Wes’ New Soundproof Office

Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats Out there today, we've got a exciting episode for me, at least, in that is detailing my new office. So I have been working probably for rid. About 2 months on building out my dream office, both of, like, literally the ceiling and soundproofing it and everything, and rid As well as, like, the set up the desk and and everything like that. So, I'm gonna go through all of that today as to what decisions I made and how I did it and whatnot, And, it's gonna be a good one. We're sponsored today by 3 awesome companies.

Prismic, they are a headless CMS service that is, rid. It's great for building websites with slices.

LogRocket, they do JavaScript session, replay, and FreshBooks.

Cloud accounting will talk about all of them partly through the episode. With me as always is mister Scott Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Hey. I'm doing rid. Good. And I I want people to get the right idea. Because when you say that you're building it yourself,

you're building it. Like, you're getting your hands dirty. You're up there with the rid The the boards, the cores, the all sorts of stuff. And you're doing some serious, serious hardware work.

Yeah. Yeah. It was, rid. Kind of a fun project, and and I'll go into kinda why I did it myself in just a sec as well. But it's, been a a very rid Enjoyable project to do, but I am also very glad that I am a web developer and not a contractor because rid. I'm sore and tired, and, like, I talked to my friends who do this stuff. I'm like, does it get easier? They're like, no. You're sore all the time. It's hard work. Yeah.

I know you're getting me really inspired, though. I have some, updates and some modifications I wanna make to mine now. I'm gonna hang fly some lights.

Rid I I can't really fly my speakers that well, at least at this point. But it's hard when you can't have access to an open ceiling. Like, you are able to have an open that you closed up. Right? So Yeah. Yeah. And I I kinda screwed up my speakers, so now I'm trying to figure out how to hide that.

Wires. At least you got the hole You got the hole in some speakers through there. So I got the

the feed into the ceiling, so that's good. That's what matters. Alright. So, let's go in into it. I'm almost done. There's a couple little nagging things that they need to do yet. There's a couple more, pieces of sound or sound rid. Treatment inside the room that he needed to do. If I when I talk really loud, sometimes you'll hear a little bit of an echo that I need to nip it in the bud yet. But, rid so let's talk about it. We bought a new house couple months ago, and part of that was when we were house shopping or looking for, like, okay, where Where can I have an office? And some of the houses had attic spaces, which are really nice. Some of the houses had, rid. Outdoors sheds or garages that can be converted to it, like, kinda like Scott has.

Rid new. It's about, I don't know, 16 years old, and they it has a huge basement, which, rid. Generally, like, for people listening around the world, they think like a basement. Isn't that damp and wet and cold? And basements in Canada are very especially newer houses are very well ready. Waterproofed and, insulated and have all the utilities to them. So we bought this house. It had rid. A half finished basement, meaning that the there was carpet on the floors. The the drywall of the walls was done, But the ceiling was not done. And I think it was prepped for what's called the drop ceiling, which is you hang, like, these, like, tracks and tiles so you can get at the mechanicals if you need to. And then kids accidentally punch and break them and Yeah. Exactly.

Those things love to get destroyed by, like, teens, I think. I think that's like a a classic. That's ready. With the couch in the basement. So,

we had, like, sort of, like, an l shape in, in the basement, and I decided, okay, this sort of ready. Area in the basement is going to be my office.

And I just framed out, like, a little wall, rid in front of it, out of the door, ripped up the carpet. And at that point, I sort of had, like, a blank slate to say, okay, rid. I can build my office. I can build the dream office. And I sort of sort of said, like, okay. Like, what? Actually, no. That's not what I wanna go into just yet.

So the question we have here, a lot of people are like, why did you not just hire somebody for this? Why are you here swinging a hammer and Drilling stuff, screwing stuff together, drywalling.

So basically, I approached this project, being like this. First of all, rid The most important part of this project for me was the soundproofing. I needed the space to be as quiet as possible because my kids are rid Elephants, and they are loud as heck all the time. Screaming all the time. Very, very high energy kids. And if when they are home, rid. It is extremely hard to work. And my last office was on the 3rd floor, and that was pretty good. I could still hear the blood Curdling screams, but, it was pretty good because it was a whole floor away from the actual action.

However, this is I was in the basement where there are people above us. So, I thought, like, the soundproofing, I rid I did lots of research. I talked talked to lots of experts. Shout out to everybody who reached out and helped me out.

