Whew, it’s been a busy month! I posted a while ago about my fantastic new office, and I’m finally getting around to posting images now that we’re done finishing it! It was *WAY* more work than I had anticipated, and a big thank you to my boyfriend for helping sand, lay the floor, and still speaking to me after I might have been just the tiniest bit nit-picky about the details. What can I say, I like my paint lines STRAIGHT. Below, in the “before” stage:

And here, in the “after” stage:

I’m proud to say that most of the furniture and equipment in the office is from Craigslist or purchased locally (trying to minimize my carbon footprint on that one). The paint is low-VOC from the local paint store, and the flooring was also purchased off of Craigslist as leftovers from someone’s remodeling project.

The thing I’m most excited about is the desk. It’s custom made and finished with this amazing stain/sealer product I got at Eco Home Improvement in Berkeley. It’s called Rubio Monocoat, and it only requires one coat! Anyone who’s stained anything in the past knows how hard it can be to get the number of coats right, and the smell of regular stain is ridiculously bad. This stuff is totally natural (made from tung oil), very durable, and zero VOC. It was the easiest part of the process. The shelves in the nook in the back of the room are made of the leftovers from the desk.

The other thing I’m geeking out about is the asterisk. I’m obsessed with that thing. I was thrilled to use some old school geometry to figure out exactly how to mark it out on the wall. It doesn’t look like it in this image, but that thing is perfect. My years of engineering school aren’t going to waste, Mom and Dad.

The big wall on the left (a bit hard to see, but it’s currently a big blank white wall) will be used when I participate in Open Studios in October. I’ve got a series of images in mind to hang for display, which will be more fine-art focused than my usual event and portrait work. At least that’s what I’m thinking about this week…