Meeting pods are a ripoff, so I built my own. Buy or DIY?

We've got a ton of cool spaces here at Linus Media Group. We've got office spaces, testing spaces, studio spaces, soundproof spaces, hidden spaces, even parking spaces. But there's one kind of space we always need more of, and that is meeting spaces. Can I help you? Actually, I think you can see this is my office, but it's also call room 104B. Did you book it today? No, I didn't. Which is exactly the problem that we're trying to solve. That's where call pods like these come in. Whether you need to jump on a conference call or host a meeting or if you just plain can't take Sean's chair squeaking anymore, you just jump into one of these and your problem goes away. I need you to get some more call pods right away. I can tell procurement, but you know these cost, right? Seven grand for what? An upholstered phone booth. $40,000 for this meeting room? Come on. These things can't be that complicated. You built an arcade. You built a server rack. I bet you could build one of these for cheaper. I probably I'll take that as a yes. So, on this episode of Buyer DIY, Jordan is going to be tackling the challenge of building a twoperson call pod and seeing both in terms of time investment and money how that compares to a commercial solution. Let's go. And the best part is, check this out. I got my office back and I can use it to tell you about our sponsor, Squarespace. Build a professionallook website for your business. It's easy to use, efficient, and can even help you with payment processing. You can save 10% at squarespace.com/ltt. Today we'll be comparing our efforts to this Tuesday plus pod from Bureau. It's a twoperson pod that retails for about 14,000 US plus installation, which I say is about another grand. I'm pretty confident we can make our own for a lot less. So, let's go do some drawing. I want to keep roughly the same dimensions of the Tuesday pod. So, our base will be a little smaller than the 4x8 sheet of plywood built on top of a 2 by two frame. We'll put posts around the perimeter made up of 1x4s that will glue together into different profiles. And then between those posts, we'll sandwich between some hardboard and then cover it with some fabric that we'll figure out later on. If you didn't follow any of that, don't worry. We'll cover it as we go along. Now that we've got a plan, we're going to start trimming down our 1x4s. Yeah, I got like a fingers gap. That's fine. It'll tighten up on me. Yeah. So, we'll just have to like section it down. Fine. We're going to glue and then nail these together because we really don't have enough clamps to do it the proper way. The base is just a simple floor framing. It's 2 by twos and some plywood on top and should be no problem. This is exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids. Yeah, with a table saw. Same technology. We've just trimmed our plywood down to size. And now, because we know that's the right size, we can actually just use it as our template for all our 2 by twos and not have to measure them. We just put them on flush, use our pencil to mark, and we'll just cut on that line that we just made. And I guess this one's times three. Oh, no. Five. Hey, actually, can we do six instead of five? I want to make this a little beefier, I think. All right. Okay. Now, we can drop it like it's hot. Yeah. Floor. All right. work here is done. This feels bigger. Yeah, maybe a little bit. I definitely got more leg room cuz I think the difference between ours and theirs, you have the walls set on the outside, right? They're kind of along the edge. The outer part will be theirs are more in more inward set. Okay. How this is going to work is our outside corners will get screwed into the base here. We'll layer this up with cardboard, sonopen, more hardboard, and some kind of fabric on the inside. And then these guys, we'll sandwich it all in, and they'll staple or screw or nail or whatever in to hold it all together. I think if we go about 79, that gives us 3 or 4 in for our ceiling assembly. Yeah, that should be fine. Just keep in mind, inner ones are going to have to be shorter. Now the question is, are we putting that internal flooring stuff down first before that? Well, this goes on the outside, Talk about the inner wall portion and then the flooring goes down and then the wall. So, we're going to measure from the floor. Measure from the concrete. This side is 8T. This side is 8t of it. Okay, let's go 7' 10. It's more than enough wiggle room. Yeah. and Lucas might have to duck. We'll see. Good enough. We'll see you guys tomorrow. We're back on day two. Our first task is to chop these guys down to size and then we can start attaching them to the base. We're going to add crossmembers to make this a little bit more stable. It's kind of kind of wiggly right now. The problem is we're going to dovetail those in to those uprightes. And we really probably should have done that before we glued everything together. We made these 3D printed templates to make it easier to figure out our dovetails. That'll go in the