Category: construction photos

The framing process reached a major milestone this week, with the foreman telling me that we are now drying in the Music Room roof.  Hallelujah!  But that was merely the tip of the iceberg, progress-wise, as we enjoyed five days of ideal weather, and the site was humming with dozens of workers every day.  In five days we:

• Clad and protected most of the Music Room roof
• Framed, clad, and protected most of the Booth (North) Roof
• Finished laying the Annex technical wiring conduits
• Locked the Annex conduits in concrete (4 yards worth)
• Filled the Annex foundation with stone and packed it down
• Finished most of the Music Room duct work
• Pointed the exterior masonry corners
• Sealed the Control Room foundation blocks
• Located equipment corrals and slab outlines
• Located exterior soffit lights
• and made numerous other design and construction decisions that will become visible in the coming weeks

There is no single picture that adequately summarizes all of this progress, but this one shows a good bit:

For more details, read on:

Continue reading “Week 94 (Drying In, Part 1)”

This is going to be a glass half-full/glass half-empty posting.  On the positive side, we have half the duct work up in the space that’s going to be our attic:

On the downside, here’s how much has not yet been installed into the attic:

Continue reading “Week 93 (Stuck in the Attic)”

There has been much progress in many areas since my latest construction blog posting, but clearly the establishment of the major structural members of the roof over the booths must be the headline.  Here you can see several such structural members, two hips and a bit of the top plate (which is effectively the top ridge of the roof as well):

But there is much more progress to report, as you will see…

Continue reading “Week 92 (Booths: Masonry Completed/Roof Framing Begins)”

It took about eight months to get the Music Room masonry done from start to finish.  It took about 2 weeks to do the same for the principal Booth walls and another 2 weeks to completely finish the masonry portion of the Control Room.  Wow!

But that’s not the only progress this week…

Continue reading “Week 89 (Control Room Masonry Completed)”

There are many facets to this studio construction project, and all are important, but one small one that’s always been a special milestone to me has been the installation of the glass block in the control room.  That happened this week…

But let’s start from the beginning of the week and then I’ll come back to explain what the above photo shows…

Continue reading “Week 88 (Glass Block Installed)”

We had a short week due to weather, and we continued to suffer some slowdowns in our roof and ceiling work because of continued challenges with respect to our HVAC requirements, but by the end of the week, progress was again very visible, with very large air handling equipment now crowning our ceiling:

Next week we’ll create the labyrinth of ductwork that will send air in one direction while tricking the sound to follow other pathways (so as to deliver less noise to the recording environment).  The whole system design is quite difficult because:

Continue reading “Week 87 (Music Room Air Handler)”

This week the masons made steady progress while we checked, re-checked, and double-checked our HVAC plans.  Here’s the week’s progress, in pictures…

Continue reading “Week 86 (North Booth Walls Finished)”

Despite a very dubious long-range weather forecast (which called for isolated/scattered thunderstorms every single day of the week), the weather day by day was good enough to give our two crews a good five days of work.  By the end of the week, the masons had raised the booth walls 2′ above the base of the booth window sills and the rear control room/sound lock walls to 4′, while the framing crew finished the top of the ceiling and established all the major roof beams.  Here’s the finished product so far:

I love how perfectly scaled the 32′ roof line is with the surrounding trees!

And now the details of how we got to this point, in pictures:

Continue reading “Week 85 (Top Roof Beams Established)”

This has been a pivotal week for the project.  The masons have finished their work on the Music Room and are now turning their attention to bringing up the walls of the control room and the isolation booths.  At the same time, a framing crew has joined the project full-time, and they made a grand entrance indeed.  Here is the crane that presaged their arrival:

Let’s take a closer look…

Continue reading “Week 84 (Framing begins, masonry continues)”

This week saw the completion of another major milestone in the studio construction project: the Music Room masonry is now complete.  The blocks were all in place as of last week, but the major remaining task was the final grouting: 5 yards of concrete for the inner wythe and 5 yards of concrete for the outer wythe.  To put that into perspective, there are 27 ft³ per yard, and since each ft³ of concrete weights 150 lbs, that’s over 10 tons of material for each bond beam.  Moreover, each beam had to be built as a continuous entity, so each beam had to be poured quickly enough so the cement didn’t set and yet not so quickly that we might make a mistake that would mar seven months of work (or worse).

To begin at the beginning of the week, the blocks were all in place, but no so the steel rebar…

Continue reading “Week 83 (Music room masonry complete)”