My Studio – From The Beginning

Here’s what this room looked like when we bought the house in August 2013. It was a garage, and the floor of the garage sat about 16 to 18 inches below the floor of the breakfast room. This picture is looking from the front garage doors towards the back of the house. The white door you see on the left is now the doorway to the breakfast room.

The trusses were all exposed, and the dark wood made it look like a real mess, and it made everything look dark and small.

There were two garage doors on the front, although they were so narrow that I could barely get my car into the garage without scraping the sides, and my truck that I used to have (a small Ford F-150) wouldn’t fit at all.

Early on, my father-in-law helped me put up some drywall in the garage. My intention at the beginning was to turn the garage into my workshop.

So with that goal in mind, when I pulled the original cabinets out of the kitchen when I remodeled the kitchen, I put those old kitchen cabinets in here, thinking that I could use them to create a long worktop with lots of storage. That idea never materialized because the garage became more of a storage room.

At the time, the back part of the garage housed the furnace, but that thing was so scary that we got rid of it before our second winter in this house.

So after that, it was just a storage room. You can see the door on the left side of the picture below. That’s the doorway that leads to the breakfast room now.

Here’s a view of the other side of the storage room at the back of the garage. This area is now the storage closet in the studio.

And for the record, here’s a look at how the garage looked from the outside when we bought the house…

In the summer of 2017, we decided to turn the garage into my studio. I hired a contractor to do most of the big work, like removing the garage doors and building a front wall with windows.

So in the summer of 2017, it went from looking like a garage to looking like an actual room in the house.

Another thing they did was take this mess of a ceiling…

And they redid it so that it had a much cleaner look, as well as a brand new beam to remove the sag in the ridge line of the room.

New French doors were put in the back wall of what used to be the back storage area, and a cased opening was put in where the single door used lead to the storage area. It looked much better, but we still had this low sloped ceiling that was only about seven feet high on the back wall, and hit just above the new French doors.

So overall, it looked like a room and not a garage anymore, and everything was looking much better. But this phase of the project was pretty expensive (about $40,000), so the project stalled a bit after this.

In the summer of 2018 is when we decided to build a carport onto the back of the studio. That solved so many problems. First, it gave us a place for a nice ramp. Second, it replaced the garage. And third, the addition would solve the problem of the low ceiling at the back of the studio. Here’s what it looked like before…

And here you can see how the addition of the carport allow for the raising of the ceiling at the back of the studio once the new roof was installed and the old roof could be removed.

So from the inside, it was no longer a sloped roof that was only seven feet high along the back wall. Instead, it now had this new roof line above it, allowing for a much taller ceiling inside.

We spent a lot of money on all of that (the initial cost of the studio construction plus the $22,000 for the carport), so we had to take a break and let our bank account recover. But we picked things back up in 2019 with having the room insulated with spray foam insulation…

And soon after, the electrical and drywall were done.

After that was done, I took over by painting the walls in the main part of the studio and the back entry, and then I installed the hardwood flooring.

Then I sanded the floors, whitewashed the floors, and installed wallpaper that I designed.

I also finished the back entry with this bold green on the walls, black doors, and a black and white chevron pattern on the floor.

In June 2019, I built the desk for the room.

And in August 2019, I built the first of two work tables.

By the end of 2019, I had gotten this far on the studio. Things were getting done. Projects were getting checked off the list.

So it wasn’t until May 2023 that I decided to turn my attention back to the studio, and I started by redoing the floors. I hadn’t been careful with them, and had largely been storing things in the studio, so the floor had stains on them. Plus, I was really wanting to do a painted design. So in May 2023, I started working on the floor…

I also decided to go with IKEA cabinets for the room, so I ordered and put those together.

In June 2023, I finally finished sanding and painting the floor with the new checkerboard design.

And since I had decided to use IKEA cabinets, I found that all of my electrical boxes had to be moved up several inches.

I finally got all of the new electrical boxes installed and the new drywall up in July.

Also in July, I redid the wallpaper in a much larger size to create more of a wall mural, and I installed that before the cabinets went in.

In August of last year, I also began installing the cabinets around the window in the office area of the studio.

Also in August, I built the first of two countertops out of laminate flooring.

And by October, I had finished the whole mural wall, including a makeover on the original black pendant lights and custom touches on the cabinets.

After finishing that wall, I turned my attention to the cabinets just inside the studio door from the breakfast room.

And I had the crazy idea to use 72 different paint colors on the doors. The cabinet was finished at the end of October.

And the I gave the light in the back entry a makeover from black to gold.

In January of this year, I made the lined pinch-pleated curtains for the back entry…

And then in February, I got the rest of the projects finished up in the back entry.

In March, I finished the cabinets in the office area of the studio…

In April, I did a little makeover to the paint swatch cabinets. I had originally painted the cabinets black, but I decided it would look better white to match the doors.

In May, I framed the huge landscape plan, which I think is about seven feet tall.

And then I finished the rest of the long wall with some spray paint shelves, a frame for the TV (which I’ve now moved up a few inches), and a huge colorful calendar.

Also in May, I finished repainting the room (ceiling and walls), and repainted the work tables from green to this eggplant color.

In July, I basically remade the desk so that it now has this more feminine look with a gorgeous walnut veneer top.

In August, I finally finished the closet, which now has usable storage after years of being unusable because it was just piled with stuff.

And this month, October 2024, I finally got the rest of the electrical work finished so that all of my lights and outlets now work.

And my mom and I reupholstered my desk chair.