Got the key! (Day One)

This morning I got the key to my storefront space in Burleson, so I was able to begin work on transforming the space into Shutter Muse Studio (featuring a Brush and a Beverage), with help from my family. My aunts Bonnie and Deena are in town, and helped out tremendously, as did my mom, David, and wonderful kiddos.

The flooring throughout most of the interior space was unfortunately very ugly, very nasty, and apparently very old. It was a lovely nauseating green hue with flecks of brown. See the photo at left. Can you picture that in a photo studio? Yeah, me either.

I couldn't even begin to imagine actually leaving it on the floor--it simply was not an option. I had assumed the carpet was glued to the concrete slab, and much preferred bare concrete to gross carpet. But as it turns out, I was way wrong.


What we found under the carpet: A lot of very sticky glue over linoleum tiles. If they were not yellowed by the adhesive, they would have been mostly white with streaks/flecks of blue, which wouldn't have been too awful. Except for the glue. And the glue was almost a deal breaker. Did I mention that there was a lot of it? And that it's extremely sticky?

We all have glue caked on the bottoms of our shoes, stuck in our clothes, and covering our work gloves.


But we took a peek under the linoleum tiles, still hoping for bare concrete, and found... beautiful stone aggregate slabs!

How. Cool. Is. That. It's too early to tell what kind of shape this floor is in--we already found some odd concrete spots, some stains and cracks. Will have to get the old glue off the entire floor before I can make an assessment, but even in bad shape, this stuff is a gazillion times better than the carpet. Better than bare concrete even. Very retro.


And I've got an idea for showcasing the undamaged parts while hiding the not-so-undamaged areas.

To the left is a close-up of a clean-ish spot (glue scraped off)

This stuff is throughout most of the space, though we did find bare concrete toward the very back of the store, and even an area that has even more linoleum under the white/blue linoleum tiles. It was sort of like an archaeological dig, unearthing an ancient dwelling and trying to figure out what the heck was going on at the time, and what the devil they were thinking. I'm still half expecting to find a huge blood stain or something, to indicate why they covered over the aggregate slabs in the first place.

Just to show our progress so far, to the left is a photo I took during one of my initial walk-throughs, while it was still being used for storage and meal-box assembly.

Note the green carpet and dark brown rubber trim. The brown stripe on the wall is where another tenant had built a wall that was later taken down.




Here is the same space this afternoon, carpet and trim gone, and working on taking up the linoleum tiles. We did eventually get all the linoleum up in this room. (That's David working on a particularly stubborn area).








This is my daughter working hard in the back room to take up carpet. Don't know how she went all day with her hair down. Tomorrow I'll suggest a ponytail.









And this is my crew at the end of Day One. Still a bit of carpet and linoleum tile to take up, but should finish doing that tomorrow!

Wooooo! Three weeks!