Chicken Shed to Electronics Lab: My Backyard DIY Studio Build

This used to be a chicken shed. Sixteen by fourteen feet, sloped metal roof, one finished cement-brick wall, and three sides that were nothing but mesh grill wrapped in shade net and nylon sheeting — open to rain, rats, and every stray current of outside air.

Today it's where I design, build, wire, test, and film every project on Humanix Tech Lab.

I'd left my IT job to come build something of my own — and quickly ran into the most basic possible problem: no spare room. My house is a 2BHK; my parents have one room, my brother and I share the other. Whatever I built, I needed space that was genuinely mine.

Behind the house stood this old poultry shed. I didn't hire a contractor. I designed the whole conversion myself, supervised every single day of construction, and worked to a fixed, honest budget — because this base was never built to carry real weight, and getting that part wrong wasn't an option I could afford to find out about later.

This Instructable is the complete build: the structural reasoning, the mistakes I made and fixed (twice, in two different systems), the safety work I refused to skip, and the room as it's actually used today — not staged for one photo.

*(All costs in Indian Rupees, approximate USD in brackets — 1 USD ≈ ₹95.5)*

**Structure & masonry**

- Mason (daily wage labor) — ₹15,750 (~$165)

- Sand (1 tractor load) — ₹3,600 (~$38)

- Cement, 30 bags × 50kg — ₹8,250 (~$86)

- Iron/stone reinforcement for shelving — ₹1,830 (~$19)

- Secondhand door + window frame (local scrap shop) — ₹3,000 (~$31)

**Electrical**

- Electrical pipes + metal junction boxes — ₹2,000 (~$21)

- Wiring (various gauges) — ₹4,500 (~$47)

- Modular switch/socket boxes + indicator lights — ₹7,000 (~$73)

- Copper earthing rod (1m) + 6 sq mm / 1.5 sq mm wire (included above)

**Finish**

- White cement, 3 coats (walls) — ₹1,000 (~$10)

- Floor damp-proof gray paint — ₹1,500 (~$16)

**Studio / filming**

- Godox 80cm softbox — ₹1,600 (~$17)

- Digitek 9ft light stand — ₹700 (~$7)

- 2× bulb holder (Godox) — ₹700 (~$7)

- E27–B22 socket adapter ×2 — ₹200 (~$2)

- 27W LED bulb ×2 — ₹400 (~$4)

- Digitek 150W COB light + 90cm Bowens softbox + 9ft stand — ₹10,000 (~$105)

- ESD mat, 2×5ft (desk surface) — ₹1,000 (~$10)

- 256GB memory card — ₹5,500 (~$58)

- Tube lights + general room lighting — ₹1,000 (~$10)

- BOYA V10 mic (Type-C) — ₹2,200 (~$23)

- boAt Airdopes 352 Pro — ₹1,500 (~$16)

- Type-C hub — ₹900 (~$9)

- Neodymium magnets (background mount)

- Green + gray background cloth

- 2× budget RGB lights with remote

**Camera**

- DJI Pocket 2 (borrowed) + independent stool/chair mount

Before I touched anything, this was still an active coop — old carpets, tags, green shade net, nylon netting tacked over the mesh to keep birds in. Only the back wall was finished cement-brick; the other three sides were pure mesh and shade net, low enough on one side to duck under.

I planned to fill this room with live electronics, exposed LiPo cells, and a running inverter. A structure that couldn't keep out rain and rats couldn't safely hold any of that either. This was the reason the shed had sat unused for years.

Feb 1–4: stripped out all the old carpet, tags, nets, and scrap myself, down to the bare frame.

My first instinct was to brick all three open walls to match the finished one. Standard, durable, done. But the numbers stopped me — three sides at this size needed 1,500–2,000 bricks, a full masonry load on a base that was built for a wire coop, not a brick room.

I live roughly 30km from the coast, so monsoon here means sustained heavy rain and wind for weeks, not a passing shower. A foundation never engineered for extra load, softened by monsoon-saturated soil, under 1,500+ bricks of new weight, is a foundation that cracks or sinks. I wasn't willing to find that out after the walls were up.

Chicken mesh, tied to the existing metal grill frame with binding wire, then plastered over with a cement-and-sand mix. A fraction of brick's weight, close to it in solidity once cured, without pushing the structure past what the base could hold. Less durable long-term — a trade-off I accepted deliberately.

mesh tied, cement plaster applied across all three open walls, full internal wall plastering completed.

This structure never had a proper load-bearing floor. Before laying the final floor, I added roughly 6 inches of aggregate + sand + cement as a sub-base — cheap insurance against settling under the shelving, the inverter/battery combo, and daily foot traffic.

Secondhand door and window frame from a local scrap shop, ~₹3,000 (~$31) total. Plain cement floor, no tile — kept deliberately low-cost since I know the structure itself has a limited lifespan.

One detail I hadn't planned for until I was living with the room: walking from the house to the shed at night meant crossing open soil in the dark. I added a small paved walkway connecting the house gate directly to the workshop door.

Off-the-shelf storage assumes household weight. Mine needed to hold an inverter + battery pair (40–60kg combined) plus a component collection that's grown past 400 individual line items. I designed the grid backward from the heaviest item first.

Two rows of three boxes on top, each roughly 20"D × 20"H × 24"W.

