Building a New Home Studio – Challenges
As one can imagine, especially someone who with very limited construction experience, you will discover many challenges in the process of building a home studio such as the one I have built in the unfinished part of my basement. In this post, I want to point out some of those challenges for others to gain some advantage over what I had when I started this project.
Heating ducts, pipes for home heating gas, electrical conduit, windows and the like, are all part of the many challenges you face when using wood as your primary construction material. It doesn’t bend too easily or go around corners. If you do not make a correct cut, you end up having to use another board as costly as they are.
This first photo shows the heating duct work that posed an enormous problem for me where I spent many hours just thinking about how I was going to cover it up using the wood products I chose.
The furnace in my home had this large heating duct that ran suspended from the ceiling plane directly across the room. I had to cut a large quantity of boards to cover this duct. That was actually the easy part. What was difficult was making certain that each board was cut perfectly and in such a way that the left side, the right side and the bottom were joined consistently to form a “box” surrounding the duct.
These two photos show what I mean.
The panel boards were mounted to a frame made of 2 x 2’s. rather than 2 x 4’s because the weight was not that much to consider using the 2×4’s for this part of the project.
Each piece was cut by hand using a standard hand saw. In fact, I only used a hand saw and not a powered say for this entire project. Old school I guess:) In any case, it turned out pretty good. The trim boards are not shown in these photos. I’ll save that for later.
This next photo shows to problems I faced; first, the electrical cutouts on a 5/8″ thick panel board and the insulation.
The Romex wire hanging from the ceiling runs through a metal box held in place by a clamp inside the box. The panel board needed to have an opening cut into it so a person has access to the wiring and, of coarse, so the lighting could be put up safely and securely. The problem was; I had no major set or collection of tools to do this work. Consequently, after measuring and marking the panel board, I used a drill to drill a series of holes inside the measured marks. After that, I used a Stanley knife to trim the opening as best I could. All of this took about 20 minutes to complete as 5/8″ thick wood is difficult to cut holes through where the finished opening was fairly clean cut and looking as good as possible. The finished opening is shown here and think of this, I had to do this same procedure for all of the outlets, switches and lights.
The second problem I couldn’t quite figure out was how to straighten out the insulation when it was interwoven between the floor joists, pipe, conduit and the 2 x 4’s used to drop the ceiling under all of these things. What eventually was learned was that I simply put the insulation up and continued to work at straightening it until I was satisfied. Mind you, the insulation was 4′ long and 16″ thick so this was not an easy thing to do. Maybe you are more knowledgeable then me but I have no construction experience at all making this project a major stretch of my skill as a carpenter, not very good, and my ability to think and devise a method of doing things on the fly. I did find that using a commercial grade small staple gun made it a lot easier.
Another “issue” I faced was multiple planes whereas different surfaces joined in different places and matching them up so they looked nice was for me difficult but somehow I managed to make it work out OK.
There just happened to be a window in this room:) It turned out to be right next to another “boxed in” area where the built-in bookshelf was going to go. As you can see here in this photo the panel boards needed to be cut around the window. A small challenge in and of itself. However, right next to it I had to cover another vent by creating a box around it, join it to the panel boards for the wall, join it to the ceiling boards, join it to the framing and outer panel boards and trim for the book case. Hmmm…, now how does one do that? The only way I could figure it out was to sit and stare at it for about 25 hours or so:)
Actually, I was able to figure it out by doing one thing at a time. First, I completed all of the framing for each part of the construction. Second, I finished the wall and the window including the trim. Then I made the framing for boxing in the vent followed by putting the panel boards in place. Then I finished the panel board work for the book shelf followed by the final trim boards. All in all, by taking each part of the problem and breaking it down to smaller pieces, I was able to finish the entire work in no time:)
As I continued my journey into the construction world, I found out through hindsight that there were many things I could have doe easier than I actually did while building it. Sort of like composing your first piece of music. It is not necessarily your best piece and in fact, you most likely would redo most of it after several songs were written. I didn’t have that luxury or the experience. What I did learn was that by taking some time to think things through I was able to make good progress and the finished project looks fantastic!
In an upcoming post, the final one for this project, I will provide some additional photos showing the completed room and with furniture and decorations done as well. Until then, I hope you are finding some value in these posts for building a new home studio. Your project will be different of course but still, maybe my effort will provide to you some insights and some ideas for your own in-home studio.
Don Rath Jr 