Ocal Ham Beque

So instead of getting any work done, I spent most of those 10-minute intervals walking around outside, dreaming, planning, admiring what’s been done, and thinking about next steps for getting the outside of our house looking like I envision it in my mind. One of the first things that stands out to me is the skirting around the front porch. The unfinished skirting shows in every picture I take, and it’s just plain ugly.

I just hate how that unfinished project (along with the two shutters that came down during storms) detracts from our new driveway and the entire look of the front of our house.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this is a project I can just finish and check off of the list. It looks like it’s going to have to be redone completely because this is the current state of the Airstone.

So whatever I use as the skirting on the front porch will also cover the open area between the workshop and the ground.

And then the second is this lattice look, but I only like this style of lattice. I’m not sure what it’s called, but I like the horizontal and vertical lattice pieces. I’m not really a fan of the diagonal lattice designs, at least not for my house.

Photo by Crisp Architects – Search porch design ideas

Here’s what this room looked like when we bought the house in August 2013. It was a garage, and the floor of the garage sat about 16 to 18 inches below the floor of the breakfast room. This picture is looking from the front garage doors towards the back of the house. The white door you see on the left is now the doorway to the breakfast room.

The trusses were all exposed, and the dark wood made it look like a real mess, and it made everything look dark and small.

There were two garage doors on the front, although they were so narrow that I could barely get my car into the garage without scraping the sides, and my truck that I used to have (a small Ford F-150) wouldn’t fit at all.

Early on, my father-in-law helped me put up some drywall in the garage. My intention at the beginning was to turn the garage into my workshop.

So with that goal in mind, when I pulled the original cabinets out of the kitchen when I remodeled the kitchen, I put those old kitchen cabinets in here, thinking that I could use them to create a long worktop with lots of storage. That idea never materialized because the garage became more of a storage room.

At the time, the back part of the garage housed the furnace, but that thing was so scary that we got rid of it before our second winter in this house.

So after that, it was just a storage room. You can see the door on the left side of the picture below. That’s the doorway that leads to the breakfast room now.

Here’s a view of the other side of the storage room at the back of the garage. This area is now the storage closet in the studio.

And for the record, here’s a look at how the garage looked from the outside when we bought the house…

In the summer of 2017, we decided to turn the garage into my studio. I hired a contractor to do most of the big work, like removing the garage doors and building a front wall with windows.

So in the summer of 2017, it went from looking like a garage to looking like an actual room in the house.

Another thing they did was take this mess of a ceiling…

And they redid it so that it had a much cleaner look, as well as a brand new beam to remove the sag in the ridge line of the room.

New French doors were put in the back wall of what used to be the back storage area, and a cased opening was put in where the single door used lead to the storage area. It looked much better, but we still had this low sloped ceiling that was only about seven feet high on the back wall, and hit just above the new French doors.

So overall, it looked like a room and not a garage anymore, and everything was looking much better. But this phase of the project was pretty expensive (about $40,000), so the project stalled a bit after this.

In the summer of 2018 is when we decided to build a carport onto the back of the studio. That solved so many problems. First, it gave us a place for a nice ramp. Second, it replaced the garage. And third, the addition would solve the problem of the low ceiling at the back of the studio. Here’s what it looked like before…

And here you can see how the addition of the carport allow for the raising of the ceiling at the back of the studio once the new roof was installed and the old roof could be removed.

So from the inside, it was no longer a sloped roof that was only seven feet high along the back wall. Instead, it now had this new roof line above it, allowing for a much taller ceiling inside.

We spent a lot of money on all of that (the initial cost of the studio construction plus the $22,000 for the carport), so we had to take a break and let our bank account recover. But we picked things back up in 2019 with having the room insulated with spray foam insulation…

And soon after, the electrical and drywall were done.

At that point, I took over and did the rest of the work in the room. I painted the walls in the main part of the studio and the back entry, and then I installed the hardwood flooring.

By the end of 2019, I had gotten this far on the studio. Things were getting done. Projects were getting checked off the list.

So it wasn’t until May 2023 that I decided to turn my attention back to the studio, and I started by redoing the floors. I hadn’t been careful with them, and had been storing random things in the studio, so the floor had stains on them. Plus, I was really wanting to do a painted design. So in May 2023, I started working on the floor…

I also decided to go with IKEA cabinets for the room, so I ordered and put those together.

And since I had decided to use IKEA cabinets, I found that all of my electrical boxes had to be moved up several inches.

I finally got all of the new electrical boxes installed and the new drywall up in July.

Also in July, I redid the wallpaper in a much larger size to create more of a wall mural, and I installed that before the cabinets went in.

In August of last year, I also began installing the cabinets around the window in the office area of the studio.

After finishing that wall, I turned my attention to the cabinets just inside the studio door from the breakfast room.

And then in February, I got the rest of the projects finished up in the back entry.

In April, I did a little makeover to the paint swatch cabinets. I had originally painted the cabinets black, but I decided it would look better white to match the doors.

And then I finished the rest of the long wall with some spray paint shelves, a frame for the TV (which I’ve now moved up a few inches), and a huge colorful calendar.

Also in May, I finished repainting the room (ceiling and walls), and repainted the work tables from green to this eggplant color.

In July, I basically remade the desk so that it now has this more feminine look with a gorgeous walnut veneer top.

And this month, October 2024, I finally got the rest of the electrical work finished so that all of my lights and outlets now work.

So let me show you how we finished up this chair. When I left off yesterday, the chair looked like this…

And I had this raw edge of fabric showing all around the arms, wings, and the top of the chair back.

