Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Remodeling and Baby room







This isn't really 3d related but I had to share anyway since it has been consuming my life for the last few weeks. Had my basement finally concreted out so I could make my studio and also painted a big bright mural for my, yet unborn, little girl.
The basement has been a very big project and I have been working on it for several years now and it is great to see it finally come to fruition. It all started when we bought this historic townhouse, which had a closed off room in the basement that was filled about 30 yards of dirt.

When I started the dirt was to the ceiling and only a small area at the front of the room was accessible. The bench seen in the first few images was the only thing in the room and the dirt was pile in around it so that it was about 3/4 buried.
I started digging dirt out one 5 gal bucket at a time. I piled all the dirt in my backyard which I then used as a base for my brick patio. The dirt was super dry and I had to wear a respirator mask to work in it at time. Over the course of 6 months or so I dug out about 15 yards of dirt . I had left enough dirt in place to hold the very old foundation in place.

During the process of digging out the room I found all kinds of interesting pieces buried in the dirt from the construction of the house. I found almost 40 different glass bottles. Every one was a different shape and size, not a one of them was identical to another. I found 3-4 different sized wine jugs. All but one in almost perfect condition. There were also countless other liquor, medicine and paint bottles. Most in perfect shape, just a bit dirty, plus a endless amount of random construction debris.

After having dug out the room to where it is in the first image, The room sat closed off for a longtime until I figured out what to do with it next. After a year or to we decided that we wanted to put in concrete and make a studio/ office out of it. So I hired in some guys to come and do it.

Over the course of a week they excavated out the rest of the room, laid in the foundation support and then laid in the floor. The excavation part was the hardest on everyone involved, since they had to bring in jack hammer and hammer drills to break up the floor enough to lay in a new floor. In the end they also took out another 15 yards of dirt, much to everyones surprise. We had only estimated it was another 5-6 yards.

Once they had laid the concrete, the wife and I began cleaning every nook and cranny in the basement. The dust of the dirt went everywhere and had to bee scrubbed off everything, including the rafters, walls, pipes, air duct and floors. I don't think we will ever get 100% of it out here, but we got enough of it to finally move all the rooms around.


Which leads me to the baby room. We had to finish the basement stuff so we could move the rooms around and free up the middle bedroom to become the nursery. Baby name is going to be Subaru Mary and Subaru in Japanese is the stars and is also the constellation name for the Pleiades or seven sisters. So naturally I did a stars and moon motif to suit her name.

Whole painting took me about two full days to do it. A few hours to concept and draw some sketches of the characters, about 13 hours to paint all the base colors in and about 4 hours to paint the outline.

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