missing in action...............

...................but I have a good excuse!!

For over 3 years, I've wanted to remodel my studio & finally this Christmas, I got my wish. The carpet in my studio was there from the last owners that had children & no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the stains removed. (Who puts white carpet in a small child's room anyway?)

So now to look for flooring.............. we tend to do the remodeling ourselves in our home & I have to say that Daryl (dh) is quite the carpenter. We try to be as green/recycled/reclaimed as possible when remodeling, cork flooring in the den & library, plans for concrete kitchen counter tops, possible salvaged ceramic tile for the bathroom (a project for next year), etc.

I looked at bamboo flooring in hopes of staying "green". What a let down. I've heard that bamboo is quite hard, when in all actuality, it's quite soft. You can get hard bamboo flooring but to do that you remove the term green since you need to add glues and the formaldehydes that's needed to harden the bamboo. Since I have three-four legged children, I decided with their little claws it would be best to find something harder. There is another kind of bamboo that is naturally harder & it's called twisted bamboo. When you see bamboo flooring, it's either laid side by side or turned up on it's edge & laid together that way. The twisted stuff is actually that. They take the bamboo & twist it tight & then lay it side by side. What I didn't like about the twisted bamboo, is that it looked like regular wood, it lost it's bamboo "look".

So, bamboo was out & should I decide to work with liquid dyes (ever in that room), cork wasn't a good idea either, so we went to the opposite side of the spectrum.......................Daryl & I are kind of wood snobs. Or maybe I should say, have an appreciation for fine wood :) Our front porch (we rebuilt) with beautiful ironwood & we're slowly removing the hollow core interior doors with beautiful solid maple doors. For flooring, we found the most beautiful quilted maple engineered flooring from a local store. We paid for it & waited for it to be delivered to the store so we could pick it up. It arrived late one afternoon to the store & we were told we could call the next day to pick it up. The next day, I couldn't reach a live body by phone & when you drove up to the store, there were signs on the door stating the store was closed (for good) & a phone number was posted, which went to voicemail.

(the wall quilt in the photo, was one of the first quilts I ever made, it's over 20 years old)

For three days, I tried tracking down the flooring that we bought that was sitting in that store. I finally found out, they closed the company & filed for bankrupty. We're still working with our credit card company to get our money back, which I think shouldn't be a problem & since then, we found a local place that had their flooring in the "back room." We bought it that day & took it home with us. We found solid hardwood flooring & saved about $500.00 from what we originally purchased & it's absolutely gorgeous!!

It's Brazilian Teak & these were all of the colors in ONE box. Teak is a very hard wood & we also discovered that UV rays will not fade or darken the color of the wood, so what you see is what you get.

Now to put everything that was in that room back into it, sigh.....................!! Oh how I'd just love to throw it all out & start over. Less is more, right?!

So there's my excuse, my studio has been torn up & what was in that room is now all over my house (what a mess)!!

I have been working on some pieces that I hope to photograph over the weekend & post here next week.