Sometimes you need to physically see the room before you fully understand it… I recently took my 6-year-old son to our local library where, alongside books and video games, they have a huge table full of LEGO. Usually I spend the time looking through the vinyl LPs or involuntarily colour-coding all the LEGO pieces like some kind of mildly broken designer goblin. But this time, without really thinking about it, I started building a model of the studio. At first it seemed silly. Then I realised it’s basically the same process. Moving furniture around. Testing layouts.Working out where things fit. Once Freddy finished making his amazing “super transparent car,” he realised what I was doing and immediately joined in. “We need the yellow carpet, Dad…” And suddenly we were thinking about workflow, movement, storage, sound, lighting and comfort. A lot of home studio advice online jumps straight to expensive gear, but the actual room matters more than people admit. The shape of the space. The listening position. Where cables collect. Where instruments end up. Where clutter starts. Whether the room actually makes you want to create. Sometimes creativity starts with experimentation that looks a bit ridiculous from the outside. Sketches. Tape on floors. Cardboard mockups. Why not LEGO? Tiny desks made from random bricks, while your kid explains why the dragon needs laser cannons. This process matters. Because eventually the room stops being an abstract idea and starts becoming a real creative environment built around how you actually live and work. And honestly, building creative spaces while raising kids probably deserves its own category entirely. There’s also something strangely appropriate about designing a creative space using the same kind of building process most of us grew up with in the first place. Tiny pieces. Gradual experimentation. Changing the plan halfway through. Making a mess. Rebuilding sections repeatedly until they finally feel right. Which, honestly, describes most home studios pretty accurately.

After spending weeks building, adjusting, reorganising, painting, tweaking, and slowly turning this space into something usable… eventually you have to stop working on the room and actually use it. That’s the part people don’t talk about enough. A home studio can quietly become a permanent setup project. There’s always another thing to improve. Another cable to fix. Another plugin to buy. Another video to watch. At some point though, the room has to justify its existence. So here is the first recording that came from the room finally becoming a place for actual output instead of endless preparation. “Dealing Drugs” was written by Tom Smith and recorded in the new home studio to meet an external deadline. It was later mixed and mastered at Hillside Studios by Matt Hills, before being released in January 2026 on The Glorious Rebirth… by Baulk at the Möön (more on that in a future post). https://open.spotify.com/track/33bw4zPtGm4KeMmwkbIczF?si=40edcd543fb14bf9 Tom’s original demo was a raw acoustic guitar-and-vocal recording captured on a mobile phone. It's also part of his forthcoming concept album about crime and justice. I approached the arrangement as a strange fusion of 90s grunge and hip-hop, which was completely new territory for me, and asked my friend Adam Szkolka to record the main vocals.

Part 10: The Output Phase (When You Finally Use It) After all the planning, moving, setting up, tweaking, adjusting, and reorganising, there’s a point where the only thing left to do is actually use the room. Which sounds obvious. But it’s surprisingly easy to delay. There’s always something else to fix. Something else to improve. Something else to buy.And all of those things feel productive. But none of them are the reason the room exists. The room exists to make something. So at some point, I had to stop adjusting things and just start recording. Not perfectly. Not with everything fully dialled in. Not waiting until the room felt “finished.” Just starting. And once that happened, something shifted. The room stopped being something I was working on. And became something I was working in. That’s the difference that matters. Because the value of the space isn’t in how it looks, or how well it’s set up. It’s in what comes out of it. This is one of those sessions. Not perfect. Not finished. Just real work happening. Around the time I got to this phase, I realised I had already started recording in the previous room. It was smaller. More cluttered. Shared space. Less ideal in almost every way. But it had one thing this room didn’t yet. Output. So I went back through everything I had. Eight songs from an old band, sitting at 30–80% complete. Ten songs I wanted finished for an album, with about four halfway there. Another 20–30 ideas that were barely more than a drum loop and a few notes. Plenty of material. No finished work. So what did I do next? Finish them? Actually No. I attacked the real problem. I created a deadline. I’d been working with a prolific songwriter earlier that year who mentioned he had a backlog of about 30 songs waiting to be recorded. So I messaged him and asked if I could record one of his. Not just for the song. For the deadline. He gave me four to choose from. I picked “Dealing Drugs.” Then he gave me a date. 30th June. And then he checked in every week.

Part 3: Planning the Studio When we first moved in, this room stopped looking like a studio opportunity very quickly and started looking like a storage disaster. Because it had easy access from the front of the house, it became the perfect place to dump things while we dealt with the much bigger challenge of moving an entire household. Furniture, boxes, music gear, random household items, and anything else that needed to go somewhere for “now” ended up in here before I had any real chance to set the room up properly. Image 1: It didn’t stay empty for long. So even though I’d already thought through the space and had a rough idea of where things would go, the reality was that the room had to survive a fairly chaotic first stage before it could become anything useful. That part is worth mentioning because I think this happens a lot when people imagine building a home studio. You picture the finished room, the desk, the gear, the speakers, the lights, the whole setup. But in reality, the first stage is often much less glamorous. It can just be a matter of clearing space, making temporary decisions, and trying not to lose your mind while the rest of life is happening around it. For me, this room wasn’t built in one perfect burst of inspiration. It was built gradually, in between moving house, unpacking, handling family life, and working out what actually made sense once I was physically in the space. Image 2: Very quickly, it became the place where everything landed. That turned out to be important, because the difference between a room on paper and a room in real life is massive. Once it started filling up, I got a much better feel for what would and wouldn’t work. Access points mattered. Wall space mattered. The shape of the room mattered. Even the temporary chaos helped me start thinking more practically about layout, workflow, and what I needed the room to do. So this stage was messy, but useful. And in case anyone reading this is thinking about "The Dude" - don't worry i will talk about "The Rug" in a later post. It's just as important (or more than) you think.

Part 1: Planning the Studio This is the first in a series of 10 posts about how I planned and designed this room, from before we even moved in, through to building a functional studio. About 12 months ago, my family and I moved into a new house. Part of the decision to buy it was this room. I knew from the start that it would become my office and studio space. The house is a three-bedroom, two-storey semi-detached home, and this room is essentially a converted garage. The previous owner had used it as a shrine to his favourite AFL team, which made it memorable for reasons both practical and deeply Australian. Image 1. This was the room when we first inspected the house. Not a studio yet, but I could already see the potential. It had laminate wood flooring, dark grey paint, and plenty of holes in the walls where framed pictures had been hung. The room measures 3.0 x 5.8 metres. Image 2. The floor plan showed the room as a 3.0 x 5.8m lounge on the ground floor. Before we had even made an offer on the house, I was already convinced this was the room. I even rushed out and bought some cheap second-hand ceiling insulation, which I’ll come back to in a later post. Once the purchase started moving forward, I began planning the layout. Using the real estate floor map, and my best memory of where the power points were, I made a simple Canva mock-up to work out where everything might go. It also helped me start thinking about what I needed to buy, what I could reuse, and what I’d need to sell or give away as part of the upgrade. Image 3. My rough first pass on the floor plan, working out the room size and main zones. Image 4. One early layout version, back when I thought I might fit the motorbike in there too. In the next post, I’ll share what the room looked like once it was empty, what I tackled first, and how it quickly went from blank space to crowded chaos to the start of a working studio. Have you ever planned out a studio, workspace, or creative room before moving things in?