "warehouse area" is rack after rack of weird metal bent pipes, assorted junk, and a lot of other stuff that I'll have to have removed. No problem here, the rest of the room is completely open, all three stories.

The office area to the left of the diagram has decent furniture, the carpeting is fairly new, and is one story high (11' floor to ceiling, I measured). On top of the office area are some girders that go verticle on the diagram, which the office area suspended ceiling is tied to, and on top of that is concrete. I presume there is rebar in there, but its still concrete. On top of the concrete is more junk and a boatload of empty boxes. Obviously, needs to be cleared out as well. There are no stairs whatsoever to the two story area above the office area, and there is absolutely no lighting either. There is a small skylight about 2'x2' at the very top above the office area, which appears to be dead center, but thats a wild guess as I couldn't get up there.

The two loading docks are closed by electric steel doors, and exposed to the warehouse area. One worked, one didn't, and outside of the building there is a dip from the parking lot down towards the docks. The "rear" of the trailer goes down so the floor of the trailer is level with the dock. An "ordinary" van that you or I would have would be waaaaay to low. The dip(s) in front of the docks are completely full of water, leaves, etc. Obviously a drainage problem.

The circuit breakers are located also at the top left of the diagram above the fuel tank. The only way to get to them is to climb the fuel tank and walk across it. Really stupid design, but thats where it is.

The bathroom towards the left is the only bathroom - and it has a copier in it. Why the "reception" area only has access to it via this bathroom I'll never know, but thats its. Strange, huh?

I'm thinking I'll leave the office area alone, chop out the reception cube and put the copier there against the top wall in the diagram, and cut into the concrete wall to the left of that space and put in double doors, this way "gear" could pass through the front doors right into the warehouse space.

What do you think? Studio potential? The price is sooooooo right its not funny. I could pay cash and own it outright and while I am not seriously renting my studio out, its entirely doable in every way, financially whether I rent it out or not.

How would you guys lay it out? What do you think?

 

[frederic]

picture would help Oooops

 

[foreverain4]

whoa! looks like alot of potential. that is enough square feet to make a home recordist cry! hahah! i would say "go for it". have you thought about costs to renovate? you mentioned "3" stories, what do the other floors look like? or is it just tall enough to house 3 stories? keep us updated on this one!


lynn

 

[frederic]

whoa! looks like alot of potential. that is enough square feet to make a home recordist cry! hahah! i would say "go for it". have you thought about costs to renovate? you mentioned "3" stories, what do the other floors look like? or is it just tall enough to house 3 stories? keep us updated on this one!


lynn

Above the office space on the left side of the diagram (back of receptionist cube and the bathroom all the way down the bottom of the diagram) has a cement floor over it, to which the raised ceiling is attached to. The space above this cement flooring is open two stories - to the roof.

The shaded area "Warehouse Space" is three stories (approximately) floor to ceiling. Tons of space.

Renovation costs haven't been calculated yet because I haven't done anything more than print out 50 copies of the diagram I attached and pencil in different ideas as "what to put where". I could put in a second floor for the control room, have a live room downstairs, just keep it all open and frame off oddly shaped rooms, etc.

BTW, part of what makes this so affordable is this is 1/2 of the building. To the right of the diagram is another space (also open all three stories) with no doors or other passage ways into this space, which a good friend of mine wants to rent for his machine shop. It doesn't have A/C nor is it tied to the generator on the roof. Has its own utilities. By his shop renting it, the space in the above diagram has a monthly profit rather than a monthly cost. This profit would be whats used for remodeling

 

[Garak]

Sounds like a win win situation to me, jump on it. Even if it dosn't work out as a studio you will have a very nice rental property.

 

[Beathoven]

Beathoven says...

GO FOR IT!!!

Beathoven
http://www.mp3.com/beatoven

 

[John Sayers]

Looks good frederic - having the loading bays is excellent.

cheers
John

 

[frederic]

Looks good frederic - having the loading bays is excellent.

cheers
John

Thanks everyone for the positive feedback - I'm with all of you in that its a good investment property even if I don't slap a single panel of Auralex on the walls.

Made my unsealed pre-bid last night, and things looking good.

Now I have to sketch out how I want to lay things out. I'm all for large rooms, with some natural wood in them.

I'm just not sure what to do with three stories in height. I've never EVER seen a control room thats 15x15 trapozoidal with a 45' ceiling

Maybe I can pretend its a house and build a subfloor/ceiling 1/2 way for storage or something. Well, back to visio

 

[longsoughtfor]

frederic -The building looks great man! - Lets have a "design frederics studio" contest ! Everyone enters a floorplan - the winner gets to help solder the 5-billion wire connections needed

Kevin.

