The Big Think

Day 453.

Filled nail holes. Finished crown moulding. 35th run to Lowes (no joke). Removed doors for painting. Wiring and ceiling fan tomorrow.

Hang with me a little while longer. I’m almost finished and you won’t have to read many more of these. If you hate ‘em, skip ‘em. I’m doing this so that I’ll be able to look back and see an account of what I did to accomplish the remodeling. Next time I have a desire to tear up a room Erin can point me to this topic and I can feel that good old remodeling love again. Hopefully when I’m rereading these posts in the future Erin will hit me in the head with a 2×4 to knock some sense into me.

Anyway, I spent a very fruitless 2 hours yesterday trying to get THREE pieces of crown moulding to fit. They were along the ceiling of the booth. Normally, I cheat and add corner blocks and then just cut the crown flat to fit between them. It’s easy and neat and as close to a sure thing as crown moulding can be. But these three pieces were on three walls that had 18 and 9 degree angles between them (the door isn’t on a 90 or 45 degree angle. It’s weird and the eventual pictures will make it make sense). Oh, and halfway along one wall the ceiling starts a 7 degree downslope. I tried to trial and error these pieces into place with laughable results. I then checked the net for a formula and ran into a suggestion that I use trigonometry.

Trigonometry.

For crown moulding.

Well forget that (feel free to substitute alternate language here).

Last night Erin came home to a very frustrated and grumpy Jason. Today, bless her, she got all proactive and solved my problem for me. While driving home she saw a guy with “remodeling and repair” on the side of his car, whipped out her cellphone, and gave me the number. Within 30 minutes the guy was here. I told him that all I wanted was a quote for him to install those three pieces of crown. I would do all the filling and caulking, etc. He took a look at it and told met that it was possible. Not, thankfully, that it was easy. Such an admission might have seen me defenestrating myself. He said he could get right to it (which surprised me a lot. I figured he’d have to come back later). Luckily he was on his way home from a job and had all his tools in the car.

Two and a half hours is what it took him to install three pieces of crown, which made me feel much less like a nine-thumbed failure. I stayed in the room to do some other things (track light, ceiling speaker, wire testing) and watched him work. I was happy to see that, even for a pro, this install was tough. He was very complimentary of the rest of my work, which made me feel better, but then again I was paying the bill.

So for $60 I got 2 1/2 hours of a pro installer’s time (I guess he felt sorry for me- this is cheap!). Now when the studio is done and I look at that wall I’ll have a sense of ahhh instead of ick. Worth. Every. Penny. The install looks GREAT. After I putty the nail holes and do the touchup paint it’ll be the best looking stuff in the house. I wasn’t going to mention hiring a pro since it kind of violates my feeling that I wanted this build to be 100% me, but sometimes wisdom is knowing that you need help. Just do me a favor, if you ever come over to marvel at my studio, which I will have put over three hundred hours into when it’s finished, I humbly ask that the first words out of your mouth not be “so, is this the part you couldn’t do?”. You don’t want to see me cry. Let’s just keep this between us and not speak of it again, okay?

The lights are all installed and tested (they look great!) and the ceiling speaker is in. Three more easy pieces of crown to do, then the ceiling fan, then some tricky work on the booth door. Then I get to install the switches, paint the doors, tint the window, find/sew curtains, and do a few other final punch list things (mainly paint and caulk related). Then, then, I get to install the wood floor and trim and build the sound absorbers. After that I’ll start the furniture design and construction, but this will take place over the next few months. I’ll move the equipment back in the meantime so I can write some music again.

I can’t see the end of the tunnel, but I’m nearing the final bend. And no, Katherine, I didn’t get eaten by a woodworking tool. But then again I’m not done yet.

The trim and crown moulding is all painted. I started applying the door trim today. I installed one side then used expanding foam to fill the gap between the doorframe and the rough opening. Once the foam dried (MAN, they don’t call that stuff “EXPAAAANNNNNDDIIIINNNNNGGG” for nothing!) I installed the other side of the trim. I had some work to do on the inside of the booth since the framed walls are 2×6 and the door is for a 2×4 wall. I had to build out a little bracing system on the inside to make up the difference, and getting it trimmed out nicely is proving to be difficult.

