Building a Darkroom: loads of Q's

[ragazzo]

Hello generous and venerable Photrio community,

I'm a long-time lurker on this forum. I created an account today to help contribute to the discussion and to have some more experienced people weigh-in on some questions I have. I hope this is the right forum category for a question such as this one. Excuse this mammoth of a post.

I've been very fortunate in being offered the opportunity to build out a custom darkroom in my grandparents garage. It's 22' x 22' roughly 480 square feet, emptied. I have the opportunity to do what I want and the priority is longevity.

First and most prominent question: to anyone who has experience building or using darkrooms, what might a first-time darkroom builder overlook that you would absolutely prioritize? Some preliminary information might help tailor your responses:

Last year I bought a Fujimoto CP 31 Processor as the lynchpin for this darkroom, in fear of not being able to find a roller-transport processor for another long while. I've foregone fashioning a darkroom in my current (rented) apartment for space reasons. I mostly work in color (95%) and would love to eventually do black and white, but not urgently. 12x16 is the largest size paper I can put through it. It will be mostly 6x7 and 4x5 negatives enlarged to this size.

I have a few years of experience printing color in rental labs around the city (NYC). The enlarging, correcting etc. is familiar to me and all of these labs have giant roller transport processors. The chemistry for this I haven't brushed up on, nor do I know exactly how to work the CP31, but I'll get there. It would likely behoove me to figure this out first in case it could lead to a bespoke setup, of sorts.

The actual light-tight DARKroom I'm planning to build in a corner of this space using drywall or curtain. I haven't designed this yet but have this itch I'm overlooking something in thinking I can just cordon off a corner for the enlarger and feed-side of the processor.
Luckily I have a great group of friends and family who vary in degrees of handiness and skill, but across the board are smart, generous and solutions oriented. And may or may not owe me a few favors, haha. Still, most of this I'll be taking on myself. But construction is not out of the realm of possibility.

The garage is equipped with electric (I don't know the specifics), and the plumbing for the entire second floor of the house is actually exposed on the ceiling of the garage - I can't image it would be hard to tap into it in order to (I might regret saying this) hook-up a sink or drainage.

here are the categories into which I've separated my lines of thinking:


ventilation
This is my biggest mystery. If I'm going to go overkill anywhere, it might be here. I want to be extra safe about chemical exposure in the long term, but I've never dealt directly with development chemicals for film or printing. There are two garage doors and one regular door on hinges, all of which lead directly outside. I'm not scared to cut a hole somewhere in the wall but I'm wondering if the sheer amount of threshold space might make it possible to just figure out a ventilation system without cutting into anything. Of course, I can't have doors open between October through April in NYC so I'd like to figure out something that works independently. This leads me to my next biggest thing to tackle:

insulation/dehumidification
it's about 25% more humid in the garage, which I know is normal, but I intuitively feel the need to engineer the driest environment possible for all the photo-tech that will live there permanently. The garage itself has a rough cement floor and drywall, behind which is allegedly insulation. But if the old MDF shelving on the wall that has been warped by moisture into the form of squiggle is any indication of the moisture levels in there....I would ideally love to have a commercial dehumidifier that is hooked up directly to drainage or the gutter that empties (conveniently) right outside the garage anyway. A/C and heating as well need to be addressed. I can re-insulate or put up drywall atop what's already there...

electrical/lighting
quite serendipitously there are already two overhead fluorescent light fixtures (which I can equip with daylight balanced bulbs?) that illuminate one wall for viewing. There are a couple outlets, but perhaps I'm overlooking anything particular on the electric front that might be required. Some lamps, the enlarger, lightbox, a computer maybe, but not much else. Although, I assume if I opt for bigger dehumidification or A/C it will have to be addressed.

plumbing
my current plan is to figure out how to tap into that water line that's already in there (exposed pipes are ok) and have a small slop sink for emptying chemicals and washing prints. Reasons for/against a traditional stainless steel darkroom sink? I've never done tray development but I'm open to it in the future, considering my set up will be mostly for color.

darkroom equipment/storage
still have to tackle the enlarger question, but for now I'm looking at the Saunders/Omega LPL 45. There's a user on ebay (apogeebee) who refurbishes and sells enlargers within the city. He seems really knowledgable and would deliver and install the enlarger. I'm sure he'd walk me through a few things as well, as that particular model does not come cheap...
Of course theres the general miscellanea (most of which I'll get secondhand) like the easel, vessels for chemicals, grain focuser, I could go on and on but I'll likely need a cabinet or big locker to store all this?


support fixtures/feng shui
Worth it to level out the rough cement floor and tile it? Or use rubber floor tiles for garage flooring. I plan to get an anti-fatigue mat for the enlarging station. Any workflow or layout suggestions might be helpful. Was thinking of lining the cutting table with a self healing black mat. Secondhand furniture is relatively easy to figure out in NYC. Putting fixtures up against the walls is fair game, but I should prioritize being able to fit a car on one side of the garage still, as far as open space.


