Some of our regular followers and clients will know that we have been a little quiet on our blog and social media in the last couple of weeks. We have been working extremely hard on renovating our new studio getting it ready to work in. It’s now finished, we are back to work on our first full day today and it looks AMAZING! We are still in our same little cottage, we haven’t moved, we have renovated our packing shed into a fully working, insulated, garden art studio to work in full time all year round. We are so warm and cosy down here, we have much more room to move and its so quiet being down our garden in the little woodland area. We have windows both front and back one side looks into the garden and one side into a few trees and a field, so we are hidden away, its absolute bliss!
In total I think it has taken 7 weeks from the first day the builders arrived on May 27th to this weekend 12th of July installing the phone line and final bits and pieces. It took around two weeks once the builders had nearly finished to get it decorated, painting the walls and varnishing the floor and whenever we have taken on projects like this, we always underestimate how long the decorating will take.
Not only have we decorated in the studio, but we have revamped what was our old studio into a beautiful bedroom and that’s another room done in our cottage renovations. We asked our lovely neighbour DIY team to remove some old plasterboard and replace it with tongue and groove to tidy it up a little, and upon pulling off the old plasterboard we found old rustic wood paneling, which was lime washed and wallpapered in disintegrating newspaper from 1877! We know the cottage is over 300 years old but this proves that the paneling is at least 140 years old. So we saved as much of the remnants of the newspaper as we could, cleaned the wood paneling with a brush and wire wool, oiled the wood and it now looks stunning, it’s such a feature!
We are always so excited to do these little building projects, not knowing what we are going to find, going back in history with the cottage. Having done a lot of renovating in the cottage over the last few years, each time we are in chaos and a mess I vow never to take on any more building projects! At the end though it is so worth while but it just zaps all of your time and energy so I am quite relieved to be back to work! We only have one more room to do in the cottage and it will be the most difficult, the front room with the large inglenook, but I think we will leave that for a couple of years….
I will be taking some promotional photos this week for the website but as a little teaser here is a photo of our new door sign (Red Kite Studios is our business name) and Nick painting inside!
More posts to follow!
