Hi all, I'm looking for advice regarding the building of a 68m2 2 room studio on the top 7th floor in an office building.
The salient points: The space is L shaped, but the structural engineer has decided it's wise to build along the long side of the L which is basically 14m x 4.9m. Ceiling height, once I take out all services and ceiling tiles, will be 3.16M sloping down to 3.04 M. There are structural beams supporting this perimeter, as well as beam support that splits the space in two. So essentially I can build 2 separate rooms (CR and LR) where the lineal load is supported for the walls. The floor has been calculated to hold 500kg/m2 after studying the building plans. I'd like to float the floors with a 75mm slab on isolators (NRD2?) with a 75 mm air gap and insulation.
The walls I'd like to be comprised of 3 layers of 15mm CFC (45mm), although, much of the outer leaf is floor to ceiling window glass (10.38 lam) which will need to be reinforced with either more glass (the views are great!) or CFC. Apart from nearby office and hotel buildings (20m away) there are just 2 neighbours on my floor within spitting distance (them spitting on me if I mess this up!) but my main concern is with neighbours below in several offices beneath the existing 125mm slab on condeck. I conducted some LF tests where it seemed most frequencies between 40 and 200 hz are currently attenuated uniformly by around 40 dB, although listening to a sweep it seemed to peak to my ears b/n 150 and 200z.
I want to record rock bands but am prepared to accept that I may not be able to record drums during business hours, I'm a late owl anyway... However would really love to be able to work all hours to suit client needs. To this end, as part of the live room, it would be great to have a drum booth and a couple of amp booths which might enable me to record during business hours, albeit not ideally. It would be fantastic if I could use movable walls (Hufcor?) to create these booths, and move them back out of the way when I can get away with having more ambience (at the expense of more leakage!).
That's the rough outline. I can't use sketchup (yet) but could provide a mud sketch or 2 along with any other particulars, including the rest of the layout (green room, access to toilets etc). I should say that I have operated 2 different studios over 25 years (both on the first floor), and built my last one in 1998 with a little help from the late Graeme Thirkell.
I'm thinking to complete a design in a few weeks, and am hoping to commence building soon after. Of course there are a lot of details I have left out, but am happy to provide as much as is asked for, should any one care to! I have a ton of questions, as anyone always does in these matters, but I have a feeling, due to the unusually challenging nature of the project, that a couple of you folks may be wanting to ask me some questions first- like "what the hell are you thinking!" ;) .... So, please, shoot me!