--- title: "I built my own YouTube studio 2022" description: "After months of hard work, I finally finished my very own YouTube studio! We transformed a leaky old countryside garage with no windows into the ultimate workspace for a content creator, conference speaker and developer advocate." date: "2022-03-10T11:06:58.000Z" url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/tim/040-dli7uzzddx8" youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlI7uZzDDx8" playlist: "tim" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dlI7uZzDDx8/maxresdefault.jpg" tags: ["content-ops", "devrel", "media-production"] --- # I built my own YouTube studio 2022 After months of hard work, I finally finished my very own YouTube studio! We transformed a leaky old countryside garage with no windows into the ultimate workspace for a content creator, conference speaker and developer advocate. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlI7uZzDDx8 ## Transcript [Music] so [Music] so [Music] hello what is up i am finally back with another video and how about that intro i spent so long on this and it was so much work but i had fun i'm doing some actual video making for the youtubes anyways with that behind this this is a video about how i created the room i am in right now because i have wanted a room like this for years now and when we finally took the leap and moved to the countryside to be in nature i decided okay i will be working from home and i can finally make that space that i can use for like videos making videos like this or doing some sports behind here there's a gym or work with some colleagues or play some music and i just wanted to try the experience of finding a place doing it up and then here we are and so it took a lot of effort like we started this in august and lots of things happened and i just want to take you through the process of what it means to be making a room like this all the things we've encountered from water damage to other complicated things whatever so sit back and relax and enjoy the ride cheers it is october 1st and we were finally ready to go and yes it took from mid-august to october 1st to actually kick this off because initially i thought you know what i'll do it all myself it would be a fun project it will be life defining i will learn this city boy will learn how to do this and as it turns out it was just too hard and i work at a startup and i just i work all the time i just couldn't see it and so i decided to ask a local builder and he's actually english so a really nice way to communicate because i didn't have to do it in my crappy french and off we went and we decided because of the irregular shapes of the garage doors that we would actually just build some walls with like these cylinder blocks right and then make custom wooden window frames inside and he he was supposed to do all of that and so it actually worked out quite well once he finally got started and got here it was really fast it took him only a couple of days to to build these little walls and to make like a little strip on top to make it strong and here you are not seeing any of the water related issues just yet but they'll soon come oh and i also asked him to make a little slab of concrete so the air conditioner that is going to be a heater and a cooler would sit on and you can also see how much stuff came out of this old garage that we didn't know that we had when we bought the place um and so you can see this is um like a lovely overview of the first work that was done and then after this the guy just vanishes and i had no idea what was happening and he probably assumed that i knew he was going to order glass and then make these window frames in the door but he didn't really tell me and so after a while when birds started to live in the garage because there were literally no windows and they were taking shits on everything i felt like i had to call him a couple of times and that probably didn't help but at one point he did return and when he did oh man this is nice stuff it is now december 17th of almost two months of hearing nothing and then he came and the windows in the door that he made were so good they were entirely fitted to the dimensions that we found in the garage that were slightly off of what you would normally see and it was all solid oak hand crafted and i have never seen something that nice i couldn't have done this myself not even close what a craftman it was amazing and so that gives you hope right it doesn't really matter that it took that long when something is that nice and so as everything started to install we came to the next day and then i started to look more at the garage because we live um on a valley and there's lots of rain with wind coming from that valley and it's kind of horizontal once in a while and the garage just started to become damp and wet and more wet and dripping and we didn't really know okay are we now going to just install the doors and just stop the work and see what we can do or do we continue and we devised some plans but it was nearing christmas so we took a little break and then came back later it was the next day it was kind of gloomy it was not really a white christmas here and i was walking the dogs and i thought you know what it's a break we're not going to do anything on the room now even though i was quite antsy because it had been taking so long and then i get a phone call and it was a christmas miracle the guys from the hardware store actually sent the lorry and they delivered all the stuff that we needed to get going after christmas and then at the same time the electrician showed up started poking holes in the wall to actually put through all the tubing that he needed and to be able to put electrical cables later on and so we had huge progress in a day where we thought okay it's time for relaxation no more work let's celebrate christmas as much as we can during corona and that was it and then suddenly we were ready to rock for the week after the new year had started and this was the week or maybe two where we had to look at fixing our water problem because we had some serious leakage and it was a damp everywhere and this was not a fun place to be and we almost canceled the project because we just didn't really know can we continue when it's this wet inside and we figured out why it was so wet inside above here is a terrace and you can lounge there next to the pool because the pool is there and the terrace is here and when they built this place they knew this is a garage we don't really care if it leaks as much so they kept it cheap and so between the slabs and the ceiling here both concrete stuff they actually didn't put any sort of barrier and so the concrete is porous and so when it rains enough and it goes through the slabs and once it saturates and it rains a bit more it starts dripping and there was just nothing you can do about that unless you take off all the slabs put a barrier on and put the slabs back but that's a lot of money and that's not enough money we have now or at least not that we want to spend on this and so we came up with the most janky but pragmatic solution out there and it works really well i'm so happy that we did this so what we did is we have a wall that is deeper so it it's like 25 30 centimeters deeper than normal and so it's an empty gap there and then on the top we put a whole bunch of sink and that sink is in a slope and then there's a little gap on the outside wall with a tube and so when the water leaks oh because it's only that spot right so the water leaks down and it just slowly goes outside and then we also put some air filtration stuff in the wall itself so when the wind blows from the valley it actually goes through the wetness and then into the room and so it should