April 2017

We are closing in on the end of the One Room Challenge, only a few weeks left!  It’s been exciting to see the transformation happening within the studio.  But, boy, what a pile of work!  This week’s progress has been minimal in comparison to last week, which you can check out HERE.  An empty studio and white washed walls are hard to top!

But, still, I have some work to show for my efforts over the course of the last week. With the exception of having to finish doors, and paint the floor, I feel like the hard work is behind me.  Getting those walls done was a huge hurdle and now that’s behind me!  Thanks much in part to Catherine’s help!

This week I got to do a few fun little things while the trim paint dried.  Painting white paint over white primer on 3 doors and 4 windows is a thankless job, but it will be nice when it’s completely done.  It already has made a huge difference to how crisp the space looks.

And painting out the blue on the doors was GREAT!!  I need to talk about the blue here for a minute.  Now, I want to start by saying that I do like blue.  I have lots of blue in my life.  But this blue, oh this blue….is EVERYWHERE! All our shutters, all the exterior doors in the garage and house are this blue, including the two huge garage doors.  I’ve painted out our front door, I did that the summer we moved in so now it really pops with its bright green.  We will be painting the whole exterior of the house this summer and I will be changing the blue…ironcially to another blue, but this time a deeper, richer blue.  But the inside of the studio doors do not need to be blue, it always stood out so much in any pictures, so it was with great glee that I brushed on that coat of white paint!

My other fun progress was digging out the corner cabinet from the loft and dragging it down into the studio for its….makeover? Hahaha!!  I’ve had this $5 yard sale find for years tucked away and I believe that the previous owners started to strip it but quit part way into the project.  I’ll just say I love me some chippy paint!  So, when I got it down from my stash in the loft, I snapped a picture of it, even before I cleaned the dead flies and bird poop off it and put it out on Instagram and FB to see what other people would do with it.  The feedback was incredible!  People have strong opinions about chippy, weathered old pieces.  Some said to keep it as is, some said paint the outside, leave the inside, while others thought I should do the opposite.  Some said paint it all!  So what did I do? First I washed it. 😉 But the rest you’ll just have to wait to see it!!

Part of the plan came together by happenstance.  Every Spring and Fall, the Atlantic Stockyards has a Machinery Auction.  I started going after Michael told me about the wooden screen door that went for about $2 and not to him.  He obviously couldn’t be trusted to bring home the right stuff from the auction so I just had to take matters into my own hands.  So, I’ve taken in the auctions whenever I can. This year Dad and I loaded up the girls and headed for Truro.  Now, I will say there are rows upon rows of various farm equipment – from tractors to wagons, saw mills and ploughs.  But, of course, I’m not going for that stuff. I’m going for the random other stuff that people drag there – like wooden wagon wheels, industrial lights, platform scales, milk cans, tool boxes and yes, the furniture.  Random, I know.  And that’s what makes it so fun!  You truly never know what might be on the auction block at one of these sales.  I loaded the back of Dad’s truck up with furniture and 2 random vacuums that were part of the lot. Coffee table, end table, a bench, 2 chairs and a low metal stand and 2 vacuum cleaners.  Yep, that’s how I roll. So, what does this have to do with the studio?  Other than the fact I barely had room to store this stuff?  Well, one of the pieces is going into the new plan.  But what piece in the picture above? Well, you’ll just have to wait!!

I like to add in here just how put out Buttercat is that there isn’t a spot left for him to sleep when he sneaks into the studio while I’m working.  Finally, after listening to him complain, I threw a blanket down for him by the heater and he proceeded to curl up and have a nap.

The other exciting thing I did this week was wash the plate covers. 🙂 I know, right?

So, that’s it for progress to show you this week.  Let’s check in on that To-do list shall we?

Sew the curtains for the prep table – done

White wash the walls – done

Paint the floor

Frame the chalkboard – wood bought and cut

Paint the sewing desk – done

Paint and hang the corner cabinet – done

Paint the doors – kinda done {sigh, they need a third coat to cover that blue…}

Paint the sewing chair – done

Paint the trim – done

Once I make it through the To-Do list, I get to do the fun stuff – decorating and re-organizing it all! And then do the big reveal on Week 6!!

