Isolation Room - Initial Design

After talking over issues with my wife and considering the location of things, I think the isolation room can be constructed inside the garage, using the main house entry way as the main door, with the possibility of hanging another door so that someone can walk through the studio from the garage.

Materials:

• Drywall : about 600 sq feet. Parts of the wall will be used for the construction on 2 sides, and then an extra layer of drywall with 1" gaps all the way around. The walls will need to be filled with insulation of some sort, but creativity may be required.
• Barriers : Looking at about 490 sq feet of barriers to cover the inside walls and to lay inside the celiing of the attic, or attach to the ceiling, although that could also cause some problems with sound transmission into the attic and then out the various ventalation ducts
• Acoustic Foam : Some type of acoustic deadening stuff. Foam egg-crate mattresses might be the cheap solution to the problem.
• Floors : Since it's on the foundation, most of what needs to happen is to deaden the sound. 1 layer of carpet or carpet underlay, 1 or 2 layers of plywood, and another layer of carpet on top to look nice and keep the instruments all in place (read : drums)

After all this, the room should be about 16x8.5 on the outside and about 15x8 on the inside with about a 7 foot ceiling. This will leave room for another car in the garage and leave the storage space too. Prior to building, I intend to go to Musiclab and set everything up in a 15'x8' space to see what it feels like.

A few things to consider before ordering anything:

• Putting up a window on the inside so that a bassist could jam outside the room but still see the people inside.
• Putting up a door on the indside of the garage so that there is a path from the garage into the house
• Ventaliation that keeps the noise out
• How to properly sound-proof the door hanging in the garage -- mostly this will involve making appropriate seals around the door

The budget for this portion of the project is an even $1000. If I can build an isolation room for 1K, then the rest should fall more and more into place.