Posts Tagged ‘building’

I’m in the process of moving into a new studio location.  The studio is located in the building with Ripple Theater.  This building was originally built in the 1940’s and has changed uses several times since then.
It started off as a grocery store, at least as far as we can tell.  I’m looking forward to researching some of the history of the place when time permits.
The next business was supposed to have been a car mechanic’s garage.  The studio is located in the old garage entrance bay.  In fact, the old garage door is still suspended on rails on the ceiling.  Evidently the entrance was just boarded up and then matching concrete/stucco was applied across the whole front of the building.
The latest rendition of this room was its use as a “Tea Room”.  White trellis was suspended in the air with plants entwined through it.  The floor was carpeted with indoor/outdoor carpet, along with several shelves around the room.  Some of the old cabinetry was left intact, but decorated to match the rest of the room.  Flowers and vines were stapled all the way around the room, and fabric was hung on most of the walls.  Everything was held up either with staples, long wood screws or glue.
My project the last couple of weeks has been to clean all of this out, so the room was actually usable again.  The cabinets were the first thing to go.  They actually went quite peacefully.  After that I started tackling the carpet.  Half of it came up after a couple hours of labor intensive trial and error.  I then moved on to another project.  One wall of the room is an exterior wall composed of old red bricks covered with plaster.  In removing the “decorations” from this wall, pieces of the plaster also started coming off.  I decided that a grungy brick wall would make a great background for photos, so all the plaster was scraped, pounded and pried off the brick.  After that I removed a few more shelves and pulled up the other half of the carpet.
My next task will be to remove as much of the paint from the brick wall as possible.  A couple areas had been exposed previously and were painted over in a couple different colors.  I started this yesterday, but didn’t get too far on it.  It does look like most of the paint will come off though.  After that, I’ll be ready to put subflooring and hardwood down on the floor.
Finally, after that, I should be able to start hanging backdrops and lights.  Then the studio should be usable.  Feel free to drop by and help me test it out.