To be continued,

Lori

PS To see more Week 4 updates from other bloggers in the ORC, click the logo below!

Well, I feel like I’ve made some huge progress on my One Room Challenge to share with you this week.  My body feels like it was huge progress anyway…

Guys, the studio is empty.

Empty.

Like a few tools I needed and a ladder kind of empty.  Here it is with just a few bigger pieces left in it…

And it’s huge.  I had no idea how much space I had.  Maybe I should rephrase that.  I had no idea how much stuff I had.  So. Much. Stuff.  I filled a garage bay with all that stuff, piles on top of piles.  But I don’t think you really want to see that….

Since last week’s update, which you can read HERE, I discovered that it wasn’t the task of redoing the studio that overwhelmed me, it was all the stuff I had collected and hung onto that overwhelmed me.  To the point that I didn’t enjoy going out to the studio anymore.  All the stuff was making it hard to move around and hard to find a surface to work on.  It had become a joy suck.  The spot that had been my happy place was sucking the joy and the creativity out of my life.  Here’s a quick flashback for you, in case you forgot just where we started:

The space will be well guarded when it comes to putting things back in.  I already have a plan to eliminate some of the furniture that had lived in there.  And I’m going to do some serious purging and sorting.  I’m hanging onto things for potential projects and makeovers.  But if I never get around to it, then it’s time to let it go.  I can’t do everything, I can’t make everything and I will no longer hang onto everything.

I’m really thinking about how I use the space and what jobs I do in there.  I was doing the dustiest jobs right beside a shelf that was filled with little knick-knacky things.  Duh!!  That was dumb!  It was always dusty!!  And I don’t want to go to the studio to do housework, I want to play, to create!  Needless to say, this space is going to function much better when all is said and done!

One of the main reasons I wanted to whitewash the walls was because it was a busy backdrop to photograph against.  But it really didn’t matter since there wasn’t a wall to photograph against anyway! So in the new plan, there will be empty wall space and I’ll try my very hardest not to fill it.  I struggle with gaps…truly I do!  Until I want to photograph something and there’s stuff everywhere!

It was a huge job just to empty the studio out but I finished it and started the white washing before my friend, Catherine, showed up to lend a hand.  One of the things I love about Catherine is she is my sounding board.  When I’m debating something, whether it’s in real life, in fashion or style or in decorating, I use her to bounce ideas off.  So, when the whitewash wasn’t quite looking how I had hoped it would, I stopped and waited for her arrival so I could get her take on it.

She agreed that it wasn’t quite right but maybe we should let it dry before making the final call.  But during this whole debate, the decision was made to paint the trim work throughout the studio a solid white and no longer just white wash it like I was originally going to do.  So, while we waited for the trial white washed section to dry, we put a coat of primer on all the window and door trim.  And by the time we finished that, we knew the white wash really would be alright and we carried on with the rest of the walls in the ratio I had mixed up.  { If we decided to go with a more solid white wash, it would’ve meant waiting to do the work unto I could get back to Phillips and Chestnut another day for more Farmhouse White Miss Mustard Milkpaint because, of course, I mixed all I had….and I even know better!! }

Three walls later, Catherine left with some of her kids and I continued on painting the last, and hardest wall…the diagonal wall.  Ugh.  To prevent dry lines and weird overlap marks, a complete board needed to be done at once, which was pretty easy on the horizontal boards but meant a whole lot of climbing and squatting on the diagonals!  But I finished it off, with a 1/4″ of paint left in the bottom of the big Tupperware container I was using to mix and hold all the paint.

So, once again, my To-Do list grew!  Let’s review:

Sew Curtains for the prep table – done

White wash the walls – done

Paint the floor

Frame the chalkboard

Paint the sewing desk – kinda done

Paint and hang the corner cabinet

Paint the doors

Paint the sewing chair – kinda done

Paint the trim – kinda done

But look at that progress!!  Looks a million times better – so bright and fresh….maybe that’s just because I washed the windows, though….

So much to do, so little time left!!

To be continued,

Lori

PS – To see other guest participates of the One Room Challenge – click the logo below