The sand/cement (screed) floor is now dry enough to create the floor proper. We’ve deviated slightly from the drawings in terms of construction materials – Jeff describes Howard’s flooring drawing (right) as ‘just a guide’ (I’ll let them fight this out!). So we’ve used the following materials for the floor (from the ground upwards);
- screed (with PVA to help it stick to original concrete floor)
- damp-proof plastic membrane (stops damp soaking into the rockwool)
- compressed rockwool (1 inch)
- lengthwise chipboard
- widthwise chipboard (these last two are for strength as well as isolation)
- rubber-backed carpet
I’ve just, er, bounced on the floor, and it has that curiously springy solidity that you get in studios – feels like the bass drum/bass cab wouldn’t resonate at all, but there’s a feeling of ‘give’ underfoot.
Here’s a close-up of the membrane/compressed rockwool and first layer of chipboard..
Two and a half metres higher, the roof timbers have been wood-treated (with whatever the modern equivalent of creosote is – I shall call it creosote in tribute to the many Derbyshire chicken sheds I painted with the evil stuff in the 1970s). Artis has now added nearly all the lower-density rockwool – the stuff that actually looks like wool. 
Rockwool is, apparently, the best material for sound isolation, because it contains a combination of rock and air (as, indeed, will the studio itself ;-). He cuts the stuff with amazing expertise – it’s a millimetre-accurate job because if the slabs are too thin, they fall out of the gap between the timbers; if they’re too thick, they buckle. The control room ceiling is now filled; here’s a picture of it, and of the half-completed live room timbers.
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