 

[foreverain4]

ohhh! that is cruel! and he gets to eat lemons while getting each apendage sawed off sloooowly! lol

 

[frederic]

ohhh! that is cruel! and he gets to eat lemons while getting each apendage sawed off sloooowly! lol

I'll skip out on the lemons and sawing thank you

I'll post in a couple of weeks the floorplan I come up with (or several). I must admit I'm a little thrown by the girder poles in the diagram, but thats okay, can't be that big of a deal.

I'm away next week and the following week, so I'll get some serious design progress after that. By that time I'll know if my pre-bid has been accepted as "the" bid.

 

[TexRoadkill]

The space looks awesome but I don't know about having a machine shop as a neighbor. If you have to soundproof a 45ft high wall that could be pretty pricey

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

Atrium skylighted studio

Hi frederic, thought I would throw this in, what the hell. Sounds like you have the space for more than one studio, or different types of rooms. I saw a picture of a studio that had just that, but they had the height to have a perimeter platform above the cieling line of the studios, with skylights in the studio cielings, so guests could watch from the platforms through the skylights into the studios! Ok, ok, it was just an idea. Good luck with the bid, and can't wait to see what you come up with. Sounds like your studio could get world class yet! Especially with your knowledge of digital and building. Wish you the best. Yell if you need help with pro cad stuff. Oh, and I'll send lemons.
fitz

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

Studio Dimensions.

Hey frederic, I want a shot at the contest Can you include some inside dim's of the spaces, or an "as built(existing)" plan?Include heights if you can. I'll give it a shot!
Might take a little time, but let me know.
fitz:

 

[frederic]

Hey guys,

First, thanks for all the feedback, suggestions, and ideas. You got my brain squeeking with thought - time for an application of 5W30

I attached another copy of the earlier drawing, with measurements. The measurements are accurate plus or minus an inch, simpy because there is so much crap in the warehouse it was hard to get a "straight line" wall to wall to use my laser measuring tool.

Some notes if I may...

I only included dimensions for the "warehouse" area as I'm fairly sure I'm going to leave the office area alone. The office is nice, the conference room is very nice, and the layout is tolerable. The walls are constructed out of metal studs with sheetrock and everything looks very comfy and not overly office like. A little paint and it will be "sweet".

The reception cube at the top of the diagram is going to leave, and I'm going to put double doors at the right of the reception area to allow equipment passage through the front doors. Since the front doors (both sets) lock to each other, i.e. no pole in the middle, both doors open give about 6-7' wide opening and I'll duplicate that straight back into the warehouse area. Open to other ideas, but this makes the most sense to me so far.

The back wall of the office area (right walls towards the center of the diagram) are metal studs with sheet rock, obvously not insulated in any sense of the word. The sheet rock facing the warehouse area is damaged here and there, so ripping it down, insulating and replacing is an option if necessary.

Now the funky stuff

The office area is completely covered by a concrete floor, thats bout 2' thick, resting upon corrogated steel panels which in turn sits on an I-beam that goes top to bottom of the diagram, resting on the 2' square "H" beams that are vertically set. Notice there are four "H" beams that go vertical - two in the office area, and two in the warehouse area. The office area i-beam goes across these two steel posts, at the ceiling height of the office area, and above that is 2 stories of open, unlite space. In the warehouse area, the i-beam that goes top to bottom is at the roof of the structure, so its open 46' all the way up.

after that space, the warehouse area is the full height to the ceiling - which is metal corrogated panels glued/rivited or something like that on the roof. The "height 46'" markers indicate the height of the i-beams that go across the facility (across being top to bottom of the diagram). There is space above that for the eaves of the roof, however this is more than likely unusable space, being so high up in the air.

To the right top of the diagram is the fuel tank for the roof-mounted generator, above that are two pumps in the very corner of the diagram mounted on the metal frame the tank sits on. On the right wall about dead-center of the tank (and above it) is the 800A breaker panel. THis panel feeds 400A to my 1/2 of the facility, and 400A through the rightmost wall into the space thats to the right (but not on the diagram). That space is entire open all three stories, no office area, no nothing - which will be my friend's machine shop. To address the point ForeeverRain and Tex made about machine shop noise, one of the things we thought of immediately was to have another cement block wall built 1' past the rightmost wall in the diagram, thus creating a 1' air barrier between the machine shop and me. The 1' (plus the 8" of the blocks) will be inside the machine shop space, not on my side My machine shop buddy offered to split the costs of this wall with me, because the rental price I've given him "was damn good" to quote him exactly.

With this much space, I could *easily* fit my entire home studio's gear list into a control room in this facility, so I'll give some basic dimensions.