If anyone knows of anyone else who has experience with the particular processor/enlarger combo I'm using, please point them my way.


Also, a more practical question: without getting too granular about my particular circumstances, am I overthinking what could just be a simpler process? Give the place a good sweep, lightseal a corner, move in the enlarger and processor, a couple tables and call it a day? The labs i go to in the city seem to be very thoroughly thought out and maintained, which I feel the need to take care of in advance so as not to hit any snags later...

I'm happy to keep the forums updated as I make progress in this endeavor.

Thank you in advance.

 

[ic-racer]

You won’t be able to answer most of those questions until you know your own work flow. I’d start out simple, start making prints and modify and upgrade as needed.

 

[Sirius Glass]

1. First of all you need to make the room dark. Without that you will be stopped or limited.
2. Given the large area, you can wait and do the ventilation later or just put a moveable electric fan or fans where needed for now. If you have the money air conditioning and heat will help lower the humidity and perhaps take care of ventilation.
3. Plumbing is necessary and even though you do not plan on using tray, you may well later so I recommend a long sink that is wide and deep enough for large trays [Think: toning, bleaching ...]
4. I use two large industrial tables with a shelf underneath for paper and equipment storage. The tables have adjustable legs so the height can be altered later. Also the heavy tables will help minimize or eliminate enlarger vibration.
5. Electricity, placement of the outlets will be needed but you first need to figure out the layout.

Think through the changes and make layout sketches. Then choose the best layout for you, not what others tell you, but the one that will work for you that you can live with and avoid rearrangements later.

 

[Paul Howell]

I built a darkroom in a two car garage, the environment is much different, at the time I lived in Phoenix, now in Scottsdale, summer time temps over 110 was (is) concern. The garage was rather deep, I had 8 feet in depth about 22 feet long at the end of the garage to work with. I did level the floor with 1X2's cut on a angle to match the slope of the garage floor, then added a deck of 1 inch plywood with black linoleum as top layer. Sheet rock walls. Added a false ceiling, my handyman put in bathroom fan that vented into a the ceiling and outside with a roof top vent that was already in place. Handyman added an "in the window AC" had to cut a hole in the wall, did not make my wife happy, when we sold I had to pay to the darkroom gutted and the wall repaired. Because I use trays I needed plumbing, paid the most to have a drain installed, had to dig up the yard to take the drain to the main sewage line and pass code as did all the electrical and pluming. At a industrial salvage yard I found a long SS sink, 6 fee long. Not as deep as I would have liked but functional. My best find was a water chiller that had been pulled from some chemicals plant, the size of a larger water fountain, expensive to run but worth it in the desert. My space was galley style, at one end 2 enlargers, then the sink. I didn't have room for a true darkroom door, made do with a door that led into the garage with black out cloth overhang and weather stripping. It was dark.

In your case start with a plan, how much space can you devote to it, where are going to put the processor, enlarger, maybe a small sink for developing film? Think though your workflow, how many outlets do you need. How are you going to heat and cool it your space, and of course ventilate it. I would recommend leveling the floor, standing on a slant for hours on end is hard on the ankles.

 

[Sirius Glass]

... I would recommend leveling the floor, standing on a slant for hours on end is hard on the ankles.

And back. Really, not fun.

 

[MattKing]

It can't hurt to post this:

https://125px.com/docs/techpubs/kodak/ak3.pdf

Design for flexibility. Surface mount as much as possible. If you can choose between long runs of pipe and hoses, the flexibility of hoses is a great idea.
Because you will want to tweak it.

Ventilation that draws air and fumes away from you and then moves it out of the room is a really good idea.

A rubberized floor that you can hose down to clean would be great. Floor drains aid in that, but would be hard to put into a garage.

Automatic temperature control for water is a wonderful luxury. If your pockets are deep, an Intellifaucet is wonderful: https://www.photrio.com/forum/forums/darkroom-equipment.69/

Consider whether you like to play music while you work, and wire accordingly.