crossmember. And we'll cut out that hole. This will go on here. That is backwards. If we mess up something. Yeah, this is backwards. Oh. Uh, make that more different. Make more different. Okay. I think this one's okay. What a guy making me print more stuff all the time. But here is the new piece. It is more different. Let's go see how. The issue was I had this stop block on the wrong side on the previous version. So, it would have been impossible to mark the wood properly. This is a Milwaukee multi-tool. It is a vibrating saw, so the saw head just kind of goes back and forth really fast like that. Makes it super easy to get into tight to reach spaces like this. And fun fact, this is very similar tool to what they use for taking casts off. So you could even touch this while it's moving and it won't hurt you. This is a Rioba or Ryoba. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. It is a pull saw from Japan. So instead of a western saw where you push to cut, this pulls. And for me at least, they're way more accurate. I feel like that makes way more sense. And it's got two kinds of teeth. I'm going to zoom way in here. So, it's got four rip cut, which is going with the grain, and cross cut, which is going against the grain. So, on the upside, the length is right. Downside is, uh, we got some, uh, some massaging to do. That's expected. We need the white hardboard first. Is that going on the outside? This is the outside. Okay. So, then sauna pan. Okay. Putting the hardboard on the outside. What else do we need to dovetail? Cuz we're not going to be able to do that on the inside. We need access to both. Uh, just here and there. We're not doing any more along the top. Oh, balls. So, those kind of have to get done first before we can Oh, that sucks. Okay. do any of the exterior things. Next, we're going to trim our hardboard and our sauna pan. And we're definitely want mask for that cuz it's not fun stuff to get in your lungs. Next, we're going to build a sandwich out of some hardboard and some sauna pan. Uh, this is a soundproofing material made of like recycled fibers. I don't think you can get it in the states. So, we're going to do this white hardboard on the outside cuz it's already finished and I'm lazy. Then the sauna pan and then the more other hardboard. More other hardboard, which later on is going to get a coat of some kind of fabric. got a bit of a problem. Turns out our distance here at the bottom is 40 and 3/4 of an inch, whereas up here it's 41. So, we're quarter inch out, meaning our uprightes are going up at angles. This is not good. I think we're going to have to bash this out. Do number three. And then we'll do the same dimension up top so we can just nail it up there to hold it in the right spot. Then we can screw in the panels and call it a day. Sure. All right. I think we're pretty good for day two. We've got our first sandwich done. We had some challenges with our dovetails, but I think we finally figured that out. We have good even dimensions on both sides now. And there's already some soundproofing. Yeah. Give it a test. Justin, can you hear me? Nope. Not at all. Perfect. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Ah, in the middle the dovetails seem to work just fine because we have a lot of material both top and bottom. So, it doesn't really have a way to split. But, as you can see, once we get closer to the top, there's not really a whole lot holding that dovetail in. So, they kind of just pop as you saw there. What do we What do we lose if we pivot this at this point? The piece that we had cut for the wall with the sauna pan and the hardboard, that'll work for the floor. Okay. Okay, so we got nothing lost there. I mean, at this point, it's looking like we're just losing a couple pieces of lumber. What if we just go BC box, 2x two walls, sonopan inside it, sandwich it with the hardboard on the outside, so it gives rigidity, and then just get some corners, pretty it up a bit. The post and panel construction with the dovetails is turning out to be just a nightmare to deal with. So, we're going to switch to a more traditional North American stick framing using 2 by twos. That should be more rigid and it'll actually let us cram more sauna pen into the walls. Just means we're in for a lot more cutting. All right, time to rip the wall down. We're going to pre-drill our holes this time just to avoid any possible splitting. And uh this should go a lot better. Okay, now we do that three more times. We got us a barn. It's day four. Our next step, I think, is to put on our sheathing on the walls to give this a little bit more uh rigidity. And then we'll fill her up with Sona Pan. I should mention it's day four, but we haven't been doing like 8 hour days on this by any means, so like don't get too worried about us. Yeah, we're doing real construction hours. Exactly. So, we're like 46 and 38. Oh, thank God. What? Exactly 8 ft. Nice. We're here on day six or seven somewhere in there and we're ready to start cutting acrylic to make our windows. What we need to do is cut two of each size and