The Man-Cave is Coming, and it Looks Just Like Ringo

He hasn't really said anything about it, he's taken it like a real champ, but I know that not having a space to call his own is really getting to Eric. It would get to me too. We always agreed that any house we purchased would give us each our own room to do with what we pleased; to close the door and do our own thing. And I have one with the guest bedroom/office. Eric hasn't has a space where he could go and close a door in over a year. And he hasn't had any space at all for music or his desk in almost two month. So we are making a real push to get the new basement studio completed so he can start setting up his own place to be. The room needs a TON of work, but we are hoping he can at least move in by Memorial Day.

We started a little over a month ago, putting up a wall and door to make Eric his recording studio. It's pretty spacious room, about 17' wide by 14' deep, but it is riddled with uneven concrete, huge gaps and holes and tons of unfinished details. It will take months to fill up all the little holes and to fill in all the gaps around the electrical panels, the gas room door and the door that leads out to the hatch to outside. About a week ago you could stand in the basement and hear every conversation that went on in the street, so it wasn't exactly ideal room for sound recording. To remedy this so far we have filled the gaps around the frame and threshold with concrete. We also plan on using space insulation around the door and installing a door sweep and weather-stripping, which should cut down on the noise considerable.

Then we had to fix all the ledges that run around the perimeter of the room from where we dug the cellar down almost 2.5 feet. We rebuilt and left 2 foot by 2 foot ledges along the perimeter to re-enforce the foundation and left them exposed so we could use the remaining 6 feet or so on top for storage purposes. However the unfinished, uneven concrete ledges have made the space a dismal dust factory that is difficult to actually live in. We chose to smooth out and finished the side surfaces with stucco and will be applying self-leveling concrete on the ledge tops and later tiling them.

We also have some companies like California Closets coming into to look at the ledges and give us proposals on built-in storage units that Eric can use for storing his musical equipment and office supplies.

Eric applies the stucco to the sides of ledges to make the match the primed, white section. Stucco is a real pain in the ass to work with.

In the picture about you can also see a bit of what we did with the floor. The unfinished concrete floor was also impossible to keep clean and generated tons of dust. We decided to rent a grinder to smooth out the surface and then cleaned and used a dark grey semi-translucent concrete stain to darken the look of the floor. Then we applied a shiny epoxy coat to the surface to lock in the stain and create a hard, protective layer on the floor surface. It looks great, but it currently under wraps until the room is done.

Since this room is going to be Eric's recording studio where he works on his own music and also has clients over to do professional mixing, we need the place to look official. Eric changed the name of his studio from "Kitchen Sink Studios" (from back when he lived in JC and had his studio in his kitchen) to "Big Green Noise Machine" a tribute to our small green Amazon Parrot Ringo. He make looks small, but damn is he noisy. He makes this noise that sounds exactly like the theme from Psycho, only much louder and more piercing. He is truly an annoying noise machine. This is Ringo:

So when Eric asked me to help him design a color scheme for the room there was no better option that to make the room look exactly like Ringo. With three predominant spaces (ceiling, walls and bottom of ledges) to paint, we decided to make the walls green like Ringo's body, the ceiling yellow like his cheeks and the bottom of the ledges blue like the top of his head. It's going to be an extremely colorful room! But also, Eric will be putting sound absorption panels almost every single surface of the wall so at least the green sections will appear almost like accents and not quite so bright.

Part of the stucco wall near the electrical panels was already painted a light green, the Ralph Lauren Kauai that we have in our hall and kitchen. However we decided we needed a brighter green to capture Ringo, so we got RL Surfboard Yellow for the ceiling, RL Alpine Pool for the walls and we will re-used the RL Swamp Willow (the blue River Rock style paint we have in the sunroom) for the bottom ledges.

Behold the yellow and the green so far. We drew a line around the room so we can paint the bottom 26" all around the rocky blue color. The paint is still extremely glossy but will dry flat.

Eric models the different between the new green and the old green, while drinking a beer of course!

Up next, painting the blue bottoms of the ledges, priming the new stucco and using the self-leveling concrete to even out the tops of those ledges!

Comments

[Tijmen Stam]

Wow, it's starting to look nice!

When looking at the plans, I wodered - why do you have to have such a big boiler room? My parent's house (which isn't really small - I think surfacewise equal to your 5 floors) has a boiler which sits in a closet 1 or 1.5" deep and 2.5" wide, and it's only half the height of the closet, including pipings Only thing extra is a little expansion vat, which holds about 30 litres (7.5 galllons) and sits next to it. That thing does heating and warm water. However, it does run on natural gas, not on heating oil.

[DHL]

Are you just photo shopping Eric into these photos because he appears to be doing the same pose as the Kitchen gallery photo. j/k :oP

[dana]

Hey Tijmen - We basically have such a big boiler room because that was the size of the boiler room when we bought the house and we didn't want to pay to change it. The only things in there are our 80 gallon hot water heater and our furnace, so yeah it's a waste of a few feet, but we have plenty of storage at this point so it's no biggie.

DHL - Actually Eric walks around like that permanently :-)

[The Founding Father]

Glad to see the Mantuary being given some priority at the new house.

[dana]

I'm 100% pro-Mantuary, even if the name is silly. We all need a space to do our own thing, men and woman alike.