Details, Details, Details!

The last you saw our barn/my new studio the plaster board was just going up, well what do you think of the plaster painted? I had the whole barn, annex, ceilings and between the rafters painted in Benjamin Moore paint called Pismo dunes, number AC-32, it’s gray with a taupe undertone but stays mainly gray. Since I’ll be draping and hanging textiles everywhere I didn’t want a blue, green or purple undertone interfering and I needed a neutral background for those textiles.

Unfortunately at the time I took this picture the only light came from the windows and my contractors blaring workman’s light since the light fixtures weren't up yet. I had the trim painted in Benjamin Moore paint called water chestnut number 522-3. Because the trim paint wasn’t as warm as I wanted it to be we had the paint primed double or 200% to achieve the warmth.

This shot was taken from the annex looking out across the staircase and out the French doors into the back yard of the barn which is really the side of our house, does that make sense? The whole space, barn and annex, work as one space and is sort of L shaped but you have to go up two small steps to get into the annex and it’s actually a whole separate BIG room.

During this whole project everyone from our contractor on down liked to torture me in some small way and our electrician was no different. I wanted him to hang the chandeliers in the barn first because they were in huge crates and I hadn’t seen them yet and the suspense was killing me, so he hung the annex chandelier first and then went to lunch…. Grrr! This chandelier came from Wisteria and is called their regal French chandelier. It works for my needs but I’ll be honest here its not as hardy as I was hoping and not what I was expecting but since we were closing in on our budget it was good enough.

Now these bad boys were what I was expecting!!!! The chandeliers came from Restoration Hardware and were fashioned after 19^th century Italian street gas lamps. I was a tad worried before they went up because at four feet tall they were massive at human level but once hung they sort of got dwarf by the sheer size of our barn. Since the barn has those cross beams at equal intervals I kept calling each area bay one, bay two, you get the idea and the two chandeliers were hung in bays two and three. The second is directly at the top of the staircase. Each bay, and there are four bays, is slightly bigger then an average room if that helps in gauging the size of the barn.

I couldn’t get to the hardware store fast enough to buy light bulbs for the chandeliers but when I got back our electrician was gone for the day…yikes! I hate heights and to take pictures from a ladder I was having some heart palpitations. But I sucked it up and climbed a ladder and just look at my chandeliers! They don’t really put out a ton of light they’re mainly for ambiance but that’s ok since it’s not like I was relying upon them to sew by.

With everything done except the baseboards it was time to lay the flooring. Our home has the original flooring of heartpine wide planks. Heartpine is the actual heartwood of the tree. Since pine used to be quite large when it was logged some hundred or more years ago, the pine trees were able to grow large enough to develop heartwood. Not any more as pine trees do not grow as big because they are harvested at an earlier age. The "heart" is dark colored. It is decay, insect and rot resistant and more stable than the white/yellow sapwood. We wanted to match the flooring from our home in the barn since they’re connected.

So we went to Carlisle Wide Plank Flooring since they have a great reputation and they’re close by here in New Hampshire. We had the floor stained deep walnut and I for one am in love with our floor. The railings hadn't arrived yet as they were being custom made.

It was at this stage it was time to have our home re-assessed because we added on more livable square footage and we wanted to make sure we didn’t price ourselves out of the neighborhood and for insurance. Just because you may have spent a fortune remodeling, renovating or adding on doesn’t mean you’ll get that money back out when it’s time to sell. I know this might crush a few people but the decorating in your home doesn’t mean much to the worth of your home it might only help sell it easier some day.

I couldn’t help myself even though there were odds and ends waiting to be finished I had to move something into my new studio. I didn’t care there was a wire hanging down, see right above the chair, the outlets needed their covers, I just needed something in there! But in the end I had to move these items back out because the walls were dusty and the floor needed cleaning, you get the idea but it was a cleaning job I actually enjoyed.

So after all the painting was done, everything was scrubbed and walls dusted down it was time to move in and it was only fitting that the first item to go in was my desk, ok so it’s really a table but hey I need room to spread.

Up next are still more details but what do you think of my new studio?