The Move

It’s quite small for the number of things I try to do in here. 10x15 or so. The basement is really just the whole first floor of my house, a 20x25 untreated garage and a 40x25 basement floor with about 12x10 cutout for right-angle stairs, and another 8x17 for mechanical. In this space I am planning to break into sections. The layout is roughly:

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 |            D       I                     .     |                                 |
 |            I   2   W                     .     |                                 |
 |            H       I                     .     |                                 |
 |     1      I=.=D=.=I         4           .  M  |                                 |
 |            I                             .     |                                 |
 |            I                             .     |                                 |
 |            I                             .     |            GARAGE               |
 |=.=.=D=.=.=.o. . D . . ------------- . D . . . .|                                 |
 |                       |  STAIR    |            |                                 |
 |                       |           |            |                                 |
 |                       -------|    |   5        D                                 |
 |          3            .      |    |            |                                 |
 |=.=.=.=                .  6               . . . |                                 |
 |  SR  |                .                 .  OIL |                                 |
 ---------------------------------------------------D--GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG-----

#1 - Main Office Area
#2 - Recording Booth
#3 - Lab
#4 - Seating
#5 - Entry
#6 - Pantry
M  - Mechanical Room
SR - Server Room / Main Panel

 . . .              - stud wall, no sound isolation
=.=.=.=             - stud wall, sound isolation
`I` when vertical   - stud wall, sound isolation
D                   - door
H                   - half-rack with rear mounted in #2 and front in #1.

the rest should be obvious enough

I’ll come back to the garage part another time¹. The plan is to have a single-stud false floor under the main office area, but leave the rest bare concrete. I’ll carpet in the booth, but keep all the electronics out of it mod some control panels and pedal controls. I play mostly acoustic but I have a kemper that’ll probably be stationed in there, it currently lives on a half-rack and the plan is to install that so half is in the booth and I can have the frontend controls for me in there, along with enough controls and monitors to manage the session. There are some water pipes there but I mostly record at night and between that and the sound insulation I can hopefully minimize the noise to acceptable levels.

I wanted to keep the easy flow between the lab and the seating area, but I do want them to be separate. I suspect that door may be a pocket door. There is some storage underneath the stairway, I’m unsure if I want to set up that area to be availbe to area #6 or #3. The former would require the removal of the sheathing and may not be straightforward to accomplish, so I’m leaning #3. I want to avoid a 3-6 door², as it would greatly reduce the usable configurations of #6, but I will likely have a passthrough or double-sided cabinet since #6 is going to be where my snacks are. Likely a minifridge under the stairs; unfortunate to have in the lab, but the most convenient place to locate it for sure.

Area #5 is just general entry and will extend the pantry storage from #6. The OIL tank there is similarly poorly studded in and takes up a ton of unneeded space because Kevin couldn’t work a square to save his life.

I have two racks to manage all my equipment, they’ll end up in the ‘Server Room’, which is actually not going to be a studwall. I plan to have two walls-on-wheels that just cover the area but can be fully rolled out of the way when needed. The design will just be a normal set of stud-walls in a L or U shape (depending on stability), set on low-profile omni-directional wheels. Maybe a skirt/weatherstrip if it’s needed, but ideally there is a slight gap to encourage some convective airflow³. When I need to work on the rack, just roll it out of the way. The false wall can still benefit from the heat sink of the foundation of the house, but when I need to work on the rack it’s just ‘slide the thing out of the way and go to work’.

It also avoids having a very small room that would definitely not meet code.

We plan to move our pool table down here too (I am sure that will be an ordeal covered across many entries), that’ll end up in #4. Getting it down there may be tricky but fortunately the wall around M is (bad) stud-wall left from the previous owner (my arch-nemesis, Kevin⁴). I don’t think that stud wall will survive my hatred of it, I’ve already had to remove about a third of the shitty stud job he did down there. So I can gain a couple feet if the movers need it. The lower part of that wall doesn’t have a ton of clearance from the furnace, but I can likely re-use my movable-wall idea here and just have a wall I can roll out of the way when we need to access the area behind it. Gaining access to the extra space at the cost of a little engineering. That wall could be simpler than the server false wall, since it just needs to roll out of the way very infrequently.

I may be able to gain a foot of that space back, and could also gain the space at the top of that room as it’s just covering off the water main and water heater, which are annoyingly separated (honestly the boiler location in this house makes no sense to me. I blame Kevin, it’s not his fault, but I blame him anyway).

Otherwise that section is probably going to be bare concrete, I’ll fit a couch and TV in there probably, hopefully have my simracing setup in there as well. I’ll probably put some rugs down. I considered doing more false floors like in #1 and #2, but concrete-with-a-rug has the advantage of being extremely durable and still pretty comfortable if you don’t have to stand on it for hours and hours, which is sort of the definitional opposite of what will be done there.

The ceiling is currently open-bay-and-pink-insulation; that will certainly need to change before proceeding, but I think it’s going to just be a ‘sheet-rock-and-call-it’. I considered doing some amount of drop-ceiling as it would aid in cable management⁵, but I decided it’d be cooler to run LED strips with the main cable runs (there won’t be too many) so I can use the LED strip later to identify cables.

Also I can do the blinkenlights with them.

This is basically the plan. I’m at 0% complete, and it’s probably going to take a year or more to get this done, but I plan to move down there sometime later this year, so the other complexity here is doing this all ‘live’ to some extent.

It’s gonna be a fun project.