And the Darkroom portraits threads that are Sticky threads here may give you some good ideas - don't ignore the temporary/bathroom darkroom thread, because some of the ideas there would be great in something permanent as well:

 

[Jim Jones]

Ragazzo - Plan ahead, perhaps 50 or more years ahead. If you do a good job of planning and building the darkroom, it will useful for whoever next uses that garage, or fairly easy to dismantle. If there is ever a chance that the garage will be used as a garage again, locate the darkroom to permit that without losing that darkroom.
As for walls, one of the several darkrooms i improvised over many years had walls with two layers of heavy black plastic surrounding insulation batts for the top half. Plywood 4 feet high protected the plastic on the inside. This was inside a former chicken house with a concrete floor. It was problem free until an outside fire torched the whole building. Such a wall would have been easier to dismantle than paneled walls. However, it would not have supported plumbing, electric wiring, and shelves. It was easy to heat and cool in northern Missouri. Insulation is better installed during construction than added later. A curtain would be the easiest wall to improvise, but perhaps much more troublesome.
Most of my improvised darkrooms have been long and narrow due to what was available. That might also be practical along one side of the 24x24 building. That does waste a bit of space in comparison to a shorter and wider darkroom with a center aisle.
Ideal ventilation would be air drawn into the darkroom through a filter and free to vent out through a hood over the processor or trays. That vent can easily be extended to an outside wall. Some of us can tolerate scanty ventilation: only you (or perhaps a municipal codes officer!) can determine how much you need.
For electricity, add up all possible darkroom demands, and at least double that number of outlets. I had over a dozen items plugged into outlets in the last small darkroom. You should have a ground fault interrupter on each power line.
I’ve never had controlled water temperature. However, The temperature of the darkroom was usually near the right temperature, and lots of water stored in plastic jugs was immediately ready to use.

 

[mshchem]

HVAC, Plumbing, electrical and bribes for codes and zoning officials

 

[Sirius Glass]

One cannot have too many grounded electrical outlets in a darkroom.

 

[Don_ih]

Save money on your gfi outlets by wiring one gfi and feeding multiple regular outlets off that one. Unlike in a kitchen or some other living area, you likely won't be overloading any breaker by having a dozen things plugged in and turned on at once - it just might be handy to have many outlets spaced out over the room.

I bought a small instant hot water heater that I use often. Unfortunately, the one I have requires a 30amp 220 circuit. I doubt you can find one with lower requirements. It wasn't necessary - but it is convenient.

One thing you may eventually want is enough counter space for 4 16x20 trays. It's a pain to have less than that.

Matt mentioned a floor drain. I don't think you can actually have a floor drain in a garage. You would need to check building codes.

As this is not your house, you should probably make everything demountable.

 

[btaylor]

That’s great that the plumbing is so accessible. My darkroom is built in an old 1 car garage. I have a wet side and a dry side. I have both an air inlet fan and exhaust fan- keeps the air moving pretty well, especially important to me because I have a sensitivity to RA4 developer vapors.
Like you, I print color: because of this I had the enlarger circuit independent of the other circuit in the darkroom to minimize voltage variation. Maybe it was overkill, anyway it seemed like a good idea at the time. As mentioned above GFI’s are a good idea. As far as a temp control water panel, I have one (used, $100) and it’s nice to have, but I am not a commercial lab and water use has been so minimized over the years that it’s not such a great benefit IMHO. But it does support the inlet water filters which are nice to have.
Drywall is cheap and easy to install or remove. I think a lot better than plastic sheeting. My darkroom door is just a cheap interior door and frame from Home Depot- careful attention to the threshold and some additional foam tape keep it light tight with no additional curtains.
The cement floor was in good shape, but I etched and sealed it to keep dust down and be able to keep it spotless. A rubber mat is easy to clean and helps the feet.

 

[AgX]

Ventilation:

A german guideline for commercial labs was an exchange of 8x room air-volume per hour.

 

[henryyjjames]

AH! Another first-time Darkroom builder! I have recently taken to building my own first darkroom in my basement as well and I am always excited to hear that I'm not the only one taking on this type of project.