dry stuff out and it worked so well it's actually amazing and so this jank setup cost only a little bit more we we learned about how to do this stuff and we're good to go so we actually added a little bit of um insulation there and we used the green scaffolding which basically um is also water resistant and so now with this out of the way um there was a couple of other places we still had to solve the water you'll see that in a sac but for the rest we were ready to go with the inside oh yeah i did a wardrobe change because it took quite long to make this video and i couldn't keep wearing the same shirt every day that was kinda nah anyways a couple of days had passed and i thought okay i'm gonna have to solve our second water problem and i was hoping i could actually do that on my own turns out not really anyways the second problem that we had was actually we have concrete blocks and those are the walls below the windows that we have and we couldn't treat these walls yet because it was too cold overnight so we could spray something on it and then in the morning come and see and everything would fall off because it's just too cold so we decided to just leave the walls at it as is and work on the inside and we actually have horizontal rain and a lot of wind because we live um on a valley and the rain would literally go through these blocks there are two porous and so every day i would go and have a look at the garage there were puddles inside because it just rained through the wall so i found this really cool product called storm dry and it's like a paste that you can put on masonry work to kind of you know harden it out or actually make some sort of a water seal so i thought this is it i'm gonna try it and i painted all day and it was kind of annoying but also kind of fun to do because i was fixing a problem right and then i come back the next day and same amount of puddles it just didn't work i think it was too porous so we just kind of left it and hoped there wasn't too much rain anymore and just move on and anyways there you go it was ceilings and walls time and this is a very exciting moment in the build because you see results like you see the room change a lot right and so mark you can see he did it all by himself because he had this amazing tool to put a board on make it go up and then attach it to the ceiling and he did that super fast and then for the walls we decided to have plasterboard with already stuck to it insulation and this stuff is decent it has like an r value of 2.5 2.7 this is like how well it insulates and because our walls of the garage were already quite straight we were able to use this stuff he would just glue it on cut out a bit of the you know a gap for the electricity pipes and the stuff for the air conditioner and it was like literally like putting in a puzzle and he did that really fast and so at one point he took a break and i saw he was going home for lunch and so i was like oh let's have a look and then i looked at some of the holes that he used for that he made for the the lighting and the electricity cables were still running out and there was so much water coming off of them and so we had another leak that we didn't dissipate and there was yet another spot that was completely saturated and started dripping and i was like again more like i'm putting so much time effort and money in this room i just don't want it to be leaky right and so i didn't know what to do anymore we asked mark he was like yeah at this point i he we both didn't know and so i called my brother and i called a friend and both said why don't you just buy a big tarp and put it on top for winter because you're not sitting on that terrace now it's cold and it's everything is frozen and there's not that much sun out so i thought why not so i ordered a huge tarp that would fit this this room here on the top and it was pretty big and that worked out pretty well because there was lots of lounge chairs and other stuff already on the terrace so i could put that in the middle and so i could create a slope and it was really slippery because the whole terrace was iced but i got it done and i could just unfold the whole thing use tie rips and zip ties and things like that and it kind of worked i thought and then it started raining and then you could see what type of wind we have here and oh boy that was a lot of wind and i was taming the beast basically all every day after work i would go in and have a look and there was like i don't know thousands of liters of water on the tarp and i would just i bought a pump and i was pumping every day and yeah it was a challenge but we got rid of the water problem inside in the next couple of days things went really fast we had both the electrician and the builder here at the same time and the electrician was actually working on all the switches power sockets connecting the lights and they even started working on the air conditioner and then at the same time the builder mark was actually working on all the finishing touches of the plasterboard and filling things up and putting like nice ridges and then kind of plastering it so it's like super strict and tight and it started to really become like a room now and we got so far in that week that we were ready to start painting and after that put in the floors and then done and i was getting really excited i really thought we were ready for paint but we were definitely not because first of all it started raining like crazy it rained through the walls again and also the plaster that was on the walls the new stuff is it's wet anyways but it has to dry because of the rain it couldn't dry and in the morning when i would come into the garage there were puddles on the floor it was crazy and so we decided to turn on the air conditioning at really hot because our air conditioner is like two-way it's hot and cold and i also had a dehumidifier and we let that run for like two days maybe even longer and slowly it started to dry out and then i thought yes it's pain time we're ready to rock but of course i wasn't because you know what all this plaster it needed to be sanded because all the holes that were filled up like all the screw holes and all that stuff it needed to be sanded so it's flat because otherwise you have ugly walls i didn't know this i'm a novice at all of this and so mark started sanding and oh boy the amount of dust is ridiculous i've never seen this much dust the poor guy did it all along he had a white face i i decided not to film him because it wasn't a good view for him anyways um we did it finally ready to rock and so when it was time for painting um of course i asked my wife because she's really good at it and especially because we bought a paint machine it's one of those sprayers and i'm just not i'm subtle enough i i don't have the eye for detail apparently let me build a website and all the detail you need i'll do it but painting all that stuff i'm just not that good so she did it and she did a great job and she worked really hard so i really thank her for this and um slowly but surely everything started to finish and there's actually one piece of ceiling where the initial drips were you know the the part before where it was dripping off the electronics um we didn't paint this one and we also didn't fill it up with plaster because if it was too wet we would actually be able to just replace it and just deal with the with the leakage like that for a while but yeah um it was finally done mark came back he put in the floor and i was just giddy with excitement because now it's the moment of plugging in the internet building my desk moving on all the furniture and i was finally there and i am so excited to show you these final shots of where i work right now here we go [Music] so [Music] you