Before & After: My studio.

If you would have asked me a month ago which room I thought we were going to finish first in this house, I wouldn't have responded with my studio. In fact, we had barely talked about what we wanted to do with it. It's really a strange room, if you can call it that. We're not actually sure if it was meant to be a room, or a large closet. Someone mentioned to me that there used to be baby rooms built off of master bedrooms, so maybe that's what it originally was. Either way, I fell in love with it right away despite the fact that it was covered, floor to ceiling in ugly, stained carpet squares. Seriously. 

We ripped out the carpet on the floor the first weekend we lived in the house and didn't do much after that. I set up my desk in there a couple of weeks before Christmas to work on some gifts and soon after decided that it would be nice to paint the floors white to brighten up the space a bit. So we did that. And the room was cleared out and one thing led to another and the next thing I know our good friends, the Tomlinsons, are helping me rip down all the carpet squares and sagging plaster wall. 

Luckily Ryan has had some experience with drywall (we had none) and was super motivated to help us get it hung while they were staying with us. Then they left and the mudding was up to us. I have to say, I'm no Bob Vila, but I'm feeling pretty good about my drywall mudding skills after this project. And Andrew even got to use the rasp that he had just gotten for Christmas. 

After the drywall was complete we cleaned the layers of dust and painted. We had finished painting the floor prior to demolishing the wall so it got fairly beat up in the process. I decided to leave it as is because I liked the distressed look and I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep it perfectly white for forever. I had an idea to use lathe to create a pin board of sorts for the wall that my desk would be against. It took me two days and a few splinters to finish it but it was so worth it. I LOVE it. It makes the room.

It's probably pretty obvious, but the room is 100 times better than it was when we started. Just painting it white made it so much brighter and more welcoming. I'm really excited to have a studio again, especially one that's designed exactly the way I want it. The only thing it's lacking is a sky light, hopefully that will come some day when the weather is warm again. 

More pictures from the remodel are on my Flickr page here.