Some time ago we had a little garage studio here at Happy Acres. It was against zoning regulations and the neighbors across the street, who had been plagued by our raucous music at all hours of the day and night, justifiably had us shut down. While my studio partners and I went on to build a spiffy new (very big---very expensive) studio in a properly zoned area, I was left with the remnants of the old studio. Since most of the recording equipment from the old eight track studio was woefully inadequate for our new studio I was left with a still functioning studio.
Here's the three virgos who built the little garage eight track studio known as Tres Virgos Studio. Allan on the left, Mickey da Mayor in the middle and our recording engineer, Robin on the right.
Interior of the control room which was to become the bedroom of the renovated rental unit. Partner Robin at the controls.
I took advantage of that opportunity thusly: I had a bunch of projects that needed doing. I had recently taken over the rent for the whole three acre homestead and I was going to make some changes. One. Get rid of the goliath of a blackberry bush that sat in the middle of what I was going to turn back into a horse pasture. Two. Redo the windows in the living room and the crumbling brickwork of our "Hagar-the-horrible fireplace. Three. Replace the front door with something less easy to break into. (see former posting: "Play Misty for Me"). Four. Rebuild the back stairs that were getting seriously rickety. Five. Replace the bathroom walls with the cedar shakes that were on the studio walls and lay down a new linoleum floor.
To do all this, I would give musicians who wanted to record their music free studio time and my rather basic recording engineering chops. They would give me the labor to accomplish the above tasks. Amazingly, it worked. I got all of the above rebuilt, replaced, repaired and chopped down and they got recordings of what, in my humble opinion, was some really forgettable music. Hey, I was happy, they were happy, end of discussion. Eventually we shut down the recording operation and sold what we didn't need for the new studio and incorporated what we could use. I was left with a gutted suite of three rooms; a control room, a music room and a sort of staged area in the back that was our drum riser. For awhile a friend of mine crashed in there for a pittance (it deserved nothing more in its unimproved state). The place had lights and power. It did not have heat, a kitchen or a bathroom. I decided this was a revenue making opportunity that was going to waste.
My friend moved out to live with his new girlfriend and I bought some tools, a tool belt and a book on home building. First project: build a bathroom. I followed the instructions in the book on how to install a bathroom. First I had to build a room appended to the back of the studio. You have to start with the foundation. I found some old, large and very heavy concrete piers lying around on the property that would be suitable to support a bathroom floor. Like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill, I slowly and laboriously turned two very heavy concrete piers over and over till they were sitting next to the holes I had dug for them. Then I carefully dropped them into place.
Sisyphus, buddy; I feel your pain. Rolling rocks uphill is no fun.
Now I had my foundation. The rest of the support for the room would come from being attached to the back of the studio. I did some figuring and some measuring and then some buying. One large purchase later, I had studs, plywood, sheetrock, composition shingles and lots of screws and nails. Measure, cut, hammer, screw and repeat. In a couple of days, voila! I had an empty room. You haven't really lived till you have managed to put up a sheet rock ceiling by yourself, but I managed to do it. I was feeling really proud; I had built a room all by myself. It had a linoleum floor, sheet rock walls, a simple shed roof and the whole thing was covered in the same kind of composition shingles that covered the rest of the studio walls on the outside. When you're engaging in sub-rosa construction which is supposed to have a permit, it helps to make the new stuff look like the old stuff. "What inspector? Nah! This old construction was grandfathered in years ago!"
I installed a small vanity with a mirrored medicine cabinet. A toilet and a six foot tall fiberglass shower stall. The only hitch in the installation of the bathroom was when I bolted the toilet tank onto the toilet base. When I turned the water on, it came gushing out the bottom of the tank. Oh, I guess this rubber thingy is supposed to go in there to make a seal... I also installed a water heater for the shower and sink. I put it inside the bathroom, right behind the shower. "Talk about your instant hot water", I chuckled to myself. The gas heater had a flue that I vented out the roof so bathroom users wouldn't be overcome with natural gas fumes. Still; hardly kosher as far as the building code was concerned. Next up; kitchen.
