So just a refresher, in the last video I explained the reason for the new studio, and let you
see the various phases of construction including the foundation, framing, electrical work,
and network wiring including that conduit for the fiber optic cable.
Well, once the city inspected the trench, the first thing I wanted to do was cover it
up.
I’ve had this open trench in my back yard for weeks now and it’s really annoying.
And there we go, hopefully we’ll get some grass to grow back in this area next spring.
Next came the air conditioning.
A lot of people were asking about that in the last video.
These are the refrigerant lines for a ductless mini-split.
There will be one in each room, and a single outdoor compressor.
It is also a heat-pump so it can provide heat in the winter.
And of course each unit will require its own drainage line for condensation.
So, that’s what this is for.
So for the moment, this is all there is to be done.
Just wiring, refrigerant pipes, and drainage for both units.
Next up, we’re about to get insulation installed.
And I didn’t find out until the night before that they are going to do the spray foam,
which I’ve never seen done before.
Apparently I should have used a different kind of box on the exterior walls, which would
keep the foam from filling the network boxes.
But, as a compromise, I’m putting duct tape on the back sides of these, which I hope will
help.
And here we are the next morning and the crew has arrived.
First they cover up anything they don’t want to get foam on.
The material itself is actually pumped in from a truck parked in the street, much like
the concrete in a way.
And here we go.
I’m really getting a stay-puft marshmallow man vibe from this stuff.
They’ve got one guy spraying the stuff, and another guy following behind with a giant
saw, trimming off the excess.
The stuff cures much faster than I would have expected.
If you buy that spray foam at the hardware store, it takes like 24 hours to cure.
This stuff seems to only take a few minutes.
I’m also having them spray the smaller room, even though we don’t plan to air-condition
this room.
And some of it has escaped the building.
On the bright side, this should be keeping bugs out if it is literally filling every
gap.
So, how are my network plugs holding out?
Well, so far, so good.
I’ll just cut off the excess duct tape, but I guess the stuff in the back will stay
there indefinitely.
There’s a little foam on the wires, but it won’t hurt anything.
It’s better than having to dig them out of a solid block of the stuff.
And here we go, insulation is all done.
So, one interesting thing right now with all of this foam everywhere, both on the ceiling
and on the walls is that the acoustics in here is absolutely great.
I mean, I don’t have any echo.
I don’t need a special, I don’t need a lapel microphone or anything like that to
talk right now.
But, wait until just a couple of days from now when they put the drywall in, because
I’ll come back and do the same test and see what it sounds like then.
I also let PigBunny take a visit, but she wasn’t too happy about being in here.
Plus the static charge from her fur starting attracting all of the small pieces of foam
and she got covered with the stuff.
A few days later a truck showed up with the drywall.
I was actually curious how they were going to carry all of that to the back yard, but
I didn’t realize there was a special dolly made just for moving drywall.
So that’s pretty neat.
They even had a little bridge to get over obstacles.
And so most of the drywall was placed in the studio room, and a few pieces were placed
in the storage room.
A few days later, the drywall crew showed up.
The
first room to be finished was the small storage room.
And if you’ve ever wondered how they cut out all of the holes for the electrical sockets
and stuff like that, well they have this little tool called a rotozip.
And they sure do make it look easy!
After the initial drywall was attached with nails, they came back and reinforced it with
screws.
And of course, now it’s time to mix up the spackling.
This is different than what I’ve seen done in the past.
I’ve always seen them use this paper tape, along with the bedding.
But these guys are just using a little fabric like material like this, and just applying
the bedding on top of it.
I don’t know if this is the new way of doing things, or if just different crews use different
methods.
Anyway, here it is all done.
It’s still in the process of drying, though.
So, I said I would come back and let you hear what the acoustic sound like in the room after
the drywall was installed and well here you go.
Yep, it’s just a giant echo chamber.
So, at this point it was time to head to the store and start picking out some light fixtures.
Now, one thing I noticed that I was really annoyed by is that almost all of the new light
fixtures no longer use standard bulbs.
They have LEDs built in.
This is a problem for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, it means when one of the fixtures goes out, it does mean replacing the whole
fixture.
This can be a problem if you have matching fixtures.
What are the chances of me finding the same fixtures 5 years from now?
The other problem is the color temperature.
Most of them are warm-white, which I hate with a passion and definitely shouldn’t
use where I’m recording video.
Now, some of the fixtures do advertise that they have adjustable color temperature, which
I guess it ok.