Great news on the booth. Now that the door is hung and foamed with trim on the outside, I can go in the booth and shut the door and see…. nothing. It’s totally black except for some very very tiny points of light around the seal. These will be taken care of by the secondary door seal I’m going to make later. The door offers some resistance when you close it because of the cushion of air on the inside of the booth. It’s that tight! I’m really happy about the fit. The room is almost airtight (note to self: open door occasionally so the talent doesn’t suffocate). The attenuation is dramatic. When you’re in the booth you can still barely hear sounds from the studio (I turned on the radio to test it), but all of the high frequencies down to about 400khz are completely gone. Only the deepest sounds get through (longest wavelength), and these are severely attenuated. Yay!I don’t even have the flooring or the wall treatments in there yet. It’s gonna be great.

I’m really losing steam, though. I’ve found that as I get closer to the end my ability to work for 10 hours on the project has diminished. I have a million little tiny things to do that require waiting. Fill the nail holes, wait for the putty to dry, caulk, wait for the caulk to dry, paint over the caulked and puttied holes. Wait for the paint to dry. Foam gaps, wait for the foam to dry. Final trim is what gives a place that little zing and hides all the rough construction edges with a neat line, but it takes forever.

Time to go upstairs and hang the crown moulding.

Color My World.

If I had known at the outset that the final color scheme of my studio would look like this I would have been very afraid. But I’m happy to say that after a week of trial and error with different colors, I have finally decided on a color scheme that’s very unusual and very cool. It also blends in nicely with the rest of the house. It was only because I wasn’t 100% happy with the original paint scheme that I went down this road and I’m thrilled that I took the plunge.

In a nutshell, I didn’t like the original two color idea. There’s a third color on the ceiling but it’s so subtle that it might as well be just called “off white”. I decided to go ahead and add a third wall color to the mix. Once I got that up I realized that two of the colors fought with each other a bit. What looks fine on a small paint chip in the store can look different on a 16×9′ wall under sunlight. So I went on a wild tear and, much to Erin’s surprise, decided to fix the problem by adding a fourth color. The final result is that, counting the ceiling, there will be five distinct colors in the room.

It’s spectacular!

Each wall is a different color (really!) but they all work together so well that there is a great sense of harmony in the space. It’s perfect! Well, it’s almost perfect. I decided that one of the colors (ironically, the original one I picked for the room) is just barely too bold so I’m going back to get one that’s slightly more “dusty” looking. What’s the color scheme? Think southwest meets earth tone. I know that many of you are probably reading this while shaking your head and thinking that it just has to look awful, but trust me. It’s great. It looks fantastic with the small area rug that I’ve chosen, it will set off the black studio furniture (and eventual leather couch) very nicely, and will be an energizing and professional environment to work in. I just can not wait to get in there.

I told myself that I wouldn’t settle on the paint until it was just right but I got very frustrated (and a little scared) when I kept having to go back to Lowes to get more paint. At $28/gallon it can add up very quickly (as usual, I got the nice thick stuff that’ll last). Plus, it takes forever to cut in around the corners and get the edges perfect. But it was so worth it.

I’m really happy with how it looks and can’t wait to get the wood floor, curtains, and other stuff in. The final color scheme is kind of, sort of, almost close to this (which, by the way, would look fantastic on the wall):

Tomorrow I have to go get the oil based paint for the crown moulding and doors/door trim. Then the last thing I need to get is some sort of low profile light for the booth. Hopefully I’ll be able to start installing the floor (the final step in this whole rebuild) next weekend. We’ll see about that.

I got a little discouraged earlier today because the studio remodel is taking so much more time than I had originally anticipated. I thought the whole build would be a three week project but I’m now starting week seven and anticipate two more weeks until I’m moved back in. This project has stretched my knowledge and abilities past anything I’ve ever done before and I’ve learned a lot, but I’ve also had to pause at least once a day to ask how do I do that? Off to Google or Lowes or Home Depot for the answer! I was venting a bit at Erin today that it seems like every single day working on this project is a set of compromises, or a creative decision point, or another trip to the hardware store. I’m not just building a wall, or sheet rocking over studs, or painting, or wiring, but at each point I am having to make a creative decision about how I want something to look when it’s done. Because the final look of the room is so dependent on decisions I make now, and because I’m so unwilling for it to be just “good enough”, I frequently pause and think through the repercussions of each decision. I know that the final result will be worth it, but I have hit a point where the constant grind of it has worn me down. Can’t stop, though, because I have to get through it and finish before I can go back to work.

Color, Part Two.
I decided that I didn’t really like the main color after all (too “boudoirish”, if that’s a word), so I went back to Lowes and picked out a sample of two other colors to try again.

Today I also hung the doors and I’m VERY happy to announce that I got them flush and plumb. They also seal with a very satisfying “psssshh”. Okay, not really, but there’s no light at the door seals and for that I’m very happy.

Gonna go test the paint samples now.