Eventually I built a kitchen on the old drum stage. It was actually bigger than it sounds. Then I set about transforming the rest of the place into something that someone would actually contemplate living in. This is where I learned about some of the peculiarities of this old building. It had started life as a garage back in the thirties. The three brothers, Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, who built the original buildings on this newly homesteaded acreage knew about as much as I did about building stuff. Despite that, they managed to build a three bedroom, two story house, a garage, a duck pen for the ducks, and a milking barn for the dairy cows that resided here. Mediocre carpentry skills combined with the passing of many decades, left me quite a challenge in remodeling this former garage. Nothing was square. The world of traditional modern carpentry is built around the idea that walls, floor and ceiling should be level, plumb, and at right angles to each other. All construction lumber is milled to right angles. It wants to mate up with like-minded right-angled material.
It took me many months to do the necessary remodeling without benefit of anything being square to anything else. At times, I had to get quite creative. Above the front door, there was a 2X10 beam that was part of the support structure for the roof. It came to an abrupt end above the door. It had obviously been a "found" piece of lumber as it was not milled to right angles. It was more of a polygon and I had to surround it with a big piece of rigid insulation. My budding carpentry skills wanted to do this right, but how to cut the one piece to fit the other? A good finish carpenter can use a protractor and a compass square to figure out the right angles. I decided on a different approach. I painted the surface of this irregular beam then, before the paint dried, I pressed a piece of plywood up against it. When I pulled it off I had a painted impression of the shape I needed. I pressed this against the piece of rigid insulation and I cut along the outlines of the painted area. It worked! I was so proud of myself for using my noodle in a creative way to solve a carpentry problem. I also came to the realization that I could have been done with this whole project faster if I had started from scratch and built the whole thing from the ground up.
The other side of the studio. The deck in lower left looks down over the old horse pasture. See? You can't tell the original structure from renovations we made. It all looks tacky... The room with the window in it; I made into the kitchen. The bathroom was behind the back wall. I had to demolish it later, but that's another story.
Eventually, everything that I wanted to accomplish in my new rental unit was done. I had built kitchen cabinets, I painted them in several colorful shades of blue and green. If I ran low on one can of paint, that I had found in the basement, I would mix it with another, resulting in cabinets of various hues. I also did some upholstering in the bedroom, which had been the former control room. In keeping with the rural and rough-hewn look of Happy Acres in general, I decided to go with burlap set off with half round molding that I had stained an attractive dark walnut to contrast with the tan colored burlap. I attached the molding with brass screws and I must say, my bachelor sensibilities were quite taken with the end result.
The big day finally arrived when I was to receive the first person who had responded to my ad for a rental unit. She was a nurse who worked at our local hospital and she sounded intrigued with the idea of living next to a horse pasture. She admired the frisky Arabians I was boarding at the time and the old milking barn, the last of its kind in Southern Marin. I unlocked the front door of the studio and led her in. She looked around at all my handiwork. She didn't say word. She just started slowly backing out of the room. At the front door she looked at me and said, "Uh, it's a little texture intensive for me. I'm going to keep looking." As she left, I thought I heard her softly singing a song from "Beauty and the Beast". "I use antlers in all of my decorating" (sung by The Beast). "Hmm", I thought to myself, "maybe I should have enlisted the aid of the fairer sex in fashioning my interior...". Having been stung by her pithy comment, I looked around with a new perspective. She was right. It looked like the kind of place a soldier from the French Foreign Legion would find homey... Eventually the place got rented (a single man). Each new renter brought his or her own touches to the interior and it evolved over time until most, if not all, of my original fashion statements had been quietly removed or painted over. I didn't mind. As long as the renters were happy and they paid me every month, I was totally jiggy...
Here's looking at the back from the pasture. That large bay window you see looks out from the control room that became the bedroom. That piece of fiberglass paneling was lodged there for a reason. Under the bedroom window there used to be a wooden platform that the studio's porta-potty used to sit on. I removed the potty but left the platform. One night one of our more intrepid Arabian stallions managed to climb up onto the platform and I guess he liked the sound of his hooves on the hollow wooden floor because, according to my freaked out renter, he did a little impromptu Flamenco dance there, in the middle of the night. Hence the fiberglass barrier. Nothing's too good for my tenants!
Some years later, our dear old landlord gave me permission to build another structure on the property. Originally, it was to be a shed to process vegetables, fruits and salad greens from my garden. What it eventually became was a whole different deal. We'll explore that episode in the next posting: Mickey and Timmy Build a House: The Conclusion. Till then, remember to whistle while you work! Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres
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