But it does narrow my choices quite a bit.
While I was at the store I went ahead and bought all of the electrical and network jacks
that I would need as well.
The next day, the drywall guys came back out and textured the walls.
And here we are the following day and you can see the texture is all dry now.
Now it was time to work on the electrical, starting with this outdoor GFCI outlet.
But one thing I’ve never had to do before is install arc-fault breakers.
These are now required by city code.
And well, they are a little different in how they fit and get installed.
You see, normally a breaker only deals with the hot wire.
But these arc-fault breakers pass through both the hot and the neutral.
And then they have this little pigtail cable you have to route over to the neutral bar
on your breaker box.
It makes the box a little messier inside than usual.
And I’ve heard a lot of complaints about these not being reliable.
Oh well, I guess we’ll find out.
Moving onto some more outlets, time to pull this tape off.
I was trying to keep most of the texture out of here.
I always recommend using the screw terminals on plugs, rather than the little holes in
the back.
In my experience if you use the holes in the back, the sockets will melt if you actually
try to use them for the rated amperage.
So, if you ever plan to run a space heater, toaster, microwave, power tools, or charge
an electric car, you had better use the screw terminals.
And all of the outlets are finally done.
Now you may be wondering why I didn’t wait until the paint was done, which is the normal
procedure.
Well, the paint crew won’t be here for another week and I had some free time so I went ahead
and got to work.
I can put masking tape over these later.
Next we went shopping for flooring.
I wanted carpet in the studio room for acoustic reasons, but I really want carpet tiles.
This makes it easier to install, repair, and replace pieces when they get damaged or worn.
I saw quite a few designs, but have not yet picked one out.
We’ll come back to this later.
For the moment, it’s time for some base-boards.
And since they are about to paint, it’s time to cover these electrical sockets with
masking tape.
Once painting was finished, it was finally time to install my light fixtures.
I thought these looked really cool, but they were some of the most difficult fixtures to
install.
They have a switch where you can set the color temperature, which is pretty neat.
But, they required holding them by the wires, while putting on the wire nuts, which was
really hard to do with sweaty hands.
But the worst part was getting them on the ceiling.
The idea was to put them onto the little bracket and then rotate, but that ended up being really
hard to do in practice.
However, even once I got them locked in, this always happened.
Did you see that?
When you rotate the light against the ceiling, it causes the switch to move back to warm
white every time.
The only solution would be to put a piece of tape over the switch after it was set.
The other problem was these lights just weren’t as bright as I had hoped they would be.
Now, in contrast to this, we bought some very similar lights for the smaller room, and these
were actually designed by people who have a brain.
So, with these you mount the little bracket up there.
Then the fixture can hang on this little bracket while you mess with the wires.
When the wiring is done, you just fold the light up and snap it in place.
This one also has a switch to set the color temperature.
And then the decorative bezel just snaps over like so.
A much better design for sure!
We put two of these in the small storage room.
So, I ended up taking those other terrible fixtures back and returning them.
I bought these on amazon.
And while they look kind of like fans, they are actually workshop lights.
And as you can see, they just have a regular bulb socket here.
Which means, I can just attach on of these old-style light sockets that take all of 2
minutes to install.
And so, let’s try it out.
Haha.
While spinning it, it looks even more like a fan!
And here we go.
And WOW!
These are nice and bright, exactly what I was looking for.
On camera, you really can’t see the brightness difference, but trust me in person you can!
As such, I ordered some more of these and eventually put 8 of them in the building,
4 in each room.
And, of course, now it’s time to start on the network jacks.
Having worked most of my life in IT, I have terminated hundreds, if not thousands of ethernet
cables.
This is something I could almost do in my sleep.
The one problem I do have is that since I’m partially colorblind, sometimes I have difficulty
telling the brown wire apart from the green or orange, depending on the cable manufacturer
and what shades of colors they pick.
Fortunately, I can always tell the brown because it has the least number of twists per inch
and is the easiest one to unravel.
And of course, now we’ll finally get to see what these combo plates look like with
electrical and ethernet in the same box.
Like I said in the last video, I’ve never used these before, but they seemed like a
good idea.
Yeah, I think those are going to work okay!
Alright, so what I’m about to do next is, I’m about to crawl up that hole, which will
hopefully be the only time I ever have to crawl up that hole because there’s nothing
else up there to service.
