This week I have been off the ladder and working in my office and studio, both of which are in my home. As a business owner, with no employees, there is always much behind the scenes work that needs to get done. I spent some time entering my expenses from January-March in my spreadsheet. Last year I was very bad about this and had to enter the entire 2006 year of expenses, over the course 1 month, to get ready for my accountant. That was not fun, so I vowed to be better this year.
In my studio, I worked on what I hope, will be my final set of sample boards for the Clubhouse Job I have on my schedule to begin late April. This is a commercial job where I will be doing a 2 story Foyer, large Lounge, and a good sized WiFi Library. This job has been delayed several months now, but all the prep work by the other contractors seems to be well under way now.
The foyer will be done using Shimmered Suede which is a wonderful product that looks and feels like a slightly metallic suede fabric. The application is done by base coating the walls in a shade close to the Shimmered Suede color, then troweling on 2 layers of the Shimmered Suede. The first layer is a 100% coverage layer, the 2nd layer is a very thin layer, that gives the technique it’s shimmer. I will be doing the foyer, which is 18′ in height, in horizontal stripes. Because of the size of this foyer, I’ll roll on my first layer of the Shimmered Suede with a foam roller, vs. troweling. Here’s the sample board, done to scale for the height:
The widest stripes will be 44" in height, the bands of colored stripes total 12" in height, 2" brown, 4" gold, 2" blue, 4" green. There will be a 2" brown stripe at both the ceiling and baseboard. The original design concept was to do wider bands of the colors, but the clients are very conservative, and the concept had to be toned down to get approval. 🙁 While I like this design, I feel by narrowing the color bands, the foyer lost a lot of its "wow factor".
Next is the Lounge. This is a large room, 28′ x 24′, with 12′ ceilings. The walls will all be painted a soft blue and then I will be stenciling a series of 48" squares, using a basket weave design. Each square will have 3 rows of 3 half inch wide stripes. Here is a very rough sketch of the layout.
The sketch is done in pencil, so does not photograph well. The 48" squares will alternate, vertical and horizontal stripes.
The client has to decide what shade of brown they want to use for the stripes. That is why the colors vary on the boards. They have already nixed the darkest brown (on the right) and reduced the number of stripes from 5 to 3.
This is the proposed finish for the WiFi Library walls. They have seen this sample once so far and liked it, but when it comes for them to sign off on this sample next week, my guess is this sample will have to be less dramatic.
I’ll report back on the progress of this job later. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I don’t have to go back into the studio and do more samples. 🙂
