New House & New Projects

(Nate & I and the cats making the journey from SD to WI)

I'm attempting to catch up a little bit with my blogging.  I was off the radar for a while with the move.  We've been packing and unpacking while balancing a ton of personal projects (exhibitions, music gigs, record releases, studio upgrades).  Nate has started teaching classes at UWO as their new Director of Recording Technology and I've been teaching online and continuing my studio practice while slowly renovating our new place.  Speaking of that, here's our new (to us) house:

We have a ton of plans to make the exterior a little bit more inviting. :)  We'll be adding shutters, painting the olive green a different color, and adding a little landscaping to liven things up.  It is a 60's house with a great layout.

We've done a lot of work to the interior so far (and have a lot to do still too). After we got our kitchen/living room/bedroom unpacked, I started on my new studio space.  It is about the same size as my last studio, so I have to be pretty inventive with how I arrange and organize the space to maximize functionality.

I moved around some existing wall shelves, and built some shelving in the small closet.  I made the closet shelving specifically to hold the bins that I store my supplies in and the most common size canvasses that I use.  I also built and put up a pegboard to store all of those things that I use a lot, but don't want out in my workspace.

Building the braces for the shelves.

The 'finished' product (albeit still not entirely organized).  I think I spent around $30 on all of the materials along with some supplies I already had.  I'm loving having these custom shelves.

So as of now the studio is functional.  It still needs a lot of work - namely painting and organizing - but at least for now I can still continue to paint while I slowly get to those jobs.

I've also done a lot of painting on the first floor, and replaced the window treatments with curtains.
Kitchen Before:

The blinds in the kitchen were old, dirty, and blocked the view into the backyard.  The house has a lot of windows, and we really want a bright kitchen, so I chose to go with simple white curtains.  I also painted the ceilings with flat white paint, and the walls a really light neutral grey.  The kitchen feels a lot more modern and airy now. We've still got to paint the cupboards and replace the light fixtures.

I'm also toying with the idea of painting all of the trim white, but I'm not sure yet.  

We've also painted the living room and replaced some of the curtains.  We've still got the replace the godawful faded olive/teal floral carpeting though - I cannot wait to get that out of here.  We haven't decided if we are going to put in different carpet, or extend the pergo floors from the kitchen/hallway into the living room so the first floor has cohesive flooring.  

We were glad to get rid of the 'baby puke' yellow walls, and put in a nice neutral grey.  I like to change up the artwork and the blankets/throw pillows a lot in the house, so the grey walls let me change the feel of the room without having to repaint every time I redecorate.  

Cozy. 

One of the most satifying projects thus far has been ripping out the carpet on the second floor hallway. I can't believe the prior owners covered these beautiful hardwoods! I think the carpets turned off a lot of potential buyers though, so I'm counting this as a total win. 

We've also painted the office - we had to get rid of the 'cloud walls' as soon as we could!

We've still got a lot of work cut out for us though - painting, curtains, some floors, etc.  I made a 'little' list of all of the projects left to complete.  I'm looking forward to having things a little bit further along so it really starts to feel like our space.