OK, so you saw the title of the video and you know what this is about.
But before we get into this, I’d like to tell you how and why I got to this point.
So, this is my studio.
This is where I film and narrate the vast majority of my videos.
Its actually just a 10x10 bedroom or a 100 square feet.
For you guys in metric land, it’s about 3x3 meters, or 9 square meters.
It’s not very big at all.
I make it look big because I position the camera at the far end corner of the room,
like this.
In fact, when I have fans come over, which I used to do all of the time before the pandemic,
the first thing people would say upon entering the room is “wow, it looks so much bigger
on YouTube.”
So, I have this one workbench here.
This is the only place I really have in the house to work on projects, whether I’m filming
those projects or not.
Of course, I like to be working on several projects at once, and so this workbench is
sort of the bottleneck.
Let me give you an example.
If I tear apart a computer into a million pieces and then realize I need to order some
part or tool online and it takes a week to get here, well, I can’t just leave everything
on the bench for a week.
I’ve got to put it back together, or put it into a crate or something, so I can move
it off the bench.
Also, if you look at the ceiling and walls, you’ll see some really shoddy work for putting
sound deadening up.
Keep in mind I did this many years ago before I was even known as the 8-Bit Guy and it was
on a shoestring budget.
Originally I just used this packing foam, which isn’t all that great for sound deadening
because it isn’t thick enough and it isn’t rated for use like this because of lack of
fire retardants.
Also, because it was so dark in color, it vastly reduced the ambient light in the room,
so I ended up covering it with a sheet.
I was trying to do it all nice and fancy like on the ceiling, but it was just taking too
long so I gave in and finished it up the cheap way.
Also, I installed these LED spot lights in the ceiling.
This greatly improved the light situation in the room.
I used to use light stands, and if you look at some of my older videos like this one you
can see what the lighting used to look like as compared to now.
I also built this railing system above the bench here so I can mount a down facing camera
anywhere I need.
This was also made on a shoestring budget and made with cheap metal conduit from the
hardware store and some 3D printed parts.
I’m also still somewhat overrun with old computers and stuff that people sent me.
As you can see, I have stuff still piled in the floor here all of the time because I just
don’t have anywhere else to store them.
These shelves back here used to be for storing the T-Shirts that I sold.
But as I sold out of T-shirts I ended up putting things here on the shelf and now I have no
room for more shirts.
If you think about it, my YouTube channel is a business.
And, my business just grew way too fast for the space I had to work with.
So, ultimately I need more space.
I had thought about building a new building in my back yard.
There are some limitations here, though.
The city of Kennedale will only allow an accessory building to be 10% of your back yard.
So, obviously, I needed to find out how big that was, so I measured and created a fairly
accurate representation in Sketchup.
And so all I need to do is add the porch and sidewalk here as they technically count as
back yard space, and see what that ads up to.
As you can see, right around 3,200 square feet.
So, ten percent of that is 320 square feet.
Of course, that’s the footprint of the building foundation, not the interior space, which
will be less.
Still, that’s not bad, that’s at least 3 times bigger than my current studio.
Of course.
My wife and many other family members had been urging me for years to get a wooden storage
shed, something like this.
These are certainly affordable, but I couldn’t see trying to build a studio in something
like that.
Also, my wife had been wanting, or perhaps demanding some sort of outdoor storage to
put lawn equipment stuff like that in so that we can move all of that junk out of our garage.
Which I’m all for, but I was afraid if I bought some small wooden storage building
like this, that would essentially mean I would not be able to build something nicer in the
future, at least without paying somebody to demolish the old one.
So, a few years ago, I had a contractor come out and quote me on a small 320 square foot
building in my backyard on a concrete foundation, you know, kind of like a small house, and
they quoted me a number really close to 100,000 dollars.
And that number just didn’t sit well with me because because first of all, I couldn’t
afford that much.
And second of all, I mean, you could almost buy a whole house for that here in Texas.
So I just abandoned that idea for a while.
Well, my brother runs the Geek Pub and he had also been looking for more space.
So, a couple of years ago we decided to find some sort of building that was maybe a thousand
square feet, and go into on it together.
We looked at a lot of possible buildings, but we really just ran into one unsolvable
problem.
You see, I live in the city of Kennedale, just south of the metroplex.
Mike lives up in Keller, on the complete opposite side of the metroplex.
So, obviously we’d want a building that is somewhere in between us.
I mean, obviously I don’t want to drive an hour to go to my studio every day, and
neither did he.
The trouble is, anything that is remotely considered in between us is prime real estate.
Basically anything we found in this area was way too expensive.
