I know, I know you guys have ALL been sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo patiently waiting to see these next images. Drum roll please………………….. TaDAH!!! Introducing….. Purple Nickel’s new studio located right on the outskirts of downtown Tucson, Arizona in the old Firestone Tire Building.  No literally it is. We can walk two blocks from our studio to the downtown area and 2 blocks in the opposite direction to the artsy 4th Avenue district! It is soooooooo CONVENIENT! We love the location. It is completely our vibe. When we first heard of availability in the building from our good friend Erin we knew we had to take a peek. We viewed 3 empty spaces but never really fell ‘in-love’ with any of them. As we did a second walk through, it was brought to our attention that an artist owned 2 spaces and the 4th empty space was located on the 2nd floor. In the words of Rachel Zoe ‘BA-NA-NA’S!!!‘. Yes that’s right.  You can click HERE to read more about it in our ‘sneak peek’ post we did way back in July. Gezzzzzz… I know already, that we took FOREVER in showing these next images.  But here they finally are!!!

The ‘before shots‘(all images taken with my pocket sized Canon)…

The entrance to our studio. The dark blue metal doors lead you to the building’s parking lot and our entry is conveniently placed next to it. Suite 221!!!  If you look closely you can see a sliver of the staircase that leads you up to our space.  LOVE the old black casement windows that let passerby’s peek up into our studio.  And it’s nice to have a sort of ‘entry way’ before heading up stairs.

Image on the right shows the staircase and the entry I mentioned above.  Image on the left showcases the super cool casement windows that let in LOTS of natural yummy light.  And you can see all the raw steel beams, sprinkler system and 3 out of the 4 walls are exposed red brick.

Just a fun overall view of the space that’s around 1,000 sq ft.  Oh and there’s also 5 skylights for more light!

At this moment I want you to take a good hard LONG look at the ceiling.  Sounds weird at this time but are you looking at it?  Because we got approval to paint the wood + drywall panels a CRISP CLEAN FRESH color of WHITE!!!  It just felt too ‘basement’ like in there because the ceilings are just shy of 9ft.  Plus it would update the space and reflect more light.  You’re gonna love it…. just wait!

This blue door on the left image used to lead into the space next to us but was filled in some time ago.  We just love it’s character + it’s on a steel track!  We were thinking of putting some bold typographical decal on it in black lettering saying…  ’bad clients this way’ (hee hee), or ‘danger’ or better yet ‘darkroom’.  The verdict is still out on this one.

This floor has seen better days but has lots of character and charm.  Plus it’s in pretty good condition for such a historic building.

PAINTING DAY!!!  Well more like DAYS!!!  Here’s my hunky masked man all suited up for his battle with the rented paint sprayer.  It took us 1 1/2 days of prepping the studio.  We didn’t want any paint getting on the brick walls, flooring, windows, AC wall units and steel beams + sprinklers. That was NOT fun!  I can only explain it as if we were fogging the place for critters.  That’s what it felt like… just like what you see on those exterminating shows.  Only we didn’t have rodents.  But we did have PAINT!  I’ll take it.  Oh and notice the plastic on the floor…

Now the floor is completely covered in over spray from the paint sprayer.  SEE… good thing we obsessed over the prepping.  But DANG look at the difference in the ceiling.  GORGEOUS!!!  I love it when Eric has FABULOUS ideas.  But I don’t love it when the ideas take way way way longer than anticipated.  We thought we could BAM it out in one weekend… HA!  Silly Rabbit.

‘So Eric… how many coats does it take to screw in a light bulb???‘.  Well unfortunately in our situation the wood trim was SUPER THIRSTY and it took SEVEN FREAKIN’ COATS OF PAINT! Yeah we’re BITTER!  In all the ‘prepping/painting’ shots you will notice our paint gallon collection was ever growing on us!  We did 2 coats primer + 3 coats paint (with rented sprayer) + 2 coats by hand.  Here’s Eric hand painting the last skylight over the staircase.  It was probably midnight by this time on the 3rd weekend we spent painting.

DONE!!!

Stay tuned for the ‘after shots‘ coming soon.  It better be this week, right?!