blinded by the blinds

Two weeks ago, I moved all my studio gear upstairs and set everything up. A large undertaking it was, especially since I rewired and cleaned everything- most of my studio gear (and cables) was still covered with silt from way back when I did all the drywall madness in the kitchen. With everything upstairs and set up, I discovered two things... 1) even with the tinted side windows, the daytime sunlight is brutal. Fine when you're painting and sawing things, but blinding when you're trying to use a computer, and 2), my wireless internet connection worked like crap (the router is really far away).

After a LOT of debate and Home Depot/Lowe's head scratching, I finally decided that to bite the bullet and have custom vertical blinds made (and by "bite the bullet", I mean spend over $300). I had them done by blindster.com, mainly because they were the most affordable, and they happened to have a blue that matched my wall and doors almost perfectly. It took a couple a weeks, but they arrived today in the really long box shown above. Installation was relatively easy (you screw in four brackets for each window and pop the top bar in). I hadn't thought about it when I ordered, but the top bar happens to be silver aluminum, so bonus for my silver-lovin' self. Truthfully, I've been avoiding posting pics of the studio because I had temporarily cured the sunlight problem by hanging a sheet in the brightest window... trailer-trash-eriffic:


Here's what things look like now:




As you can see, I've put up some acoustic foam, but it's just stuff I had laying around. Gonna order some nicer, newer stuff later. (it's just to deaden the room a bit) A far cry from the shot below, taken almost exactly one year ago:


Which is pretty much the shot below (above is before the new wall+door was built):

Moving onto problem#2, crappy internet, the irony is that my laptop works fine up here, but my desktop internet barely worked at all (it speedtested at around 1 mbps and sometimes didn't work at all). There are numerous wirelss amplifier/extender devices one can get, but for not too much more dough, I figured the smart move would be to have my handyman (and John) help me run a hard-wired CAT5 cable to the studio from the back bedroom downstairs. This was a day-long project resulting in new holes to drywall patch (story of my life), but we did it, and it works. At the same time I upgraded my connection, so now my internet blazes at around 20 mbps for downloads. I ordered a brushed stainless plate and black guts for the plate (actually I had to spray-paint part of it black), but you can't see the black that well because of the flash. Trust me.


Oh yeah... the week before the blinds adventure, I officially installed the oven.

This was another can of worms, because the mahogany trim piece made it too narrow for the lip of the oven to fit (Ikea doesn't think you're gonna have big third-party trim pieces hanging on the side). You can't see it in the pic, but I ended up shimming it with pieces of 1/16" masonite (in order to move the big wood trim piece outward). That's better.


Though it looks pretty in the pics, I still needed to have a gas line run so it would actually like, work, so I called my buddies at Now! Plumbing, and they crawled around the rafters and made that happen. And made more holes in my wall. More drywall patching (see a pattern here?)... the yellow thing is the actual flexible gas line, and the the blocks of wood in the corners are 1x3 scraps I put in as a backing for the drywall patches to screw into. This one was kind of a bear because that whole jagged section at the bottom broke partway through, entailing even more patching, and a lot more swearing.

Here with the drywall pieces screwed in place. I've since mudded and sanded the whole mess. Still have to paint it, but I'm not going too nuts making it look perfect as it will be concealed by cabinet doors and trim pieces. Now I have to decide which microwave I'm gonna get then reinstall doors and make some trim pieces from the remaining mahogany pieces.

Finally, I ordered the futon below, this time spotted by Kim on Urban Outfitters (crazy cheap closeout at $249, regular $599). It's their "mid-century sofa", and I dig the minimal design and twill fabric. This will go downstairs by the piano, while the grayish-purple one that currently lives there will go up in the studio where it was initially intended to be. I didn't specifically need a futon for downstairs; a conventional loveseat would've been fine, but this was pretty neat and a great deal (I still have an entire couch in the garage for the "family room" when I get around to fixing that up). I guess the good part is that once we have the guest room going, my house will sleep around eight :P

Comments

[rebecca@midcenturymodernremodel]

I love your blinds! Thanks for linking to them!