then we'll sandwich them together with air in between and that'll hopefully denten the sound a lot more. We've got a plastic specific blade on our saw. Basically just means lots more teeth. But we're going to take it slow and uh see how it goes here. You can tell we weren't exactly square, but the trim will hide it. Yep, exactly. That one's good. Beautiful. Yeah. I'll do It's been a long time since I've done this, but the basic idea is we'll have our trim on both sides. The first layer of acrylic goes here. then some kind of spacer or goo or something. We'll deal with that when we come to it. Then another layer of acrylic and then another layer of trim to make the whole thing a sandwich. And then in theory, that air gap between the two layers gives us some extra soundproofing. It's been a few days since you've seen us. In the meantime, we built a bench. Uh we've got two pieces of acrylic in. And uh our next actual step is to put the second piece of acrylic on this side. Unfortunately, if you want to bring the camera around here, that means we have to build up all the framing around it in order to fit that, which means we're going to have to put in this inside finished panel before we can really go any further, which Justin is going to have to go and put together right about now. Before we put the hardboard up onto the walls, what we're going to do is cover it in some fabric. Just kind of maybe pretty up a bit. First things first, lay in some spray glue. And then I will start laying in the fabric. All right. Now that the spray glue is laid in, time to lay in the fabric. This is a lot easier with two people, but Jordan is busy right now. So, to kind of make this in lay in a little bit easier and kind of get rid of some of the wrinkles, I'm just going to use a normal clothing iron. Works great for getting out all the tiny wrinkles and stuff like that. And hopefully there'll be less air bubbles trapped as well, too. All right, I'm going to finish up the other half here. As you can see, it's going down pretty much as smooth as it's going to get, I think. Um, yeah. We'll see you when we go to put the wall in. Okay, one panel. Let's get her in. Good. Might as well get the full peel on camera, you know. We still need to fill out two pieces of SonaPan and then another upholstered panel up here before we can put the glass in. That was better. This pseudo leather stuff, whatever, is left over from the fire truck. We're just going to spray adhesive it onto our panels here and then uh staple that onto the wall. Keep it in there for now. So, this is I forget the name. It is some kind of glazing tape. Chromate. Basically, we're going to put it on here just to prevent the acrylic from rattling against the uh the trim here. Feels like a clay. Still got to do the top and bottom trim. That's way easier. It's already in place. So, we just got to trim it. Can you hear me now? Hello. Yes. We've put together a door with some chopped up 2x4s and using pocket holes the wrong way. We just got to sauna pan that put on the second piece of glass in the sheathing. And then we'll learn how to hang a door. That's future Jordan's problem. And if you come with me, we can see where we're at on the actual pod. We've got the wall panels fully installed. Uh Justin's just starting on the electrical. Next time you see this, it'll probably be be done. We just got to do kind of floor and ceiling after this. So, we'll see you guys in a bit. Time to find out how they did. I have no idea how much money they spent, but I do know how long they've been working on it. So, uh given that we account for our time in our budget, it's it's been a long time. It looks pretty good, though. Thank you. No, no, I don't mean that as like a buttering up compliment thing. I mean, it actually looks pretty good. Obviously, it could use a little bit of putty in a paint job here and there. Well, we know you love painting so much, so we figured we'd do that for you. The number of times I said eggshells, we don't have a swear button. But in terms of like nailing the function, wow, you can fit so much privacy in this bad boy. And I haven't even been inside yet. Jordan, would you like to join me for a quick meeting? I suppose so. I can already see a few things that are going to help a lot with the privacy of this call pod. We obviously used double paneed glass here. We uh it was a real pain, let me tell you. Hi, I get it. Now, you've got a shotgun mic there on the camera. So, what we're going to do is we're going to have the editor switch to that from my lavalier microphone and see what the difference is once I close this door. Okay. I'm going to speak in the same volume as a privacy. Oo. Okay. This table is a significant improvement in function over some of the other tables in our call pods. There are probably some things that would serve to stabilize it a little bit more. Little bit of bracing would help. Little bit of bracing would help, but it's a huge issue for me when I'm sitting in those things that the table's like way out here and you only get like one laptop on it if you're