cart 0

Building Your Own Office Phone Booth? You Might Want to Read This

Oct 30, 2017

Filed under: office booths

Estimated Price of an Effective Self Built Open Office Quiet Room: $10,000.00

There are many complexities you’ll face when building your own office phone booth. At first glance it seems easy enough.You might say to yourself, “It’s just a box and a door, how hard can that be?” While it’s not as complex as building an automobile, the further you get into building an office phone booth, the more you’ll come to realize it’s a serious undertaking.

 

Download Zenbooth's Detailed Product Catalogs
Here are a few things to keep in mind when thinking of building your own office phone booth/pod:

Material Safety
Many types of wood have urea-formaldehyde based glues that off-gas. The formaldehyde gases can be carcinogenic, and when this gas is trapped inside the office booth it can reach dangerous levels. The off-gassing is often worst in the cheap imported products. Formaldehyde is a chemical proven to cause cancer.
Safety glass should be used as well. While this glass is far more expensive, it’s necessary to ensure no one is injured in an accident.

Structural Integrity
Our office quiet rooms are designed and engineered by professionals who’ve spent thousands of hours in prototyping time to develop a safe solution for you and your employees. When attempting to build a unit from scratch, we urge you to consult with an architectural engineer. A phone booth collapse due to poor design could lead to injury or death.

Acoustics
Creating a space that does a great job of dampening sound is not easy. Different materials resonate at varying sound frequencies to convert sound into heat. We incorporate a range of acoustic materials with different weights and densities into each wall to ensure the optimal range of frequencies of the human voice are absorbed.

Air Circulation:
Proper air circulation is a requirement for any enclosed space. The booths we manufacture are designed to circulate all the air inside it every two minutes, without letting too much sound in. Remember, without proper air circulation you’ll be breathing high levels of CO2, sweating and feeling lightheaded in minutes.

Inspections
Before your booth gets anywhere near an office, you’re going to need to have it inspected by a licensed electrician, a fire marshal and a building inspector. Get out your checkbook because that’s going to run you more than $1,000 in most states.

Labor Cost:
We estimate a build time of approximately 100 hours to assemble a working, portable, soundproof booth from scratch. If you’re paying a contractor, that will run you anywhere from $30-75 dollars per hour. Cheap labor may not be properly insured and present a legal risk to you and your employees. 

Equipment Costs
If you’re building this unit yourself you’ll require a variety of tools. All of these tools can be purchased at a local hardware store for around $1,000 at the very least.

Focus
Your core business is not making and designing phone booths. The time you spend designing a booth, getting parts, and reading articles like this could be better spent growing your company.

Material Cost
The average person will spend $3-5,000 on materials alone. This does not include labor or machine costs. How can that be? Well here’s a list of 50 parts that actually go into a single person office privacy pod.
  1. Weather stripping
  2. Denim Insulation
  3. Soundproofing Staples
  4. T-50 Staples
  5. Safety Plexiglass
  6. High Grade Aluminum Door
  7. Sound Absorbent Felt
  8. High Grade 1/2 no-added formaldehyde multiply plywood
  9. High Grade 3/4 no-added formaldehyde plywood
  10. Rare Earth Magnets
  11. Dowel Pins
  12. Cover plates
  13. Black Snug Connectors
  14. Ground Screw Pigtail
  15. MC Sheilded cable/ground
  16. Ground Screws
  17. Aluminum Sensor Cover Plates
  18. Black Locknuts
  19. Ventilation Plate Cover`
  20. Fan Box
  21. Fan cord 45 degrees
  22. Gangbox Exterior
  23. Distance Raisers
  24. Mesh Screening
  25. Ventilation Fans
  26. Occupancy Auto-Sensor
  27. Snap Connector
  28. Powered Bar
  29. Anti-Short Bushing
  30. Cable Tie
  31. Self Drilling Screws
  32. Wire Nuts
  33. BX-MC-Flex Straps
  34. Long Star Screw
  35. Desk Grommet
  36. Short Star Screw
  37. Door Handle Hex
  38. Hinge Hex
  39. 1 Phillips Drive Bit
  40. 2 Star Driver Bit
  41. 3 Phillips Driver Bit
  42. Desk Brackets
  43. Spring hinge
  44. Lift off hinge
  45. Door Handles
  46. Anti-fatigue Floor Mat
  47. Small Philips Screw
  48. Short Hinge Screws
  49. Long Hinge Screws
  50. Wood Shims

Contact Zenbooth to learn about our eco-friendly, ready to ship office phone booths, and save yourself the hassle and expenses. 

 

1 comment

Sep 09, 2018 • Posted by Joe

Any different requirement for use as a voice over recording booth?

How much sound does the ventilation system make. How about air conditioning?

Leave a comment: