From Shop To Studio: Painting, Window Installation & The Ikea Mission

Setting up your own aerial studio never comes without challenges. This week we battle painting the space, a window installation and battling through Ikea for those much needed renovation items.

My friend Ty, who is an interior designer was in charge of picking all of the colours in the studio. I soon learned there are about 200 shades of white. I also learned what an accent colour is, the hierarchy of colours in our brand and that they have an order and importance. Claire Pro came to help me with the paint project with all her painting gear in tow. I decided to paint over the blackened plywood in the Pole Room which required primer and several coats. We also accented the beams green and a strip of the mezzanine area in green as well.

Let’s not forget the stairs! Ensure you check with your building code, as we had to have a stripping painted 2-3 inches thick on each stair for code. We chose a darker colour, but not black to try and minimize the amount of dirt showing up. This also required several coats and then had to be left overnight to dry and then tiptoed on the next day. Thanks Charlie for measuring the strips individually and helping get a few more coats on there! A fresh coat of paint can really work wonders at transforming a space for a relatively low investment. We also decided to leave some concrete exposed to keep in with the industrial theme. 

Another suggestion I have is adding a window panel on your overhead door if your landlord is into that idea. It creates much more natural light and gives a more open feel. We decided to place the window one panel higher than eye level so that we wouldn’t have people staring in walking past. However that’s not quite where the panel was when I arrived late to the install. I got an alarmed phone call from Alex early in the morning while I was sifting through emails announcing that he had driven to Squamish with one of his cabinets breaking open on his service truck. The result was that he had lost a bunch of expensive tools and essentially yard sale-d from Function to Brohm Lake, unaware of what was missing.

So my morning agenda went out the window and I jumped in my car driving as slow as I could to Squamish searching for these missing items. I didn’t find a single one and arrived back late to the studio to see that the window had been installed on the very top panel. The moral of the story, don’t be late for your door installation. The installers will not be stoked when you tell them they need to move the entire thing, oh and also, lock your cabinets on your truck. Fortunately, two different people had recognized the truck and handed in some of the most expensive lost items. Thank you humanity! Even when you have your entire week planned out, life happens so be prepared to make plans on the fly and have to shuffle things around at a moment's notice. 

“Even when you have your entire week planned out, life happens.”

If you take anything at all from this blog it should be this avoid going to Ikea during a pandemic. After checking the website online to make sure the items I needed were in stock, Arthur (my car) and I took off to the city feeling very ambitious to fit everything in. I suited up in my mask and joined the long line snaking around to get inside. It quickly became apparent that none of my items I needed were in stock, apparently they were temporarily oversold. How many people are doing renovations right now seriously? I returned empty handed - well, not entirely, who can actually go to Ikea and not buy something, but hopeful that items would restock soon.