Right now I have six Tascam TMD1000 digital mixers cascaded together as one big console, which is 108" wide by 22" deep, including room for cabling. Overhanging the console table will be a shelf to support three 18" wide LCD monitors for the variety of PC and recorder equipment that I have currently.

I have 24U of Akai hard disk recorders, 22U of outboards and effects, 82U of samplers, synth modules, drum machines, and related items. 4U of midi interfaces, 21U of amplifiers (5.1 surround amps, farfield amp, and two Peavey CS800's I'll pull out of storage for "client monitoring" amps). Also have a 9U mixer for foldback/monitoring and 2U of headphone amplifiers. I mention the amount of gear because right now all the above equipment is in my "control room studio" or in storage, in the case of the Peavey CS amps and the larger genelic speakers (dual 15" woofers). The latter equipment is in storage because they are gross overkill for my home studio. I use aiwa modified monitors with vifa drivers right now as nearfields, and they have been more than acceptable. But for this studio, I would definately flush mount them and use the "real" monitors. Definately.

I have some other stuff in storage I'll have to take a look at it and see if its usable, or just junk I stored. The storage place rented me a 6'x8' storage room and its pretty much full to the ceiling. But, I have a stroked hemi 600cidcid engine in there at the back, so its not all recording gear.

I have one TMD-4000 digital mixer left, but its for sale since I sold the other three, and eventually I'll replace all of the Tascam digital mixers with something thats 8-bus, automated, and has lots of blinking lights. I haven't made that decision yet, and it could be a pair of Oxfords or possibly two d8b's, though I'm not fond of the preamps. Worry about that later. Mentioning this for dimensional reasons only.

Since power absolutely is no issue (400A is a lot of power!), I'm inclined to also build a small kitchenette with a fridge, dishwasher and cooktop stove (no oven) in order to make the environment more friendly.

The last weird thing is the loading docks are 17.5' wide each, and 1' lower than the rest of the warehouse floor. The "depression" from the bottom wall in the diagram is 3', and the full width of the two loading docks. At the top of the 3' high space, the entire ledge is beveled at a 45 degree angle to meet the warehouse floor, so a total of 4' space is lower to varying degrees than the rest of the warehouse. I forgot to sketch that in. I can easily fill that in with concrete and rebar, and move the 45 degree slant closer to the dock doors, I have no issue with that.

I was also thinking of the space just below the existing bathroom to the right of the hallway (to the right of the office) would be useful for a 2nd bathroom, facing the warehouse space, i.e. the actual studio. This way I can isolate "studio" from "reception" thus keeping traffic flow between the two areas minimalized. Since all of the fixtures in the existing bathroom are on the same wall, breaking into that wall and adding additional fixtures in a new bathroom would be very easy. Don't need a shower stall in the second bathroom

If I install a stairwell, ramp, etc I could in theory use the 2-story open space above the office area for storage, or maybe put the control room up there (my machine shop buddy suggested building a multi-media theatre so he can watch his DVD's like in a movie theater (popcorn machine mandatory). Neat idea, not terribly useful I dunno, there is so much space and so many ideas in my head its easy to go insane

I do like the idea of multiple studios. Studio "A" which I run, and Studio "B" where clients can run their own gear, bring in an engineer, etc. Of course, I don't have any real clients that would need either facility to be that large, but thats a different issue

Sorry for the long ramble, but I'm trying to paint the facility as accurately as I can.

Thanks guys! Appreciate the ideas, help, thoughts.

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

Permits?

Hi frederic-ok, thats cool, gonna give it a shot. Couple of things-can I email you at home? Permits are in game, right? To make the most of time, I like to get right to the heart of whats permissible,(I'll check the building codes)but I need to know where the building is. Is that ok to ask, otherwise your spittin in the wind as far as partition/space/ egress design is concerned(remember Title 24?) At least where I live. Being commercial, or even zoned industrial, you still have to comply(or start over aagin later!) and I'm sure, if your like me, you've got no time to waste!! ha. I have to steal the time to do this, but I love this shit, so I'll steal it. But I have a lot on computer(CAD stuff) already that I can punch in(standard code stuff/coversheet etc and a lot of studio fixuring stuff. And remember, I have access to stuff that NOBODY but Macys gets and the sources, and that includes architectural millwork/hardware and it is cool stuff, that nobody but nobody uses in a studio setting except me, so there will be things in the drawings you've probably never seen before. Anyway, thanks for the dim's. Well, heres to having some fun!! And BTW, this is only to offer something that is a little different than the standard traditional studio design(acoustics are the real criteria, but they still have to bow to the law if necessary!) But I doubt it. I design to satisfy a lot of criteria, but visual detailing is what I do best and have the most fun with. Professional scientific acoustical design is highly defined now, but how much money have you got? I design to use anything I can get my hands on and do it myself! Ha!, thats why I had a studio shop. But enough already. Hope you get the bid.
Oh, whats the HVAC like. Maybe you can drop in an overlay to your layout showing whats existing. That would really help. Thanks
fitz

