Last week, I took some time to work on the studio doors.  It’s been on my to-do list for a while, but it’s one of those projects that isn’t urgent, so it kept getting knocked down the list in favor of more exciting or pressing endeavors.  With everyone home, trying to juggle school and work, feeding four humans and three animals all day, etc. it has been even more important for me to set out some small, tangible goals and get them done.  It’s good for my own mental health to celebrate small accomplishments! So, I worked on the studio doors.  I reinstalled the trim we removed to see if installing a new door was going to be a doable project, touched up the paint… …and then repainted the doors in the custom Boxwood green I used on my butler’s pantry, the kitchen island, and the cabinets in our laundry

Hey, everyone!  I’m sitting down to write this post as events this weekend have been canceled and, what was going to be a busy weekend is occupied with playing cards, making a chicken pot pie, housekeeping, and listening to the boys play Toby Mac in next room.  Jeff is taking a rare Sunday off to go fishing with a friend.  The quiet morning is welcome in this busy season, but it is a reminder that things are not normal. Friday was our 21st wedding anniversary and Jeff and I ate breakfast out together and he took me to a Scandinavian store in Minneapolis I’ve been wanting to visit.  (I’ll share about that in another post.)  When we got back into Rochester, we felt like it would be a good idea to do our regular grocery shopping and also pick up a few extra things.  We weren’t in a panic, but

Well, it involved a lot of patience, crawling around on the floor, tape (3 rolls), and dry time, but the painted checkerboard floors in the studio are finally finished! And I absolutely love them! I would say I wished I had done them initially when we first moved in, but I’m glad I had some time to live with the white-painted floors first.  The room has been a slow evolution, so I could learn how I worked best and what I needed.  I’ve put a lot of thought into the placement of each piece and, while I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak and maybe even do a full overhaul down the road, it’s pretty perfect for right now.  I needed to do a lot of scooting to figure that out, though, and the floors took the brunt of that. The checkerboard pattern on the floor adds just enough interest without

Last week, I was determined to get the studio floor finished.  That’s one of the difficult things about doing projects in stages.  It’s shiny and new at the outset, but when you only have about four feet to finish, it’s hard to get motivated.  It’s not exciting any longer and it’s somewhat anticlimactic.  But, it was pretty obvious that the floor was only partially done and I was really ready to have the studio put back together again and looking pretty. So, Monday morning, I moved all of the furniture over to the left side of the room.  Well, all of the furniture except the massive cabinet!  That piece is so heavy and so full (and it’s screwed into the wall) that it needs to stay where it is.  I’m rarely in favor of painting around a piece of furniture, but in the case of pieces that are huge and

Well, it’s not a full reveal of the checkerboard floor, but I think you’ll get the idea! As I started working on this post, I realized I already said everything I needed to say about these floors in Part 1 and Part 2 of painting the checkerboard floors.  I shared the why and the how, the sources, and colors.  And I showed the whole process in a tidy 3-minute timelapse video.   All I could think of to say in this post was, “Here they are!” So, I tried typing out more descriptions of the floors and more details about the process, but it felt redundant and like filler.  It was also at the end of the day when my writing starts to dramatically fall off a cliff. I decided to leave it until morning when I could approach the post with a fresh perspective and I had time to marinate