I usually try to give a monthly-update at the end of each month, but with Jess’ folks coming into town today, I wanted to hold off and let them experience our progress in-person, before I ruined it for them with an online post.
…but now, here ya go.
We spent most of our time last month down in the future studio area.
As soon as an electrician had come out to run some power where I wanted it, most of the walls were ready for drywall… all except the one we ordered windows for. Where we could, we put up two layers of drywall, renting a panel lift for a day to do a second layer of drywall on the ceiling, beneath the first layer that was already there.
When the windows came in, I went to town. …because I needed to buy a saw to cut holes through the thick exterior wall. Then I went to town again (teeha joke!). We’re really happy with how much the three little windows opened up the room.
Around that time, my brother Arden/Jacob came to town to visit. During his “vacation” he was kind enough to help me with some construction. He and I framed the second window wall…
…and started building a closet/vocal booth. I decided to put a vocal booth in the front half and a closet in the back half, accessible from the other side of the wall (back room area).
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| Arden measuring something important. |
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| Making sure it’s solid |
After the rest of the week of fun adventures with the bro and Jess, I returned to the newly framed walls to go crazy with drywall some more. I really love the stuff… especially the fact that it coats every surface in the house with a new layer of dust every day! Jess likes the story where she has to wash clean dishes, sitting inside the cabinets, because they all have dust on them… so she can cook on them and clean them again!
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| Too much mud. Too much sanding. Too many showers. Too many showers for all of our things. |
Next I got a little carried away. Jess picked up some paint while I was sanding drywall mud one day. When she got back, the excitement was too much for me to handle. I started painting as soon as I felt like it… which was way too soon. There were terrible dips all over the un-textured wall surfaces, which would have made for a construction fail (or a “custom” job, as my father-in-law calls it). So instead of leaving it, I spent another day or two adding more mud and doing a lot more sanding… then all the inches of our house needed more baths.
Shortly after the second and third coats of paint, I added some track lighting. It was finally starting to look like a music room, and less like a garage filled with ridiculous amounts of effort, drywall and time.
As the days went by, I got around to putting up some crown molding, installing a fan and prepping the floors for laminate.
Since laminate runs across the entire room (i.e. into the half that won’t be ready for it for at least another month) we decided I should put down as much of the flooring as I could, hoping to have enough to start putting the desk area together. Later I’ll go back and finish all the laminate and install baseboards.
With almost exactly enough flooring down, I got to start putting my desk in place. The old desk setup I had was a couple feet short of the new space that I had to fill… so we spent a couple more days building a corner piece that would extend the desk all the way to the wall, also giving Jess a place to sit.
I decided to cut the back corner at an angle, first so I could build something that looked cooler than a black box, but so I’d also have a place to put a bass trap (to limit low frequencies that would otherwise mess with my track mixing).
In the past week or so, I finished up the desk and finally started unpacking recording equipment that had been packed up for months. I almost cried a little.
Since we can’t finish the first room until the second room is done, we had to move all the extra stuff out of the other side of the basement, right into the nice new semi-finished half. That’s okay, motivation to get the 2nd part done quickly…
At the end of mostly 12 hour days, I’m thrilled to have a basic studio setup complete. This next month or so, until the rest of the studio is done, we should be able to start a little bit of pre-production for our first album!
Things are moving forward. I’m excited to share some music down the road!
Before and After August:
AWESOME!
Todd