There were very reasonably priced buildings south of me or north of him, but those just
wouldn’t work.
So, after a couple of years I kind of gave up on that idea as well.
I just decided to call another contractor out here just to see if they’d give me a
different quote.
These guys quoted me 36,000 dollars, which seemed a lot more reasonable.
So yeah, I told them to go ahead and get started!
Of course, next I needed to come up with a design.
At first I looked at just a basic square building.
But I didn’t think this looked very good.
But more importantly, my wife still insisted that part of this building be used like a
traditional storage shed.
There wasn’t a really good way to divide this building up like that.
So, instead I came up with an L-shaped design that sort of compliments the existing shape
of the back of the house.
And, of course, since the city doesn’t count concrete as building footprint, I could put
a nice porch here.
So, this is the final design I came up with and submitted to the city.
There are 3 rooms, and if you combine them together, the total square footage is 280
square feet.
This smaller room here, has its own door and will serve as the outdoor storage shed my
wife wanted.
It’s 58 square feet, which should be more than enough.
The main room here, which will be the new studio is 114 square feet, which is 14 more
than my current studio, and this second room, which will be an additional work area is 107
square feet.
Again, that’s 7 more than my existing studio.
In fact the two rooms together is 222 square feet.
Obviously, I could have made this all just one big room, but I sort of liked the idea
of having two distinct areas.
So anyway, after submitting to the city, it took nearly 3 months to get the building permit,
and then things started moving along pretty quickly.
The concrete guys came out and leveled the ground and set the forms on one day.
Then the next day they came out and finished digging the beams and laying rebar.
Now, I know it looks like a square building, but that’s because they decided to pour
the porch as part of the same slab.
You’ll see what I mean later.
3 days later after the city came an inspected, the concrete truck arrived.
Actually it took two trucks to finish the whole thing.
These guys used a pumping truck to get the concrete pumped from the street to my backyard.
For those that are curious, this is one of the bolts they use around the edges.
This is what the frame will be mounted to.
To finish it off, they used a power trowel, which looks like a giant fan.
And just a few hours later that day, here’s the finished foundation.
And here’s the next day after it is mostly done curing.
The very next day after that, a big truck of lumber arrives with a forklift attached
to the back.
Myself being a bit mystified how he plans to get that to the back yard.
But quite amazingly, he manages to lift the lumber up above the roof of the house and
just barely squeeze through the gates to the back yard.
A couple of days later the framers show up.
And they hadn’t been there more than 30 minutes and they had already started raising
walls.
Within just a couple of hours they’ve started to make it look like an actual building.
Next comes the tyvek wrap.
Now one interesting thing about this.
It’s essentially the same material that most floppy disk sleeves were made out of
during the 1980s.
Only this stuff is a bit thicker.
And next comes the siding.
I had thought about doing brick, but not only was it more expensive, but it would have meant
less interior space since the walls would be thicker and I was limited to 320 square
feet for the building footprint.
A couple of days later we have some roofing guys out.
One guy is actually cutting my neighbor’s tree branches since they’re actually in
the way.
And here goes the tar paper, or roofing felt, whatever term you prefer.
And then, of course, the shingles.
I will mention that during most of this process the temperature outside was well over 100
degrees.
For you guys in metric countries, that’s like 41 degrees Celsius.
Now it was my turn, to start work on the electrical and network stuff.
Since I was doing a lot of this after dark I had bought these little clamp on rechargeable
LED lights.
I had some old halogen work lights but those are like space heaters and being it was hot
enough already, being like 95 degrees outside even at night time, I didn’t want to use
those.
And as you can see, they lit the place up pretty well.
Now, the first thing I wanted to do was install these wall-boxes.
These kind here are designed for electrical sockets to go in this side, and network jacks
on this side.
So, funny thing is, when the builder and I first talked about the electrical he said
something like “yeah, I’ll put you a light in each room and a plug on a couple of walls.”
And I was like, “uh… no no no no no.
I need a lot more than that.
I want like 4 outlets on every wall, 4 ethernet jacks on every wall, 4 light fixtures in each
room.
So, I decided I’d just do the whole thing.
However, I was on a bit of a time deadline to get this done.
And even though I’m pretty good with electrical work, there was one thing I wasn’t quite
sure how to do, at least how to do correctly to meet code for the city inspector.
That was, of course, running the electrical line from the house to the building.
So, I asked the builder to send his electrician out to do that part.
I wasn’t expecting that Morgan Freeman would be my electrician.
Another problem was the breaker panel in my garage.
It’s full.
Nowhere to add a new breaker for the external building.
One problem is I have 3 electric car chargers, one outside, and then these two in the garage.