And, basically, I was like, I'm not gonna be able to and a lot of the soundproofing experts I talked to, they said, anybody who knows this stuff is not taking on rid A dinky little basement project. They are working on recording studios and, like, lawyer's offices. Like, very high end projects. So there's not And the kind of person you're gonna get to work on a basement, they are they're gonna wanna just do everything the same, rid Bang up. A lot of the choices I made made things much harder than they had to be because it wasn't standard building materials.

Rid. And contractors don't like that because they want to get in, do their work, get out. So I thought if I'm going to get this right, because, like, what simple as, like, if you cut a hole in the soundproofing or you put 1 screw into the ceiling joist, that ruins all of your soundproofing.

Rid. So I thought I was like, I'm gonna just do the soundproofing myself so I can I I understand how this works? I've done all the research. I'm gonna make sure it's done right. Can't be that hard. Yeah. And for those of you out there who are thinking, why not just throw some foam up on the walls and call it sound or soundproof? You know, soundproofing is all a lot about Things like isolation.

You're trying to separate the structure that you're currently in from the extra structure. You're trying to give some air gap there. Even if it's slight, you're trying to get some, high density materials, materials that soak up the sound or vibrations entirely.

I mean, there's a lot that goes into it. When we, it's insane.

Yeah. At our last house, we had my my office was in a bedroom on the 1st floor, and that was, like, a 100 year old house, whatever, with, You know, plate glass windows that would just let in every single sound from the outside. So at some point, we were like, well, what if I moved my office to the basement and then we could at least treat the room, whatever it may be. But the ceilings were so low That we would have to, like we would have had to totally rip out the ceilings. But then by the time we added the amount of layers, we would have need to add it to get that kind of isolation.

Rid Room would have been tiny. It would have been totally not worth it. So, there's a lot that goes into building a soundproof room or Yeah. Not even a soundproof room, but like a sound sound better. Yeah. Better room. Yeah.

Yeah. Between the ceiling and the floor treatments that I did, I rid. I gave up, I think, 4, 4 and a quarter inches of height in the basement, which is luckily the the ceiling heights were were decent down here, but rid It's a lot. Like, you can't just if you if you have any height issues, you can't do this type of thing. Yeah. It's not nothing. Also, it gets impossible to hire contractors right now. People are rid Super overpriced. I got one quote for probably a 1 hour job from a plumber, and he wanted 7.50, to do it. And I was like, get out of here. This is like People these contractors know right now that they are in high demand. So, I thought I could do better myself. Rid. I'm just gonna go as far as I can possibly go and then sort of reach out to, trades as I need them. And it's also fun. Like, I very much enjoy learning new ready. And I think that home, reno, working on stuff, understanding how a house works, I think that is a very good skill to have. And I I think that I will help Family and friends for the rest of my life now that I have these skills. Totally. Yeah. So so, goals. Let's talk about goals. Essentially, I had a blank Late, I said, like, what would my dream office be? I want to create a space that is comfortable and quiet for myself so that I can create the best content that I can make. Right? Rid. So these are the things that I set off as my goals. I want it to be quiet, which involves soundproofing. I want it to be comfortable, which involves, rid Sound treatment is a big part of that as well. If there's echoes in the room, it's kinda irritating. I put heated floor underneath the flooring, rid which is good because I always have cold cold feet when I'm sitting here, and I find that it's really such a treat to have heated floors. So I put that in. Rid. I wanted it to be hardwired, meaning that I needed power, speaker, and data right to my desk. But I also wanted my desk to be in the middle of the room, rid. Not up against the wall. I wanted it to be good looking and I wanted natural light. So we'll go through how I

rid Achieved all of those things. Yeah. Cool. I'm excited to hear about this. You know, as somebody who has been finally tuning their office for a while, I don't have the opportunity to make mine soundproof considering it's like in. Well, I have a door to the outside. Yeah. You don't necessarily need to. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I don't need to. Especially, you know, People might not remember this, but pandemic times, Wes and I were both recording with a house full of kids 247.

Rid The kids were home from school or day care or whatever, and it was just impossible. It was impossible to get you recording it. So Yeah. I I think this will be a huge rid. Productivity boost for you to have this space because ever since I moved out to the garage, even though it's very far from a garage, it it has really changed my life. Yeah. Rid. Yeah. Exactly.

So let's talk about soundproofing. There's kind of, like, 2 things that I wanted to do. The first one is, I wanna take the noise that is happening outside of the house. My wife running in the hair or sorry. Not outside. Inside the house. My wife running in the hairdryer. The kids ready. The kids listen to music, people just generally talking on the phone, that type of thing. That's just regular noise.

Rid. And then the other the other one is vibration sounds. And that one really gets me is that somebody is walking above you.