I have been blogging my progress (more or less) here henrysdarkroom.net if you want to give it a look. I started with a space of about 13' x 23'. Below is my initial floor plan and I have pretty much stuck to that the entire time. (the hashed-out part in the middle right is a vent in the ceiling). The only thing I changed was the access, instead of being a set of curtains on the bottom left I decided to just use the door that's already there at the top right. I suggest you figure out your workflow and plan the spaces you need for equipment and whatnot.
If you have any questions about what I did let me know I'd be happy to go into detail about my thoughts and process.

 

[el_37]

There are many books on the subject that were written years ago- Kodak had a really good one and Ansel touches on it in his books as well. Fred Picker in his Zone VI books also talks on design and there was also some great stuff written in books by David Vestal (Craft of Photography) and some excellent information in of all places the 1970's version of the Leica Manual (one with the M5 on the cover) which also has heavy contributions by Vestal.

I agree that you should design for at least 16x20 trays and honestly I would go even bigger. Whatever size you think is appropriate- I would double. If you have 22x22 I would use as much of that space as possible.

You can never have enough outlets, storage or counterspace in a darkroom. Take things slow with the design process and realize that the cost of building materials are at an all time high.

Comfort needs to be a high priority- I would factor in immediately the costs of a mini split HVAC system with both AC and Heat Pump abilities as a must purchase. Garages can get unbearably humid and hot/cold- especially in the NYC metro area. Reliable humidity control is also a factor with anything stored in a garage space- all your supplies and gear is a sizeable investment and you do not want humidity and/or temp swings to damage your stuff. You will be spending lots of time in this room when working- so make it has comfortable as your budget allows.

I would ideally design the space to be convertible to a finished garage if or when the house needs to be sold or you possibly tire of or lose interest in darkroom work. Lots of value is added when you have a sheetrocked garage with plenty of electricity, water supply with drainage and adequate lighting. Don't think just in the short term- since you are running electric run it everywhere and set it up for ease of further expansion.

 

[AgX]

There are many books on the subject that were written years ago- Kodak had a really good one ...

Agfa and Meteor even published sample floor plans. But the times of such books are long gone.

 

[ic-racer]

 

[Paul Howell]

Here in states I check with Thrift Books, found a few titles that seem to about building a darkroom, last on the page is a title The Home Darkroom. None are very expensive.

Browse | New & Used Books from ThriftBooks

 

[M Carter]

A darkroom sink for the most part is more of a table with high sides and drainage, for less mess when using trays - spills and cleanup are easier. It can make sense to have a long darkroom sink, and a small, everyday kitchen/bathroom sink for washing hands and so on.

Since a darkroom sink generally isn't holding water for hours like a bathtub, you can make one from plywood and lumber, use poly glue and screws to assemble, and use porch paint to finish it. I have a huge enlarging tray I made this way and it's never swelled or leaked. Get a standard tub drain and make sure everything's well sealed.

PEX tubing is great for plumbing things like darkrooms, it's very easy to work with and very inexpensive. The crimping tools come with a little test template thing to ensure you've fastened it together properly.

I'd say one of the nicest things with a long darkroom sink is get one of those hose-and-shower-head type things you'll find in bathtubs; it makes cleaning big trays and cleaning out a long sink a breeze.

 

[wiltw]

Get a plumbing knowledgeable person to evaluate how you would arrange the drain system for your sink. If you put in a false floor elevated up a number of inches above the actual concrete garage floor, you could have a floor drain in the darkroom wet area as well, draining into the same downpipe that services the sink (of course, with separate traps for each).

One can use plywood coated with marine epoxy resin which is used to fabricate wood laminate hulls for sailboats, to made a sink and even to allow your floor to resist water and chemicals in a water-tight area so you can hose out the place once in a while to clean up any chemicals that drip/spill onto the floor. Marine epoxy resin is very touch stuff...it is even hard to power sand to get it off the undlying wood'

As you area living in NY, I can see how external venting of air evacuated from the darkroom area can pose a bit of challenge, in terms of prevention of loss of too much heat to the exterior during winter...an HVAC person can address how to ventilate interior space to the outside without loss of too much heat.

If you can mount your enlarger column so that you can remove a drop table and do larger print sizes, that is better than mounting it on a fixed table top. It can print up to 12x16" usual prints without bending over to evaluate focus, and require you to get lower only for larger prints, without requiring extra long enlarger column and higher ceiling.

Plan for an easily accessible switch to turn off ambient light easily while you are close to the processor output and close to the enlarger position...you want to shut off white lights while standing by the enlarger to make prints, and to turn on white lights for print evaluation coming out of your processor...having to walk even 5' every time to turn on/off the white lights can be a real bother.

