Let’s Do This!

Whew! So here we are, it’s early October and classes are filling up! It’s hard to believe we’ve come so far over these past few months. It’s required a lot of blood (well, not that much actually), sweat (LOTS!), and tears (on second thought, I don’t think there have been tears… yet). But the doors are open and we are moving on to the next phase of Lovejoy Workshop. Every step in this process has had its own unique challenges, and we know the challenges will never go away, but it’s been a ton of fun figuring it all out together.

Before I jump into what the next phase of Lovejoy Workshop entails, I want to share the story of the progress we’ve made so far. In the last blog post “Lovejoy Workshop is Under Construction”, we talked about the space, why we chose it, what it was previously, and what our vision was for the workshop. In this post, I want to take you through what followed over the next few months…

After signing the lease agreement, we met with Allen Tankersly, owner of Cornerstone Builders, and worked together on defining our vision for the space. Allen was very professional and easy to work with (by the way, he does residential remodeling as well, check him out!), he quickly understood our vision and got right to work transforming that vision into an actual workshop. But before he could start building, he first had to clear the canvas. Here’s what we started with:

Demo time!

Cornerstone Builders quickly cleared the space in preparation for the new workshop.

So much better!

Removing the old walls REALLY opened up the space. Now the fun can begin! After the workshop was cleared out, the walls got fresh paint and the lights bulbs were changed out. We converted every light bulb in the shop to LED, which should last like 20 years! Ain’t nobody got time for changing bulbs!

By the way, we also removed those HUGE white high bay light fixtures as well, in addition to changing all of the other lighting fixtures. I’ll talk more about the electrical shenanigans in the next post!

We also made some other changes, like narrowing in the doorway on the main wall and adding a wall in the back to create an office. There were a lot of small details that we felt were important to the overall vision and feel of the space.

As soon as the paint was dry we were on to the shiplap! Our theme was “shiplap all the things!”, as you can see… Shiplap is so hot right now, right? So we installed shiplap on the north and south walls, wall to wall, which is a LOT of shiplap and a TON of work. But we definitely think it was worth it, it looked fantastic! Props to Cornerstone Builders for pulling this off!

While Cornerstone Builders worked away inside the shop, SignCraft Signs built us a custom sign and installed it on the front of the building. The sign going up was one of those moments where things really felt “real”. I mean, we have been full steam ahead on this business from day one, but the sign going up really felt like a milestone. It felt like there was no turning back. Ready or not, here we go!

We are official!

We think the sign turned out fantastic, it’s exactly what we’d wanted, SignCraft Signs did a great job and were very easy to work with. Even though the workshop was still under construction, we couldn’t help but turn the sign on at night, because just seeing that sign lit up made us happy!

At this point we were feeling great about the progress being made on the workshop. Things were coming together and our vision was coming to life. This brings us to early August. In the next post we will take you through the following steps in the construction process, including the challenge of building all of the furniture. Which, we somehow made time for on evenings and weekends, in between soccer practice, games, and a family vacation.

Until next time, go spread some love!  #lovemore

Lovejoy Workshop Construction Progress 75%

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