So, what I decided to do was remove this one.
It’s a low power charger that runs at 12 amps anyway, as you can see by the smaller
wires on this breaker.
I have a sub panel inside the house about 20 feet from this panel I can eventually move
that charger to.
Anyway, I’m a stickler for labeling things, so here’s the new breaker.
Anyway, once he got out here, I just decided to let him finish the electrical work and
let me handle the network stuff since I had my hands full already.
So, I ran a total of 16 jacks inside the two rooms.
As usual, I try to route these somewhat together so the attic isn’t just a mess of spaghetti.
I also tried to make sure the ethernet was always separated from the electrical, which
should reduce interference on them.
As an example, I always run them along opposite studs.
And heres a little tour of where we’re at so far.
By the way these doors will be flipped around where they open inside the building.
OK, let’s switch to the wide-angle lens.
So we’re in the workshop room, and moving into here this will be the new studio.
This corner here will most likely be where the workbench and everything that will be
on camera will go.
Looking over there, that’s the outdoor storage area I mentioned before, it will be totally
walled off from this room.
But, over here in this corner, this is where I’ll be bringing down all of the network
cables into the room.
And believe it or not, I used an entire box of 500 ft worth of ethernet cable just for
the two rooms.
You know, as gruelingly hot as it is out here right now, it’s important that I do this
stuff right now because, I can’t overstate this enough, for every hour I spend out here
working on this during the new construction phase, will save me probably 10 hours of work
trying to do it once the building is finished.
And I speak from experience.
On this, so I’ve got to push through and get this done!
But, I wasn’t quite done yet.
I needed to run two more ethernet cables to the outside.
And these will be for my security cameras.
I’m putting one here, and then another one on the corner over here.
The electrician had finished running the conduit and wire for power.
But I still needed to get a network cable run through the same trench.
My electrician had essentially cut a notch in this piece of wood so that his metal conduit
could run flush against the brick.
I’m using PVC conduit here, so I’m going to do it a bit differently.
I’m using two of these 45 degree pieces to help me get around the obstacles.
Hopefully you can see what I mean from this angle.
And, eventually, I’ll have to fish the fiber optic line up through the attic here.
Next, I’m going to pick a spot on the side of the new building where the network will
go through and start drilling.
And there we go, not too hard.
And here’s the little box I’m going to use.
OK, now I’ve got all of the other pieces measured and cut.
Time to start cementing them together.
This stuff here is just primer.
And then here’s the actual cement.
Now, I am only connecting a few pieces at the moment.
Because, my plan is to insert a piece of scrap ethernet cabling before connecting it all
together.
That way I can use it as a pull-string for the fiber optic line later.
Next I needed to attach the conduit to the brick.
So I used a masonry bit to drill some holes in the brick.
I know some people prefer using the mortar, but in my experience anything I’ve ever
drilled into mortar lasts about a month and falls out.
So, I always drill right into the brick.
Next I use canned air to blow the debris out of the hole.
Here’s the anchor.
And finally time to screw the bracket on.
And here’s the finished conduit.
Before I pull the fiber patch cable between the two buildings, I wanted to test it.
After all, running a broken cable won’t do me any good.
So, I took the cable and ran it between two transceiver units, then plugged the ethernet
into my laptop.
Of course, I’ll need to disable Wi-Fi.
And yeah, it seems to be working just fine.
Time to go pull it through the conduit.
Inside the new building, I’ve hung the bundle of network cables up above the ceiling.
This is to make sure it is out of the way of the drywall installers.
Also, you can see I’ve already run my precious fiber optic cable, without which the rest
of these cables would be pointless.
And so this concludes part one of the new studio build.
Now, I’ll come back with a part 2 after the building is finished, and let you see
how I do all of the wiring and network and everything like that.
And just, by the way, I haven’t really quite decided what kind of interior design I’m
going to use for the studio.
Now, I could just move this bench out there.
You know, that’s fine.
I could do that.
Or, I could just come up with something completely different.
I’m actually open to ideas.
If anybody wants to send me like a 3D render of something that they think I should make.
I mean you’ve got basically the dimensions of the room here in the video.
So, tell me what you think is a good idea.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that you may be asking what this game is that I’ve
got here running on my Mini-PET.
Well, I won’t spill all of the beans on this, but this is a new game I’ve been working
on for the past month or so.
And, it’s actually designed to run on all Commodore computers including the PET, Commodore
64, VIC-20, and eventually even the Commander X16.
So, anyway, I’ll be doing a full video on that in a little bit, but I hope this whets
your appetite just a little bit.
But anyway, if you’ve made it this far then thanks for watching!