Three weeks ago we started putting down wall plates, and now the Annex is mostly framed! Here’s a view from inside the Annex Control Room showing that not only are our framing members all up, but we’ve also got the IsoMax clips installed into all the rafters for the resilient channel:
Also of note are the two layers of sheetrock we’ve installed on the back side of the western half of the rear wall. If you have been following the blog closely, you may have noticed that unlike virtually all of the walls in the Main building, which have resilient channels on at least one side of the framing or another, we are not doing this in the Annex: we don’t need to.Here we have the luxury of space to use a double-wall construction to decouple the two walls, thus we don’t need the additional layer of isolation that the resilient channel provides. In the Main building we have many environments that we want to separate acoustically (when doors are closed) but which we want to be able to integrate as one (when doors are open). The 21″ thick masonry walls that separate the Music Room from every other environment are a fine statement to make, but if we made our frame walls that thick it would push adjacent environments (such as Booth A and Booth B) too far apart from each other. Plus, it would not fit well within our 16″ column width. So we use a more complicated and expensive means in the Main to achieve what double-wall construction achieves with framing alone.
Speaking of sheetrock, here’s 4800 sq ft of 5/8″ rock parked inside the Annex Control Room waiting to become the triple-layer inner wall and ceiling:
That’s almost 6 tons of acoustic mass, not including Green Glue! Moving out to the Garage you can see that since last week we got the wall framed between the Garage and the Hallway, as well as have of the ceiling joists, above which the air handlers and other utility items will go:
Given how quickly this has gone up, I would not be surprised to find that we’ve moved from framing to trim work in the Annex by the end of next week!
In addition to lots of framing and sheetrock work, a tremendous amount of work has been done on the electrical system as well. Here’s a shot of the (currently empty) Main Distribution Panel (MDP) in the Annex Machine Room:
It’s 40″ wide! Here’s one of the branch circuits, the Annex Electrical Panel:
And now for something completely different…custom ductwork has been delivered for the booths in the Main building:
It may be a bit tricky from that perspective to see just how custom these are. From this perspective you may be able to tell that most of them are not rectangular, but trapezoidal:
This maximizes the number of square inches we have available for supply and return, which allows us to reduce our airflow velocity and thereby keep the noise our air conditioning as low as possible.
Outside, masonry work begins on the blocks facing the air conditioning units:
Once again, rain does not help our cause. However, after a few dry days, progress becomes more visible:
The stacked bond tells you that you’re looking at the back side of RPG A and B blocks.
And finally, our Loggia was unwrapped:
We’re also making progress on the wiring, but I’ll save the details for next week.
Manifold Recording / The Miraverse 