January 2003

Well, now that we've shaken the egg nog hangovers, the New Year finds us in the studio.

As you may recall, the studio looked like this when we started:

  

Well, actually, truth be told it looked worse, because the above photos show it while it was actually in use as a studio by the prior owners. We just made it worse by filling it with junk that needed to be stored while we were doing the preliminary work on the rest of the house to get it liveable, so the poor room was in even sorrier shape, if you can imagine.

The first thing we did in this room this month was put down a good vapor barrier, some insulation, and lay a subfloor:

     

Not only will it provide a much more appropriate base for our hardwood floors, our toes don't freeze solid the minute we step foot on the floor. As Martha would say, "It's a good thing..." Speaking of Martha, air kisses, sympathetic clucks of the tongue and pats on the back to you, honey-- we'll send homebaked madelines dipped in french chocolate on visiting days.

We decided the glass block had to go-- not that we've got anything against glass block, mind you, we're just biased against it when it is so obviously (and badly) used to just brick up a garage door! We stacked the block in the garage for the moment, and who knows, you may see it crop up on the site reincarnated in some future project. Roll your mouse arrow over the photo below for a before and after view, or click on the photo for a larger view:

We also replaced the set of windows that were originally installed in the room, and added french doors to the west side exterior of the house overlooking the pasture. Roll your mouse arrow over the photo below for a before and after view, or click on the photo for a larger view:

These doors will ultimately open to the porch we plan to add on that side of the house, maybe in Fall 2003 if the weather holds long enough after we've finished the exterior of the house.

Our window and glass block removal projects revealed one important, and rather incovenient, fact about this room-- it had no insulation. So we spent one weekend this month tearing out the rest of the drywall, adding insulation and redrywalling. We're in the process of finishing the seams right now, and hopefully we'll be able to prime and paint this weekend.

But I guess this weekend's technically February, so stay tuned for next month's installment!

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