Need to Fix Your Studio Flooring - Not excited? Well here is an idea.

Studio hacks #2 - All about flooring

So, you've either made the move to a new place or are new at the art game and are at that point where you've decided it would be great to have a studio. The only problem is, where on earth in your house might you be able to do that! It seems that for most people that ends up being in a spare bedroom or the garage.

Many years ago I was living on a property where we had just built a house and a nice new double garage. My partner and I had agreed that he could have one half of the garage for his car and workshop and I would have the other for my studio. This worked out well for a while until we got to the point where my paintings came creeping over onto his side. It was at about this point that I decided it might be a good idea if I started teaching people art and of course that would need more room. So the poor bloke got pushed out and so did the car!

In the end he actually built another huge four car garage somewhere else on the property

and I took over the double garage. Like many garages this one had a concrete floor, which was not always ideal to be standing on for long periods of time. The way I overcame this initially was by using an old carpet upsidedown on the floor. this worked well for a while in fact I used that until I moved Studios. It was pretty hard to clean though and not really ideal.

The picture above is the same studio but the other half of it, some time later after we sanded and polished the chipboard floor.

Several studios later, I found the most successful solution to the flooring dilemma where you have carpet or floor boards you want want to get painted, which is the one I'm using now in studio 2. I have two Studios here, one of them was carpeted when we moved in and since I wanted to run an art school out of here I needed to do something with that carpet. The options were to rip it up, leave it and get it dirty or cover it with something. I took the latter route and used a heavy duty, painters, plastic tarp/ground covering. Well we've been here eight years now and I'm happy to say it's still going strong!

The other studio, (the one in the video) when we moved in, had a concrete floor because it was a garage with a tilt door. I ended up buying up some of those rubber tiles that you can lay on floor and putting those down in front of the easels. However, this wasn't very satisfactory as I had to stick them down all around the edges with tape and the tape would come undone after a while. Also it meant that the general surface of the floor and the whole room was uneven and I worried about people tripping on it.

Then I had the bright idea of buying some carpet underlay and putting down another tarp. I sent my partner off to buy the tarp and we laid it down however unfortunately the quality of this tarp was not nearly as good as the one I bought and so after a year or so, the surface started flaking off the tarp and I eventually had to pull it up and get another one.

The tarp that was bad quality after a year or so.

So make sure you choose a tarp that is as Heavy Duty as you can possibly get, one that will last you for year's.

You can do this in any room to save your original floor coverings and create a studio with a spill proof, comfortable floor to stand on.