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After multiple years of having booth envy during online audiobook conferences, relatives promising to help me build a booth and then bailing, and stress from outside noises making me question my decision of becoming an audiobook narrator altogether, I finally decided to get a pre-fab sound isolation booth. I probably would have come to this decision sooner had I not come from a long line of carpenters with a DIY mentality, but I finally decided to bite the bullet after coming across a Facebook comment by a well known audio engineer named George Whittam, aka “George the Tech”, a trusted name in the audiobook industry. To paraphrase, he said if you live in a house, build a booth. If you live in an apartment, get a pre-fab one. 

Being the largest financial investment I ever made (and probably will ever make) as a narrator, I put a lot of research into making sure to get the best one in my budget, which admittedly was pretty high, since the common argument against getting a pre-fab is “those cost $10,000 or more. Better to build it yourself!” 

It’s not enough for me to read online reviews, even if the star ranking system were available. I already knew about a few different models: Whisperroom, Vocalbooth.com, Scott’s Booths, and of course, Studiobricks; but I needed to make sure that the model I got was the right one for my situation, which is, living on the middle floor of a city apartment, where I don’t want to live forever, and moving anything in and out of my maze of buildings is a huge pain in the…

Anyway, near the end of my decision making process, I happened to stumble upon “George the Tech” doing an AMA on Clubhouse. He is a guy people go to for tech advice and tech tuneups when they are installing, or have installed a new sound booth, so he was able to give me a lot more answers than I would have gotten, had I interviewed a half dozen Studiobricks owners (which I also did). He helped me to confirm which size and style would be best for my situation. 

Once I placed the order with Studiobricks, the wait time was less than three weeks. They happened to have exactly one booth in stock (of the size/ type that I wanted) and they gave me an estimate of 10-14 days. It ended up being 16 days total.  In years past, the wait time was much longer in the US, mostly due to having to wait 6 weeks for the booth to clear customs after arriving from Spain. I was given a name and email address to contact about shipping, and I sent an email. Four days before the delivery I was finally given a tracking number.  Two days later, I received a request from another email address (the local shipping company) asking me to confirm that I could receive the booth during a seven hour window two days later. It also said the driver would call me 30-60 minutes before they showed up. 

This is when I started panicking. I knew I would be expecting a giant box, too large to fit through a door. I am lucky enough to have a boyfriend whose full time job is managing the condos where I live, has a flexible work schedule, and who has access to dollys and doorstoppers, but I didn’t like the idea of having a ginormous box blocking the sidewalk while one of us supervised and the other carried extremely heavy literal walls through multiple doors and stairways (we live in a very inaccessible wing of the complex). But since I would only have 30-60 minutes of actual notice (and I have been burned in the past by furniture deliveries that never showed up- twice!) I didn’t want to hire professional movers for the entire day. Also my boyfriend insisted that we didn’t need them.  

So the moment of truth happened. I got the call from the driver with a 30-45 minute heads up, and my boyfriend asked the driver to come to the parking lot because it would be easier than unloading from the street. About 30 minutes later, we went outside to wait and direct the truck to the parking lot. 

At one point, we saw a large truck pass by and thought that perhaps it was going to turn around or go to the wrong parking lot. After 5 minutes we decided it must not have been my delivery. After 30 more minutes I decided to go to the complex up the hill and see if it happened to be lost. I spotted the truck in the parking lot and the driver standing outside the truck, talking to a resident. After some very confusing introductions, I found out that he was, indeed the driver of my delivery, he did, in fact, go to the wrong complex, and that he had gotten into a fender bender with the resident he was speaking to. After nonchalantly examining the truck to make sure the damage was not catastrophic, I went back to my complex to wait for him. On the way there, I saw a wild bunny! (Despite being a city of roughly 700,000 humans, Seattle strangely has more wildlife than the nearby suburb I grew up in). 

The bunny seemed to me like a good omen, so at this point I wasn’t too concerned that the driver may have damaged my $10,000+ investment, with a replacement time of well over two weeks (it was the last of its type in the country, remember?) and my boyfriend, who used to work as a mailman, reassured me that a front-end fender bender couldn’t possibly damage a booth in the back of a delivery truck. 

Many minutes and another trip up and back down the hill later, the driver finally arrived to our loading area. The driver was not in a great mood at this point and I started to get nervous.  I had recently heard two horror stories about deliveries of Studiobricks booths. One was that a driver dropped the box from the truck and it landed horizontally on the pavement (It survived the fall). In the other instance, the driver was not able to get the box on the sidewalk (which is where they are contracted to deliver it) and just unloaded it onto the street. Neither of these two scenarios seemed particularly appealing to me, and with much anxiety, I watched the driver, who was now obviously flustered from his recent car accident, gingerly lower the 7 plus foot tall box from the truck on a wobbly lift gate. I would describe his process in detail, but I must have blacked out at this point because my next memory is of walking around the box to examine it for damage. In fact, I took pictures of each side before signing the “sign for delivery” form, making sure to get a close up on the scuff marks on one side, and not realizing  that I had received this message in a prior email: 

When the booth arrives, please make sure to sign the delivery documents and make a note that the final approval is subject to inspection. If you notice any damages on the box note them immediately, take photos, and record the description of the damages on the delivery paperwork. If you fail to do this we will not be able to file the insurance claim the pieces with damages.

To spare the reader any unnecessary stress, I will tell you that my booth did not suffer any damage during the shipping and delivery process. 

For the next couple of hours, my boyfriend and I hauled the heavy wall pieces, fire door, and roof up and down two staircases, along three hallways, and through three doors, and into my apartment.  I would describe the assembly process here,  but just reliving this much in order to write the blog post has exhausted me, so instead, I will leave you with two links: one from “Audiobook Share-rator Karen Commins: https://www.karencommins.com/2021/06/assembly-tips-for-custom-size-studiobricks-booths.html and one from George “The Tech” Whittam: https://youtu.be/k9f5tL8818Il

In hindsight, I probably could have tried to get someone from an app like Taskrabbit as soon as I received the call from the local delivery driver. It might have taken them a while to arrive, but since the process took us several hours, getting a third pair of hands to help haul the heaviest parts of the booth, and maybe even put it together the same day, would have saved our bodies from a lot of soreness and exhaustion!