A wide double-width box on the bottom — 48" across, sitting directly on the floor rather than raised — sized specifically for the inverter and battery to sit side by side without stressing anything above.

Wiring conduit runs straight through the cement shelf structure itself, so the inverter connects cleanly without loose cable runs across the room.

Every box got one category and stayed there — switches, connectors, LEDs, batteries, motors, controllers, sensors, drivers, power modules, step-up/step-down converters, protection boards. Transparent grid boxes for fast-access items; day-to-day tools in their own boxes; flammable liquids kept spaced apart on their own shelf, away from meters.

Alongside the storage cupboards, I built a small cement prayer shelf into the same run — a quiet, personal addition, not a functional one.

I'm not a licensed electrician — this documents what I did, not a recommendation to skip a professional. This room runs soldering irons, chargers, an inverter, and a heat gun, sometimes simultaneously, so I focused on over-building the safety margin rather than cutting it close.

Switch points split between inverter power and direct high-power sockets — 8×2 on one wall, 1×8 for the inverter setup, 1×12 on the opposite wall, plus additional lighting/fan points. Each modular unit pairs a high-amp and low-amp option: 16A socket + 20A switch for high-draw tools, 6/10A socket + 10A switch for everyday use.

MCB breakers sit on both the room circuit and the separate inverter line, so either can be cut independently.

Rather than rely on the house's existing earthing, I put in a dedicated rod for this room: 1-meter copper, driven into the ground, wrapped in 6 sq mm wire back to the breaker box, distributed at 1.5 sq mm to every socket.

Two additional high-power sockets sit outside the room entirely, reserved for cutting and heat-gun work — so that work never happens near the component shelves at all.

Three coats of white cement — chosen for light reflection during filming, not aesthetics.

Gray damp-proof floor paint, for a clean on-camera background.

My roof support structure is metal, so instead of drilling holes or rigging rope for the filming background, I mount the cloth using strong neodymium magnets directly against the metal roof support rods. No holes, no permanent fixtures — I can change the background in under a minute.

I started with a plain green cloth, expecting standard chroma-key masking to work cleanly.

It didn't. My edges kept showing thin green lines no matter how I adjusted lighting.

I layered a gray cloth over the green, stopped trying to mask at all, and let two low-cost RGB lights do the separation work instead. Simpler than the "correct" method, and it looked better.

Cardboard box, a 9W LED holder, wire held on with tags and tape. It looked fine sitting still.

Any breeze through the mesh walls, or a hand brushing the desk, and the whole rig shifted position. I wasn't lighting my projects — I was chasing my own light between takes.

I replaced it with a Godox 80cm softbox + 9ft stand.

A visible shadow on one side once I started shooting regularly led me to add a second, larger octagonal softbox + COB light — a one-time investment I don't expect to touch again.

I mount a borrowed camera for filming, and initially clamped it directly to my desk. The desk sways while I'm actively working — soldering, tightening screws, moving components — and every bit of that motion showed up as shake in the footage.

I moved the mount to an independent wooden stool, seated inside a plastic chair for extra stability, physically separate from the desk. Camera motion dropped to zero.

New plaster, a metal roof, and a low ceiling turned out to be a near-perfect recipe for echo. My first voiceover takes came back with a reflection I couldn't fully clean up in post.

I priced out acoustic foam, then stopped — this room stores flux remover, isopropyl alcohol, and gas lighters for heat-shrink work. Foam is flammable too, and lining the walls in it meant adding a large fuel source to a room that already carries real fire risk.

I built a small isolation booth around just the mic and laptop using thick woven winter blankets already in the house — clipped up on three sides with ordinary cloth-hanging clips and rope, with another blanket laid flat on the floor underneath. Zero extra cost, and the echo dropped out completely.

Every shelf gets opened, every socket gets used — the lights above this desk have been on for every project published since, including a 3-in-1 power tester, an eye-controlled wheelchair, a browser-controlled RC car, and a health-monitoring device currently being wired on this same bench.

(All costs in Indian Rupees, approximate USD in brackets — 1 USD ≈ ₹95.5)

Structure & Electrical

1. Mason (labor): ₹15,750 (~$165)
2. Sand: ₹3,600 (~$38)
3. Cement, 30 bags: ₹8,250 (~$86)
4. Shelf reinforcement (iron/stone): ₹1,830 (~$19)
5. Door + window: ₹3,000 (~$31)
6. Electrical pipes/junction boxes: ₹2,000 (~$21)
7. Wiring: ₹4,500 (~$47)
8. Switches/sockets/modular boxes: ₹7,000 (~$73)
9. White cement (walls): ₹1,000 (~$10)
10. Floor paint: ₹1,500 (~$16)
11. Subtotal: ₹48,430 (~$507)

Studio / Lighting / Audio / Camera gear: ₹25,700 (~$269)

Total build cost: ₹74,130 (~$776)

(Roughly 1 month for structure + curing, with electrical and studio setup layered in afterward.)

A few months ago this was a chicken shed. Now it's the only room in my life where the walls, the wiring, and the shelves all exist because I decided they should — and it's where every future build on this channel starts.

Full build video: https://youtu.be/eOcHxz0fV-8

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HumanixTechLab

GitHub: https://github.com/humanixtechlab

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/humanixtechlab/

Comment prompt: "This room still isn't finished — what would you fix first if this were your setup?"