Room Re-do

This past Saturday I talked my husband into starting an unplanned project, tearing up the carpet in our office and turning it into my studio!   Much of our house is covered in carpet in some form or another, even the kitchen and one of the bathrooms!  This was how the house was when we bought it 3 years ago.  The carpet is OK, but not my favorite.   Under most of the carpeting is hard wood floors, except for the kitchen and bathroom.   It's a bit of a risk to pull up the carpeting when your not sure what shape the floor is in underneath.

Over the last 3 years we've done a lot of dog sitting for my mother-n-law. Her previous dog which has since past away and now her current dog have chosen our office as their favorite spot to pee, poop and puke.  I can't even tell you how many times we've had to clean this up off of our carpet.  There was even one particular incident this past fall where her dog had a GI bleed and blood was coming from both ends.  Not an easy one to clean up.  This happened the week after we had just had all of our carpets shampooed!  Needless to say, I've been campaigning hard to get the carpet in the office pulled up, and I finally won this weekend!  Yeah!!!


                                          Our office prior to the re-do. 

I've always done my artwork in the kitchen.  Even out in Idaho I worked at the island in our kitchen.  I find kitchens to be one of the most comfortable places in the house and they always have great lighting, especially our kitchen right now.  It gets total southern exposure all day long and then from the west.  I love all of that natural light.  The drawback of course is that it is the kitchen!  In between meals I'm always having to clean up and then restart projects, while the mess accumulates on the counters.  My husband has been so patient with this and has rarely uttered a complaint about it.


                                 My studio, I mean kitchen, notice the lovely teal carpet! 

Our house is rather large and I decided that it really is time to figure out a spot that I could make into my studio.  The options were the basement, the office or our attic.  The basement has some beautiful brick walls, but for me, I just couldn't see much inspiration coming from that space.  Our attic is really a neat space, all sorts of windows and angles to the ceiling, but so cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer, plus it just feels so far away from the rest of the house, like the kitchen, where I do spend a lot of time even if I'm not painting.  The last option was the office, which is a room that doesn't really get used much and is pretty much sort of wasted space, it's on the main level and near the kitchen.  The big drawback about this room of course was the said carpet and also its location which is on the northeast side of the house and so it doesn't have the greatest lighting.


This past week my husbands business partner gave me a free drafting table which will be perfect for my studio and am totally psyched about!  While rearranging furniture in the office to make room for the table,  I found 4 new pee stains from a recent dog sitting and decided enough is enough, this carpet is coming out!  So Saturday morning out it came!



Luckily the floor was in wonderful shape.  All around the perimeter was old carpet glue from previous carpet.  Initially we were going to just scrape that off and call it good, but my husband decided we should totally refinish the floor.  The last pic above shows the floor after it had been sanded.


                                        The kids playroom and our living room. 

Our house turned into total disarray after this decision.  I included a couple pics of how our house looked over the last 5 days.  Furniture overflowed into our living room and into the playroom.  The office is behind the French doors in the second pic.

 

Here's the office, or should I now say my studio!  I'm over the top excited with how the floor turned out.  It looks awesome.  I can't stop looking at it!  The floor is a beautiful red oak and looks wonderful.  I thought the floors looked pretty good prior to sanding, but WOW,  refinishing them really brought out the grain of the wood.  I figured since we refinished the floors, the walls could really use a fresh coat of paint.   I ended up going with a light lime green color on 2 of the walls.  Lime green and orange have been my favorite colors forever.  The color and fresh paint really brightens the room.

This evening we started moving the furniture in.  I haven't decided how I'm going to utilize the space yet, but I'll post some pics when it's finished.  The only light source in the room are  2 wall sconces, so we still have to figure that out yet too, but I'm so happy with the results!  It was so worth the mess that we've went through over the last few days.  I love, love, love it!  Sorry this post got a little long, I guess it's because I'm so excited about it all!