Light and Color
Saturday, June 28
The inside of the studio is starting to look like finished space. It’s amazing what the application of a few gallons of paint will do. Natalie and I spent four days last weekend painting the interior walls. We applied seven gallons of primer, let it dry overnight, and then rolled on the top coat. I spent a lot of time going up and down a stepladder and the scaffolding in the high-ceiling part of the camera room. To reach the highest points I had to place a two-foot platform on top of the highest scaffold platform. It was pretty secure, but still took a while for me to gain confidence to stand up there with nothing to hold onto and a paintbrush or roller in my hand. To top it off, I was painting white on white in poor light so it was hard to see where I’d been and where I still needed to paint. And since heat rises, it was hot up there.
Once we’d finished our painting marathon the electrician and plumber returned.
We chose a mini-split heat pump heating system for the building, with one outside unit and three inside units. The inside units hang on the wall near the ceiling, one in the reception / sales room and one in the camera room. The third unit is in my office upstairs. The units hang on a plate bolted to the wall and connect to the outside unit through a pair of copper pipes and an electrical control cable that were put in the walls before we closed them in.
The electricians from www.electricianinperth.com.au made quick work of installing all the electrical outlets and most of the lighting fixtures. We put four fluorescent fixtures in recessed boxes in the camera room ceiling for work lights. The reception / sales room gets mini-spots on fixed tracks, as does part of the camera room and the ceiling in the bathroom. Those will illuminate portraits and other artwork on the walls.
Outside, the stucco crew has applied two coats of stucco to all the holes and will return one more time to apply a thin finish coat to match the texture on the rest of the building. We also now have a concrete sidewalk leading from the parking area to the front porch. The whole studio will be accessible to people with mobility challenges.
We’re waiting for the moisture level in the subfloor to match the moisture in the oak flooring so we can get the floor laid. At the moment there’s an electric furnace baking the moisture out of the wood and the studio feels like it would be just right for sessions of hot nude yoga.