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

PS

frederic, I'm sure you know there are trillions of questions to answer, but this is only to
contribute what I can in this context here. I by no means, intend to fulfill full design, only conceptual ideas, unless you so desire. So please don't take me too seriously, as I am only trying to help. I'll be the last one to push stuff on people. And BTW, I still have the RPG stuff that I will incorporate into these ideas, but I'll seperate them so you can still use them in whatever context you want, if at all. And I have visio, but prefer CAD, as its the medium of choice at BID. R14 is what I'm using, and I'm just now getting around to the file format conversion stuff, for here. But for now, cheers
fitz

 

[frederic]

Re: Permits?

Rick,

First, thank you for your generous offer, and yes, you're more than welcome to email me at home. I'll be on my honeymoon for two weeks starting saturday, but my home email is midiguy732@yahoo.com (I moved from hotmail since the last time we spoke directly).

Just so you know, I wouldn't ask anyone to design my entire studio for free. I know what time is worth (I was an electrical contractor for 4-5 years as well as a CIO for hire (consultant) for another few years.

I initially posted the picture more out of bragging rights, because I kinda thought it was cool. Then after I posted it, I started to see others thinking about it and offering some ideas... ideas are very cool.

Actually, I have already drawn about 10 layouts on paper on top of the diagram, and I continue to do so while I commute to/from NYC every day (well, at least until today, I'm on vaca tomorrow ). Anyway, it gives me something to do on the train and well as a good quiet place to sketch.

I guess I was just curious how others would organize this fantasy space... how others think... while I've done electrical for many studios in the northeast I've not done a huge amount of studio contruction, specifically as to the layout. I've been leeching and printing John Sayer's examples of fine studio design, and sizing them to match the scale of my little GIF, then tape bits and piece in place. People on the train find me amusing

The building codes where the building is are reasonable, I have a friend in that town who is the town procecuter, and he's already inquired into the town for the building code book And honestly, as long as its normal stuff, it shouldn't be a problem. Electrical in conduit, audio cabling in conduit, walls made of certain materials and all the normal stuff.

where the building is.

Rahway NJ, one town over.

And you're the man with all the cool stuff. I have autocad 2k somewhere, just not on this PC. Might be on one of my laptops. I have my drawing finally converted from photocopy to visio, and I can export that to a DXF. I'm not sure it would be dimensionally correct, but I'd be more than happy to try.

Oh, whats the HVAC like. Maybe you can drop in an overlay to your layout showing whats existing. That would really help. Thanks
fitz [/B]

The HVAC is simple - its on the roof 2 stories above the office, and all the ducts drop down the leftmost wall in the diagram, then bend, and roll over the office area. Capped on the end facing the warehouse area. Thats really it, nothing fancy.

The filter box is on the roof too which will be a pain in the butt since there is no ladder or scaffolding going up that way inside or outside. Thats one thing that was pointed out to me as a no-no, I have to have a fire escape or a hatch or somethign to allow fast exit off the roof.

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

Too good!

Hi frederic, thanks for the quicki response. I want you to know, that I am offering free gratis help, on anything you do here. I hope my replys are here didn't imply anything else. I sometimes have opened my big mouth about autocad here, but still havn't taken the time to get this damn format conversion down yet.(I would rather be playing my guitar) But my offer is sincere, regardless who designs your studio. I just thought maybe full blown autocad (E) drawings would help, on any portion you need. Hell, I just spent 30 hrs laying out my wiring diagram in cad. But it helps, cause if I need to trace something down, I can pull the file right at the console, that has up to 216 layers of each wire, plug, device, circuit etc. It works good. Anyway, I am by no means a studio designer, but even I know some stuff. Its the details that turn me on anyway. Hardwoods, esoteric hardware and finishes, chemetals, laminates, plexi, trick lighting- Like my console, you wouldn't beleive what I've put in to it. Its my "experimental toy"! Just getting ready to mount these "hi tech" folding arms(like a monitor arm) on my console for things like my midizer etc My best friend is an engineer at a hospital, and he gives me all kinds of stuff that you can't just go out and buy. I have so little room in my "studio" that I have to use every sq. inch. And I hate CORDBALLS!
So I try to design for my own little pet peves in my studio. Sorry for the ramble. I'll get ahold of you.
fitz

 

[meriphew]

Hi frederic - Would you mind revealing how much you paid (or made an offer for) on your space? Also what city are you in? I'm in Seattle, and have been thinking of looking into a commercial piece of real estate. Thanks.

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Meriphew
www.meriphew.com