lucky. Like, and if it's not way out there, it's like you can't get in and out of it. Oh. Oh, dude. That's your fan control. WHERE IS IT? NO, I see it. Wait. Oh. Oh, it's a combo bathroom light fan unit. Yep. That's actually pretty smart. And it has multiple levels of light. Hey, so depending on what kind of a meeting we're having. Oh, no. I like this. Okay. My initial thought was, wow, this table, you know, it could be a little bit more, you know, solid or whatever, but now it's optional. The idea was they wanted a space they have as a little kind of mini office. So, we can push that against the wall, push the chair up against that, and they can just work as an office. I did not expect us to DIY the bench, but it actually turned out pretty okay. Justin did a pretty good job. I wouldn't want to sit on it all day, but it's definitely fine for a meeting. That's a feature. You won't hog the pot. This is true. And then what am I looking at here? Uh, we've got a USBC powered screen here for sharing your video or whatever you need to. Oh, cool. So then you're not hunching around trying to share one screen. Yeah, for sure. We've got power and USB and everything here. Now, what did you guys do for noise treatment in here? I already saw the couple of these Elgato sound panels, but what else do you That's more to kind of deal with the bounce. So, what we've got inside each of the walls is a dual layer of sonopan, and that cuts out. We tested it at about 30 dB overall. That's actually pretty solid. That's about on par with the commercial ones. Yep. They're rated to about 28 29 somewhere there. So, margin of error, we're probably about the same as them realistically. Now, Jordan, I do have one major concern. Right now, this is in our workshop. How does it get not in our workshop? Well, we have it on casters. Really? So, the idea is you just activate the casters and then you can get the forklift under it. But, uh, if you want to try it yourself, there's a slight problem. Okay. You just count 1 2 3 Jordan. Okay. 1 2 3. Okay. Now, what? That's about as high as it goes. Oh, so we got like 2 mm of clearance. That feels optimistic. Yeah. So, what I've done is I've declared this an Alex problem. I see. And it's not a problem for the video anymore. What is a problem for the video is the price. Where did we land? The comparably featured Tuesday Plus from Bureau costs $14,000 plus install. Plus install. So, we're under budget. I can tell you that much. For materials, we spent about 4,400 Canadian. So, 3,100 US or so. Wow, that's way under. But it was a lot of time. Yes, it was. Uh, we spent about 176 hours in here at 30 bucks US an hour. So what that tells us is unless you're a small business owner with functionally unlimited time to build something like this workshop and tools and or you're a large organization that happens to have a team of onstaff skilled construction laborers who could build them for you. Probably doesn't make any sense cuz if you're hiring contractors to do something like this or using more highly paid employees. The economics are tough. Technically, we saved about six grand us, but realistically, this was way too much work. What else could Jordan have been doing in that time and Justin like five other videos maybe? So, I think this might be a case where we succeeded, but we also kind of failed. Purick victory. Maybe in future buyer DIYs we have a little bit of a time limit or something too. A couple weekends maybe. Scope control. Yeah, we we preach scope control here. You know what else we preach? The gospel of Segway to our sponsor Squarespace. You'd be surprised how many businesses out there are operating without a website. They rely on third party storefronts and in the end it makes them seem unprofessional and as a result their products may come off as lower in quality. Which is why your business or side hustle could use a website that matches the quality of what you do or make. Squarespace makes it easy to get a website up and running in no time at all. With their long roster of templates or the design intelligence tool that helps you make something that really matches your vibe. With millions of domains to choose from, you can make sure that potential customers can easily find and remember your website. From there, Squarespace can help you track things like sales or other analytics. They'll even help you run your storefront and process payments from all major platforms like direct debit, credit, Apple Pay, and more. We've even used it here for our Linus Media Group site. Start building your website today and receive 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com/ltt. Even if we wouldn't do this again, though, I think the truest measure of the success of buyer DIY is whether we will actually deploy it. And I think we will. I see no reason why we couldn't just use this to well in a few days when we figure out how to move it. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the Ooh, the arcade buyer DIY. That one was a clear success. Yes, Jordan and Justin absolutely killed it. Spoiler alert.