"Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous in the end." - Robin Sharma
Our Ideas
We had been talking about making changes to the store space not long after actually getting moved in. Giving Impulsive Creativity an actual place to live was our first priority. Following that, was actually giving Impulsive a place to call home.
Impulsive as a business has always been a home to all the lovely local artists that have put their works of art inside. Now it was time to make this space more art friendly. More about displaying that art to the best of our ability. More about being a peaceful place to feel at home in, not just buy art from.
New Year. New Store.
We started 2020 with this mantra. A code that has guided all the decisions and movements to make this a space for makers and crafters. To keep us moving ever forward and pushing us to be better ever single day. So we made a checklist of things that we wanted to update, and slowly checked them off! Some of those things were the floor, painting the drywall something other than beige, and installing lighting in the cabinets.
As we continue in this journey, we will be adding to these improvements. Constantly tinkering seems to be the artist way anyways! We are so excited for what the future holds! Keep reading if you want to know our thought processes and how we actually got everything done in just two short weeks!
From Start to Finish
Going into this project, we knew we had a short deadline and that we needed to make the most of all that time we had. Over the weekend, Kat and her husband, David M., were able to move anything upstairs that we thought may get ruined and to start moving the rest of the items around so that we could get started on the painting.
We came in on Monday morning ready to get things done! Our goal was to get all of the wall colors finished before moving on to the other tasks. Knocking out all the painting in just three days, we were able to get two complete coats on the stairs, painted the classroom area with two coats of white, all areas that ended up being green, and then one coat of all the blue paint.
While Kat and Heather were working on the painting, David M. was working on the lighting under the cabinets. He had gotten rolls of LED lighting strips, then had to solder the strips together so that they would run along the tops of the shelves, and drill the wholes so that they could seamlessly go all the way across. It took him closer to a week to assemble and then install everything. We are so proud of all the hard work he put into this project and so happy with how it all turned out! (Don't try this at home, kids! David M. is an IT expert and does the stained glass pieces in the store. He knows how to do this, otherwise we would have contacted help.)
After the wall painting was done, we were able to start moving the rest of the art items, that were not moved upstairs, carefully around to start painting the floors. We had to go over the floors twice to completely seal all the old, stick on tile that was down. With the floors taking 24 hours to dry, this was the most time consuming part. We had to rush to get everything painted and then wait for it to dry. You know about watching paint dry...We had to find other things to do without getting footprints everywhere! This was the time that we installed the new counter top to be painted later, got supplies for the next couple of projects, and moved more items so that we could get to the next area.
We were hitting the weekend at this point. Kat was able to pour paint the counter top and start really working on the new dressing room during this time.
The start of the second week, we were really starting to drag. Having the brunt of the renovations on just Heather and Kat was starting to take an energy toll. Coming in Monday morning, we knew that budgeting our time this week would be the most important thing. We would need all of our energy to actually finish everything.
We were able to completely finish the floors by Wednesday of the second week. That's when we decided to finish painting the base of the front counter, get the built ins actually built so that we could hang the art pieces on something more dependable than the brick, move all the movable cabinets into place, and put all the artwork back to it's home.
Normally, moving everything back would not have been as huge of a task as it was. But we were tired and running on fumes by this point. Both David M. and, Heather's husband, David L. helped after getting off work in the evenings of these days to help us put things back to where they go in the mad dash that was being able to have a put together store on Saturday. Finally we got everything in place late Friday night so that we could open our doors, right on time, Saturday morning.
We would not have been able to get all of this done without the help of our husbands, a few of our artists that volunteered to help us out, and all the people following us and giving us support! Check out our Facebook feed for a more in depth view of what was happening during those two weeks!
The Take Away
This renovation taught us so much about digging deep to get things done. It solidified the working friendship between Kat and Heather to be even stronger than it was before. Teaching us that we can and we will kick booty together! It was as empowering as it was exhausting.
The Impulsive Team is so happy with the results and also happy that it's over. Would we do it all again? Absolutely! Hopefully with all the knowledge and skill that we gained so that we could do it faster the second time!
If you follow us at all, or even if you're thinking about it, we want to thank you for this experience! Without all of our followers, friends, artists, and families giving us so much encouragement we really won't have been able to do this. Any of this. We are so grateful to all of you that have stuck through this journey with us. Impulsive Creativity wouldn't even have a space to call home without you. Thank you!
We encourage you to come by and see all the improvements we've made if you haven't already! Get connected with us and let us know what we did well and what things you would like to see from us in the future!
XOXO - Impulsive