Happy (belated) birthday to me! OR the art room, part 1

What I wanted for my birthday this year was to get the walls in my art studio insulated and refinished (not by us), since it's the hottest room in the house in summer (not entirely a problem) and the coldest room in winter (definitely a problem!). Here's the "before" all emptied of most of my furniture:

I helped out the horrid 70's wallpaper by adding an artistic touch of graffiti to it. One of the graffitied words will end up back on the wall in a new form, but I haven't decided about the rest of the phrases. 

The other thing I returned to see after the summer conference was this:

looking in from the doorway

looking from the small window side

a big pile of ugly. farewell wallpaper. you won't be missed.

They rapidly moved forward on insulating and drywalling the room:

looking from the small window side

looking from the doorway

a shot of the small window from the doorway

Skim coating the walls:

the sealed up closet area and tools.

skim coat, and looking better with each step.

Then paint. I chose gray. Shocking, I know (not). I chose an incredibly light shade of gray with no other pigment besides black to add a bit of depth on the walls, but not to affect/distort the colors of the art I'll be working in the room. 

the gray looks bluish in the late afternoon light

Eric asked me "are you sure you didn't get blue??" nope, I didn't.

The daytime photo does a better job at representing the wall color. This also shows phase 2 of the project, still to come: finishing closet and reorganization of art supplies. eep!

Next, electrical. We got new outlets and, finally, an overhead light installed in the room! Since Eric gets no say in this room, I went a bit wild on my choice of light fixture. It won't be my light source when working, so I went for aesthetic rather than functional qualities. 

This light fixture came from Cost Plus and sat in my art room for about 1.5-2 years before it finally got hung.

We have a fairly low wattage light in there. I have a light table and 2 other lights to use when i'm actually working on art. 

There is one minor, itsy-bitsy problem with it currently. This is me standing below it. NOT on my tippy toes. We'll adjust the cord length ourselves once I'm ready to use the room fully. 

The next step for the art room is the closet. While I do kind of like the shelves that are currently there, I have two big filing cabinets that need to fit in the room with all my desks. The only way they're going to fit is if I move one of them INTO the closet. From this point on, the rest of the art room is being completed by me. I get to demo shelves, then I will paint the closet the bold color that I would have liked to put on the walls. What color, you ask? well, look no further than my hair for your answer. It's around that shade. And the Splashy blue that I loved on the inside of the kitchen cabinets may also be making a reappearance!

In between working on the closet itself I get to tackle The Purge. No, not the scary movie; the scary piles of art stuff.  I'm going through EVERYTHING, Marie Kondo style, and determining what to trash, donate (to art friends or friends' kids), store (old sketchbooks and art; maybe supplies that I'm not currently using but probably will again soon), or keep. If it's in the KEEP section, it doesn't get to come back into the room until there's an organized place for it. If it's in the STORE section, it's getting put into bins and placed in the bottom half of the upstairs hallway closet, which we've mostly had empty for the last two years.

Sorting, day 1, living room. The amazon box has the trash, the white crate has the donate pile so far. I've unearthed some really old art and even some prints by friends (the tree in the center of the pic) that will need to be framed and hung, either on the orange gallery wall in the living room or my future mini-gallery space in the art room. 

In the back of the photo you can see most of the furniture for the art room. The most expensive piece of furniture (for me) was the rolling chair at around $65, if I remember correctly. The drafting table was a gift; the light table I inherited from my department at work; the metal filing cabinets $20 for both cabinets, also from work, also originally in the art department. They are not quite true flat files, but good for the size I've been working recently and have been incredibly useful for organizing projects in progress since I've purchased them.