Studio in Progress

The studio is coming along nicely and we recently ordered the hardwood for the floors.  We had to change the plan since they didn't have purple-heart available.  I will be having Brazilian Koa (also known as Tiger wood) for my studio and the upstairs hallway outside of my studio.  When we picked out the ceiling fan for my studio and found out that our flooring plan might change I decided to change my color scheme a bit so that it would work better with those choices.  The new ceiling fan is a beautiful cobalt blue so I went with the focal wall in the Honorable Blue that we had used for the tray in our Master suite,  I loved the color so thought it would be a nice contrast.  That wall will have my Ikea bookshelves in white (they are open back) and the TV/stereo.  The other 3 walls have Wood Violet around the bottom and Tassel on the top.  I need to pick some trim to go at chair rail height.

 From this view you can see my 3 windows which face south.  When the sun is out their is a lot of nice sunshine.  I have four overhead lights and a ceiling fan with lights so even without task lighting I should be good.  We switched out the regular bulbs the builder had put in with daylight fluorescent bulbs.  Eight bulbs later the difference is huge.  We still need to see about better bulbs for the ceiling fan.

This view lets you see the sink,  at this point it is just a stand for the little stereo so we have something to listen to while working in there.

Here you can see the first step in my first decorative painting project.  Since this is my studio and a creative space I wanted something to make it feel happy and something I would enjoy and make it more mine.  After going through quite a few different ideas I decided that I wanted to paint vines around the top on the 3 sides that were gold near the top.  The first step was to free hand the vines with a watercolor pencil (if I made any mistakes I could erase them with a sponge).  I will probably be adding flowers to the vine later but I didn't draw them in.

This is the second go around this time with paint.  I was going to do the shading the first time and realized that the paint wasn't going to cover enough so I switched to just the main color and plan on a second go around with more colors to add the shading.  This will take some time do but should be worth it in the end.

Since we have been so busy with the house and decorating and I am behind with my posts so if you wish to see more photos of what we are up to or what I am doing on my 2010 BJP you can go to my Web Gallery.   If you want to read about my BJP project  you can visit my bjp blog.

Hardwood Floors

We have continued to be busy with projects for the house.  The most recent BIG project that we tackled was putting in our first hardwood floor.  We started with the Master suite for the same reason we painted their first because we wanted to have the room usable as much as possible.  We will also be putting in hardwood floors in the upstairs hallway, my studio, the great room, the kitchen/breakfast room and the dining room.  That's a lot of wood and a lot of work but once we are all done it will be really nice.

We learned a lot this time around and hopefully it will go slightly more quickly and smoothly.  There is a lot of prep work needed to get the floor ready.  The photo above shows the floor with the underlayment laid down.

This photo shows the room with some of the wood laid on the floor.  We chose Brazilian Cherry for our master bedroom and had lots of very heavy boxes of wood to use.  Laying a hard wood floor is sort of like putting a puzzle together.  You don't want all of the short pieces together,  all the light pieces in one area or any thing like that and you need to make sure that your joints from one row aren't too close to the next row or that your joints from the previous row are the same as your upcoming row.

The photo above show the next rows ready to be laid down.  My job was to lay down the up coming rows and to cut the end pieces.  Wayne put it all together and used the big pneumatic nail gun that we had rented.  Between Saturday and Sunday we got most of the flooring down and everything that required the big nail gun.  The last few rows of the bedroom and the closets got done later.  It is funny that the last few rows took longer than the whole rest of the floor.

Besides the beginning and ending rows the closets had some challenges as well.  I guess the good news is that we learned a lot with this floor.  This last weekend Wayne put in the shoe moulding so that we have the floor finished except for adding some quarter round in the closets, possibly getting new air vent covers  and putting in some threshold pieces which Wayne needs the rest of his tools for.

We have the bed and some of the furniture back in the bedroom and I have ordered curtain rods.  There will still be project to do in here the biggest being turning the walk in closets to much more efficient spaces.  I also need to sew the roman shades for the room and we will have some furniture decisions to make once we get the rest of our stuff out of storage but we shouldn't have to take everything out again.

Since we have been so busy with the house and decorating and I am behind with my posts so if you wish to see more photos of what we are up to or what I am doing on my 2010 BJP you can go to my Web Gallery.   If you want to read about my BJP project  you can visit my bjp blog.

Master Suite Painted

I am way behind on posting to my blogs which seems to be more of the norm than I would like lately. It seems to be way more challenging to paint a new house, move into said house and do all of the  normal Christmas stuff  than just do the regular holiday stuff (go figure).  It doesn't help that we have been without internet since the line to our house was no good and they need to put in a new line before we can get internet to the house.  Hard to write blogs without a home internet service.  These photos are a bit behind where we currently are in decorating but since I know that some people don't go to the web gallery to see the newest photos, I thought I might include some here.  All of these photos are of the master suite.  There are 2 colors of purple, 2 of blue, 2 of gold and the whites that we left.  I really love how it has turned out and the colors make me feel very happy.  I lucked out and had curtains that would work from our house in Rhode Island that work perfectly for our bathroom, one less space that I will need new curtains for.

The 2 pictures below show the master bedroom.  The first one is before we painted the crown moulding the darker gold.  Makes a huge difference.  The colors in the second photo are more accurate.  I like the first one cause it has my "painting stud" in it, doesn't he look proud?  We are trying to get some photos here and there that include us in them.  Not our forte I am afraid.

The last photo is of me in front of my Concord grape wall.  It is a beautiful dark purple and I was acting silly.  My favorite pain outfit is slowly getting more paint on it especially the pants which I wipe my fingers on.   I will try to get more posts up about the house but it will depend on how much time I can get  to the internet.  I want to thank all of of our Family and Friends for all of the good wishes and Christmas notes.  Wayne and I would also like to wish all of you a wondrous New Year.