We’re almost 2 weeks into the studio renovation now. The carpeting and vinyl tiles were stripped within a day, then my contractor and I spent an afternoon marking the intended positions of all the room partitions using a pretty nifty little tool that looks quite similar to this:
It works by pulling a string that’s wound in a spool, through the round chamber that is filled with ink, holding it taught on the ground over the straight line that you want to mark, and then snapping the taut line against the floor, thereby leaving a nice straight line in ink on the surface. To prep it for the next use, the string is simply wound back onto the spool using a little crank on the side of the box. This was completely new to me, so I was quite happy to keep playing with it by helping to mark the rooms!
A few days later the carpenter came and took all the necessary measurements for the partitions and doors, and very confidently told me he would be back in 2 days (i.e. that very Saturday) to begin installing the partitions. And he really did begin work on time:
By Sunday morning most of the frames for the rooms were installed. Notice that quite a lot of my stuff is still in the studio–I feel a bit bad for making the workers have to manoeuvre around them and also shift the really heavy stuff all over the floor as they complete different jobs in stages, but I didn’t really have any other reasonable alternative for storage.
I also discovered some (hopefully) unintentional ‘line art’:
I made sure that the contractor was alerted to this, and that all wiring must be done in lines that are either parallel or perpendicular to the floor. Still – seeing this crazy thing made me laugh. :p
Now the rooms look more or less like this:
That’s the washing up room on the left, the weighing and dispensing room to the right, and the mixing and moulding room closest to you on the right. Plastering is being done to smooth out the surfaces of the gypsum boards, and sockets are being added to the walls.
And what did we do about the packaging room, to which I wanted to allow as easy an access as possible? Instead of sliding partitions / doors which would have cost a bomb, my contractor suggested installing double doors instead:
They can swing open flat against the partitions, which affords a nice open feel to a room that would have otherwise been really cramped (half the space will be occupied by our shrink wrapping machine). Same function for one fifth of the original price. Sweet!
I’ve bought 18 pendant light fixtures for the electrician to install. Looking forward to my next visit this coming week. 