And then I’m going to take this pipe fitting that I got, and I’m going to put this through
the ceiling.
And I’ve got a drill with a hole-saw on it.
And well, I’m just going to try to get it as far close to the corner as I can, but obviously
due to the slope of the roof, I don’t know how far that will be, but let’s get going!
So, I climbed up into the attic for the first, and hopefully last time.
This attic is very cramped compared to anything I’ve been in before.
There’s the bundle of cables that I left up there in the last episode.
I stretched as far as I could to get the hole as close to the corner as possible.
But as you can see, it ended up being a lot further away than I realized.
This ended up causing a bit of a problem, because it means all of my cables wound up
being several feet shorter than I had originally anticipated.
But I’m sure I’ll be able to make it work.
Just need to screw this little nut on here, and that should do it.
Since the little room was basically finished, my wife decided to start working on the floor
in there.
We picked out some vinyl self-stick tiles.
These will probably be the same tiles I use on top of my new workbenches.
The A/C guy came back out shortly after and started to install the mini-split units.
Starting, of course with the outdoor compressor.
Units like this can be configured to handle anywhere from 1 to 4 interior units, but mine
is of course configured for 2.
And as you can see, he already has the bracket on the wall, and not long after, starts to
install the unit.
These are pretty slick.
Each interior unit has a remote control thermostat, with a wall-mount option as well.
I’m not quite sure where I want to mount these for the moment, though.
The units themselves also have a little screen that shows either the current or target temperature
depending on the setting.
At this point it’s November and the weather has turned cold, so I probably won’t be
able to test the cooling aspect of these until next Spring.
And of course, I had to pick exterior colors for the building.
And I wanted something retro-computer themed.
I looked at a variety of different logos and boot screens and the colors just didn’t
make sense for a building.
But then I thought about the VIC-20 boot screen.
It uses white in the background, and a cyan color for the border.
So, that’s the colors I told them the go with.
And yeah, I think it turned out okay.
In fact, it wasn’t until after the painting was done that we noticed the house behind
our backyard actually has essentially the same color scheme.
Maybe they are VIC-20 fans as well?
I also bought some of these security striker plates, which I also use on my house.
This is one the the best security investments you can make for your home, as it makes it
significantly harder to kick the door in, which is the most common way home invasions
start.
And now I have another irritating task to do.
As you saw in the previous video, I ran a fiber optic line under the ground between
the house and new building.
But, because it was so hot at the time, I just left the spool up in the eve by this
vent.
So, now, I need to pull the cable all the way through the attic of the main house because
the network closet is clear on the opposite side.
I wish I could have got better footage for you, but this was insanely difficult to do,
especially at my age.
Eventually, it joined up with this bundle of ethernet cable, and I pushed it through
the hole into the network closet and here it is.
Now I’ve got to figure out where to put this media converter.
And I’m going to mount it to the wall with one of my famous self-made brackets since
this thing has no wall-mount holes on the back.
And so where to put it?
I could put it here.
Or maybe up here somewhere.
Well, I put some mounting tape on the back, like I always do, and I think I’ll put it
right here.
That seems like a good spot for it.
Now I’ll just screw on my little homemade bracket.
There we go.
And of course, with ethernet I will always cut the wires to length.
But I can’t cut this fiber optic, so I have to spool up the excess somewhere out of the
way.
And now I’ll plug in the ethernet and see if we get a link, and sure enough, everything
seems to be working.
Of course, now I need something to talk to outside, so I started mounting my security
cameras.
These are the same Axis cameras I use on my house, which I’ve always been very pleased
with.
And I’ve just temporarily wired up the fiber and security cameras to the switch.
I may be moving this switch to the other wall, so I’m not cutting anything to length just
yet.
Anyway, the cameras work.
I have a live video feed from the new studio building now.
And one thing that is really cool is that I can finally see my own house in the video
feed.
Usually cameras are mounted on the house so you are always looking away from the house
or along side a wall or something.
But yeah, I can see everything that is going on in the backyard now!
And that is where this video will end.
There will be a part 3 of this series, where I show you some of the interior construction.
I’ll show you some of the designs I came up with, also some of the designs that were
submitted to me by fans, and then ultimate see what actually ends up getting built and
how it turns out.
So, the actual building itself from a construction standpoint is now done, but the interior is
still going to take a while, so it’s probably going to be well into January or February
of 2021 before the actual studio is done and I can actually start filming in there.
So, stay tuned for that, and thanks for watching!