Fujimoto Photo Industrial Paper Processor CP31 Roller Transport...can you get chemistry readily for this industrial device? And what about calibration test strips, etc. needed for process control consistency? Being an amateur with an industrial processor just might be problematic to get chemistry, etc.
I used a Jobo CPA-2 to do primarily Cibachrome/Ilfochrome paper processing, back when home kits were readily available (before the process was abandoned). For a few years I participated in a holiday exchange of prints, and I could crank out dozens of prints that were absolutely consistent and indistinguishable even across sessions that stretched several days. An amateur oriented device might be better suited for your circumstance than an industrial machine, unless you plan on lots of printing on a very regular basis.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I cannot make changes to put in a proper darkroom sink and that makes somethings less convenient. If I could change that I would love to have a proper darkrooms sink with the length, width and depth to have the advantages.

 

[MattKing]

A deep laundry tub sink is also very handy, if you have the space. Particularly for washing trays.

 

[koraks]

fluorescent light fixtures [...] for viewing.

That's the one thing I would fix. The quality of fluorescent I would describe in professional terms as "it sucks balls", even for B&W. For color, it's just so ludicrously bad that you might as well not even turn them on in the first place. Seriously.

Give the place a good sweep, lightseal a corner, move in the enlarger and processor, a couple tables and call it a day?

That would be a good start. Just give it a go, live with the place for a month or maybe two, and then overhaul it based on your requirements instead of those of others. There's a million things that you could think of, purchase, incorporate etc, but much of it is personal preference. Yes, it's nice to have it all, but it really depends on so many factors, and personal preference is a big one. For instance, most of the things mentioned in this thread are for me personally not really a priority or even desirable (e.g. the long & deep 'darkroom' sinks; very inconvenient for what I do; I'd much rather keep my little kitchen sink and counter top). Which is not to say that all the others are wrong and I am right, but that it's very hard for anyone to fill in what your requirements are.

I myself have now worked in 2.5 darkrooms (started out in the kitchen, moved to the first generation darkroom, moved to new home & new darkroom) and the experience from each phase I carried to the next darkroom 'design', which is in part also playing smart with the infrastructure and the layout of the house/building to begin with.

So perhaps if there's one thing (apart from those ghastly fluorescents; get rid of those already! did I mention they suck balls not in the least because turning them on and off intermittently as you're likely to do in a printing session is actually energy-inefficient?), I would say: keep it as flexible as you can at the start. More likely than not you'll want to redo the space at some point and then it doesn't help if you've got to get rid of concrete fixtures that you thought would be appropriate or you have to hire a bricklayer to patch up some sizeable holes in the wall that in the end didn't turn out to be as necessary or convenient as you thought (it may sound like a brilliant plan to install a RT processor in a wall so it feeds on the darkroom side and the prints exit in the room next door, but it's kind of a permanent solution - yes, these things do actually happen!!)

 

[laser]

There is a Kodak Workshop Series book that shows several darkrooms and has construction information. You can find it on eBay, Amazon etc.

 

[VinceInMT]

Two things come to mind:

Check with local zoning. Where I used to live in Southern California it was illegal to convert a garage into anything other than a place to park a car. In fact, when I moved and sold the place I had to have a city inspector come out and look at it. They made me tear out a workbench because it intruded on what they considered a parking space.

The other thing is the drainage. While I was able to jackhammer the basement floor in my current darkroom and tie into a drain line that runs from the kitchen, that might not available to others. The other option I considered was just placing a large plastic container under the sink and using a standard sump pump to move the drainage up and over to where it would tie into a drain line in another part of the house. This is a pretty standard way to move liquid out of a basement room when the main drain is higher than the floor. In fact, the house I own across the street that I use as a rental has this very setup in the basement laundry room And it works just fine.

In general, you start with a floor plan, do any demolition, do the plumbing, then the framing, then the electrical. After that it’s all finish work.

 

[MattKing]

I agree with koraks about fluorescents.
There is a need for good lighting in every darkroom - for cleaning, maintenance, chemical mixing, all sorts of reasons. For general illumination - not print viewing - fluorescent fixtures with LED tube replacements can be good.
But purpose designed LED fixtures are probably even better.
Then spend a little extra for a single light designed specifically for print viewing - one with a high CRI and adjustable intensity. Ralph Lambrecht's Way Beyond Monochrome has a suggestion in it for intensity.