Forget “What’s Under The Floor”…What’s Up In The Ceiling?!
Matt flew out from NY today for a site visit at the new studio space. I picked him up at O’Hare and we went straight to the space to get to work. Most of the day was spent trying to figure out what is going on up in the ceiling. The current ceiling is a suspended grid ceiling. That’s outta here. The duct-work above it? Outta here too!
Well, not so fast! We will be ripping out all the duct-work up in the ceiling, but some of it, kind of, is just “passing through”. There is a large feeder duct that spawns off a couple smaller ducts to other office spaces on the floor. We had some trouble trying to figure out exactly what could be removed and what had to be re-routed.
Another issue is the massive amount of noise created by the 20-ton HVAC unit on the roof, just above (and over to the side of) the studio. We’re contacting the contractor who installed the whole system in the first place, to find out about the possibility of lifting the HVAC unit up, installing isolation springs under it, and setting it back down. This will help a lot. We’ll see what they say. The cost of such a change might be too excessive…
Matt also placed masking tape on the floor to show me where the various walls will be placed, where my mix position will be, etc. Looking very good to me. We’ve got a new round of design drawings (we’re now at Scheme #4) that reflect the updates I’ve requested…repositioning of the closet & wall-rack into just one closet, a smaller console desk for me (wait till you see what I’m thinking of!).
Next, Matt will start drawing up the real construction documents/drawings, the acoustics team in Switzerland will go through them and do some modeling/simulation of the space, we’ll apply for the proper permits (I HOPE Skokie is cool, heh)…and we’re off to the races!
