When we saw the house had a recording studio attached, we knew it was mostly wasted space.  It was somewhat pointless to knock it down but because it was purpose built, it wasn’t going to be much of anything else either, except a heavily over engineered shed.

But it could be…

A ‘man’ room

The first three photos show what it looked like at the start with egg boxes on the walls and lots of shelving.  The room had 19 (yes 19!) plug sockets not including the eight multisocks which added many, many more.

We started by removing shelving, the ceiling and insulation which had rotted due to a previous leak and getting rid of the egg boxes.  Almost all of this material was reused by our neighbour.

My electrician friend came round and we isolated and ripped out the existing electrics.  We restrung a single run of lights and left one socket on for powertools.

Three weeks later my friends Ben and Steve popped round and without any PPE ripped down the wall.  You can see the difference it made opening the place right up.  Now I have a 15ft run of space between the back wall and the front and the room is now 10ft wide.  Perfectly suited for a 6ftx4ft cinema projection.

But what to do with the waste?

Where possible we scrounged wholish bricks and stacked them by our shed.  The rest of the rubble will be used as hardcore for a base for my new patio I’ll be laying as well as the new pizza oven.  We also dismantled the old lethal storage heater (when we dismantled it we found the wires insulation had burnt away leaving bare wires touching the metal sides) and took the bricks out.  Underneath was a layer of asbestos which was carefully double bagged in heavy bin liners ready for proper disposal.  The fire bricks will be used as the base of the pizza oven once I’ve cleaned them and will be the ones that retain the heat when the oven is fired.

The rest of the rubbish has now been bagged and is ready to go to the tip.

Here’s looking towards a recycled pizza oven… that’s proper reuse!