So at that point, we still needed to add the trim, nail heads, and sew the seat cushion. To make the flat trim to cover the raw edges of the fabric, I cut strips of fabric to 1.5 inches wide, and then sewed them together end-to-end. In order to sew them together, I placed the ends together at a 90-degree angle and pinned.

And then I sewed them together diagonally.

That gave me an angled seam like this. The reason you want to sew the seam diagonally is so that the entire bulk of a seam isn’t completely in one spot on the trim. This way, the bulk of that seam is spread out over a larger area, so it can be concealed a bit easier.

The trim for this part is just a flat trim, so there’s no cording needed. I did a zigzag stitch all along one edge of the fabric to keep my velvet from fraying, and then I folded the fabric into thirds lengthwise. First, I folded the raw, unstitched edge over…

And then I folded the zigzag stitched edge over that, making sure that it overlapped the first edge just a bit.

And then I stitched right down the middle. Here’s what the front of that trim looked like once it was sewn.

With that trim sewn, I found the center of the trim piece, and lined that up in the center of the chair back and pinned it into place. And then using my hot glue gun, I carefully attached the trim over the raw edge of the fabric, making sure to line up the trim so that the edge of the trim was at the edge of the wood frame. Since I was going to be adding nailhead trim, I needed this trim to be over the wood frame and not just over foam and batting. If you’re not adding nailhead trim, you don’t have to be as careful about placement, you just have to make sure you’re covering the raw edges of the fabric.

I continued working from the center of the back, around the corner onto the wing, and down onto the arm until the whole side had trim covering that raw edge.

And then I finished it by glueing the end of the trim under the chair and trimming off the excess.

Then I repeated that whole process, starting at the center of the chair back and working in the opposite direction until the other side had trim covering the raw edges on that whole side.

With the trim attached, I was ready to add the nailheads. I only ever use individual nailheads. I do not like those nailhead trim strips where you add an actual nailhead about once every four or five nails because I can spot those a mile away. That product, in my humble opinion, will never give a professional look because those actual nailheads every five or six spots are always a slightly different color than the strips, and they stick out like a sore thumb. So if I’m going to do nailhead trim, I’m going to take the time and do it the right way.

You can buy tools specifically made to make this process easier, but since I only do upholstery about once every three years or so, I haven’t spent money on special tools. You need a spacer , a hammer, and something to hold the nailhead. For my spacer, I used a few stuck together nails that were the perfect width. A tack hammer works the best, but I don’t have one, so I used my regular hammer. And while I started off using needle nose pliers to hold my nailheads, I found that the nose of my wire strippers worked so much better because of the flat shape of the nose which allowed me much more control over the nailhead as I hammer it in.

So when you’re not a pro, and you don’t have all of the special tools, I’m very much a “use what you’ve got” kind of person. A strip of nails, a wire stripper, and a construction hammer worked just fine and got the job done.

Here’s one side completely finshed.

After the nailheads were all attached, I needed to finish off the trim by adding covered cording around the bottom of the chair. Covering cording is super easy. Just cut a strip of fabric about 1.5 inches wide, place the cord in the middle of the back of the fabric, fold the fabric around the cord, and sew the two layers of fabric together as close to the cord as possible. A zipper foot on the sewing machine works perfectly for this.

And then to attach this cording, I flipped the chair on it’s front so that the bottom of the chair was accessible, and I placed the cording on the edge of the frame…

And then used this cardboard strip to hold the cording, and stapled them both into place.

The purpose of the cardboard is to keep the cording from rolling back on itself. If you try to staple cording on a chair like this without using the cardboard, you won’t end up with a clean, polished look. The cording will try to fold back and roll up on itself in areas, and you won’t have a consistent look all around. The cardboard strip comes in a roll, and is available at any upholstery shop and at places like JoAnn Fabrics.

The strip that goes around the edge is make of three pieces of fabric plus a zipper. Piece 1 covers the front edge and most of the edge on each side. Pieces 2 and 3 include a zipper, and this piece is long enough to not only cover the back edge of the seat cushion, but also to wrap around to the sides about two or three inches on each side. So once you get piece 2 and 3 sewn together with the zipper, you smooth it out so that it’s flat, and then sew it to piece 1.

Set that aside and then work on the top and the bottom. You’ll want to attach the cording to the top piece as a separate step, and then attach the cording to the bottom piece as a separate step. In other words, don’t ever try to sew everything together (top, cording, and edge piece) in one step. Get the cording attached to the top piece, and then sew on the edge piece. Sew the cording onto the bottom piece first, and then sew on the edge piece. This picture is my mom sewing the cording onto the top cushion piece as a separate step before even attempting to sew the top to the edge piece.

And then once you get all those pieces together, you have a cushion cover, and you can insert the cushion. And you’ll probably need an extra set of hands for that.

Once the seat cushion was done, the chair was finished!

I’m so pleased with how this turned out. The fabric is so deep and rich in person. I’m not sure if that’s coming across in the pictures, but it’s such a deep red without being too dark.

And with it being velvet, it’ll be easy to clean when my cat sleeps on it, and I’m hoping she won’t be able to shred this one since velvet seems to be a clawing deterrent for her.

I’m really excited about finding a new, pretty swivel base for this chair. I think swapping these black legs for a pretty wood swivel base will take it up a few more notches.

And finally, here’s a peek at the chair by my pink cabinets and behind my desk.

This is a HUGE project that I can now mark off of my list! This was definitely the biggest project I still had to do in this room, so it should a quick sprint to the finish line now.