May 13, 2009

The Sun Room (My Studio)

There is a set of French doors off of the living room.

This house has lots of French doors
These lead to a sun room, which will become my studio.

This is the room which will become my weaving studio
After thoroughly cleaning the kitchen, I decided to tackle this room next. I figured that this way, I could move a little of my stash and equipment with each trip to the house.

I love all the windows
Here is a 360 degree look at this room. The windows on the immediate left look toward the back of the house.

And how light it is
One thing you can see in the above photo is the beadboard ceiling. The walls however, are smooth.

The circle on the wall in the corner is a stove pipe flue cover, leading to a chimney outside the corner of this room. Obviously a wood or coal burning stove once stood in this corner. I say coal, because one of the outbuildings has a room with coal all over the floor.

I love the view too
As you can see, there are lots of windows and lots of natural light, making this the perfect choice for my weaving studio!

All it needs is a shade tree outside these windows
The front windows look out at the front yard and across the street.

I like that it exits to the screed porch too.
There is a closet in the corner. The other door leads out onto the screened in front porch. This is the only solid wall I have in this room.

Not much wall space though for books & stash
The wood floors are in fair shape, and will be much improved with sanding and refinishing.

I will put shelves here.
This closet was added as an afterthought to this room. Possibly to make it a third bedroom. For my purposes, I think I would prefer shelving here. The interior of the closet offers a peek into what the room was like before it was painted.

I love natural colored wood
The baseboards were originally unpainted. The closet floor is darker than the rest of the room. Possibly it was stained or painted at one time and had been sanded after the closet was added(???)

A peek into the past.When I removed the switch plate to wash the walls, I discovered the original wood of the wall, which had been painted twice; once a darker green, and later a lighter green. These same colors were used in several other rooms as well.


The double-hung windows are likely original to the house.....

I need screens on most of them too.
These operate with weights and pulleys; you can see the pulley rope on this one seems to be in fairly good condition. The ropes on some of the other windows are broken, and some of the windows are painted shut.

This room presents several challenges for me. The first is that there isn't much wall space, and I have a lot of stash, books, and equipment! DH says I could put shelving in front of the windows, but I am loathe to block any of that light.

Because of those windows however, and the orientation of the house (of which the front faces west), this room gets a lot of late afternoon sun. This in turn heats the room up considerably. While this will be welcome during winter months, it has the potential to be unbearable during the summer. I have this problem at our apartment, but I couldn't do anything about it! Now I can and I plan to plant a deciduous shade tree in the front yard this fall!

The last challenge is the size of the room. It measures 9' 3.5" by 19'11". It is the width I am concerned about, because of the size of my loom. My Glimakra Standard measures about six feet in width, so obviously the "getting around" room will be somewhat restricted. Depth-wise, my loom is about five and a half feet, not counting the bench. Even so, this is the perfect room for my studio! (Click here to see that).



7 comments:

bspinner said...

I can't agree more. Perfect room for a studio with all the natural light. Is there room under the windows for shelves?

Theresa said...

A couple of things come to mind, maybe shelves above the windows, decorative looking and underneath, an insulating shade for the heavy afternoon sun? Shelves of course in the closet or maybe taking the door off or removing the closet all together and using the space as a flat wall? Small cottage chests or blanket chests for storage under the windows, good for providing a seat too! The shade tree is a great idea and you might look into a wall hugger type ceiling fan to move the air about.
It's a beautiful space though! When do you move in???

Life Looms Large said...

Yay!!! Thanks for showing us your new studio!! I love all of the natural light. I also don't have a ton of wall space in my studio - although I do have a lot of storage space. (I need to post pictures of all of that sometime). I'll be interested to see what solutions you come up with.

My studio heats up quite a bit too. I have a room air-conditioner for it because of the heat.

I'll be interested to see how your new studio works out. When are you moving in??

Sue

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, I'm with bspinner - long low shelves under the windows, and maybe some handwoven cushions for your new window seating?? It is a lovely room and what fun to plant a tree outside.

Your project is bringing back lots of home renovation memories and they are not all good ones! We have 20 sash windows and when we moved in there was something wrong with every single one of them. It was the first job we tackled - v expensive, but so worth it for restored and happily smooth-running windows doing what they have been doing best for 150 years. After ten years I still smile when I see the light flooding in.

Leigh said...

What great ideas! Thank you all so much. And to think that I almost didn't start this blog because I didn't think anyone would be all that interested.

I really like the idea of shelving as window seats. And Cally, I love the idea of handwoven cushion covers!

Interesting too, about your windows. I found several articles on the internet about fixing this type of window. Sounds like it will be a big job :o

When do we move? The exact date isn't set yet. We take a load of stuff every day we go to work on the house. It was dreadfully dirty and so needs a good scrubbing from ceiling to floor. We have to be out of our apartment by the end of this month, and then I have to clean it too *sigh*. We aiming for the 3rd week of May to move the furniture. I'll be glad to be moved in; the driving back and forth is a pain. It's only about 45 minutes from here to there, but it's getting old.

Margreet said...

Leigh, super to share your house moving this way! Your new Studio is going to be a great place to be working in. I too would think window seats with shelving under.

What a lovely place to be moving to and at last you will be able to do some serious dyeing again :-)

Good luck with the cleaning and moving. Do keep us up to date in between the jobs...

Trapunto said...

What a wonderful room and what beautiful floors and woodwork! Just think how pretty it will be when you can look out from your loom into your tree. I'm with Cally. Those windows are gold; you can definitely fix the pulleys and counterweights, though it's turning into a lost art in this country. I would look for a book. The windows in the house we're fixing up are all vinyl replacements from not too long ago--and not cheap ones--but they are already breaking and getting recurring mildew around the seals and so on. It's a lonely crusade of mine. If you care for your wood windows, they will last forever, whereas plastic windows start going downhill in only a few years.

Boy, don't people start gushing with advice when you start showing them house pictures! It's an uncontrollable urge, like petting the yarn in a yarn store!

We also have a long narrow western room with no wall space. It takes a lot of thought.