Hello again ladies and gents!

I’m back with part 2 of my apartment renovation/redecoration.

I thought I would next show you all Sam’s studio room, AKA Studio Aloe (because of the only plant in there), aka the Redrum (because of the walls.)

Here is Sam, my better half, looking very happy with our home purchase, having the second bedroom all to himself and this second hand rug his parents found at an auction.

Image of Sam from his website.

Sam is a self employed freelance musician and guitar teacher. He teaches privately from home and then works with other musicians across the country as well as does filming and demos for different companies in his industry. So, it was important for us to have a 2 bedroom place so that the second room can become his studio room/gaming room/man cave. You can check out his youtube and demos on his website: stwmusic.co.uk

Inspiration images from Pinterest

Sam had a rough idea on what he wanted his studio room to look like. He wanted some form of feature wall that had a wood pattern to it and then some colour on the rest of the walls. Originally he wanted peach walls, but I wanted peach in the living room, so I got to looking at different colours to see which he would prefer.

In my previous post, I mentioned what colour we ended up choosing for the studio walls, but we started off with a few different colours and shades before settling on the perfect colour for his studio. Once we’d chosen a colour, we could then start looking at what to do with the feature wall.

We originally thought about using reclaimed wood which was in keeping with reusing materials throughout the apartment. We soon discarded that idea as we weren’t sure how sturdy or strong the wall between the studio and living room was and didn’t want to risk damaging our lovely new home straight away. So, we opted for looking at reclaimed wood effect wallpaper.

Above is the different wallpaper samples I ordered for Sam to have a look at. When we were looking at properties, Sam gave me full creative control, but I felt it important for him to have a say in what goes on in our new home, especially in his workspace. So with this in mind, I gave him a few wallpaper patterns to look at and choose from. Sam chose the Driftwood wallpaper by Galerie from Wallpaper Direct.

Images are my design using Roomstyler.

Sam is a bit of a perfectionist like myself, so I had a play around with layouts in RoomStyler to see which side the desk should sit on and show to him. It made more sense for the desk to be on the same wall as the feature wall. This way the wall will be in view for all of the filming Sam does for his demos.

Images are my design using Roomstyler.

I did try it with peach on the walls, but I still felt that it needed to be richer and darker.

Once we’d chosen what was going on the walls, we then needed to choose what to put on the floors. Originally we thought about an engineered wood or some Karndean flooring, but as we’re in an apartment and wanted to soundproof the room, we felt that carpet would be the best thing. We chose our carpet from Tapi Carpets. Sam needed it to be easy to clean and hardwearing as it will get a lot of traffic from him teaching students and often some of these students are in their teens and have parents that sit in on the lesson. As the walls are quite dark, we wanted to make sure the floor was lighter so it didn’t distract from the walls and also didn’t make the room feel too much like a cave.

For the furniture, I left that to Sam to decide and he also double checked with me to make sure it all goes together. I created a visual board (pictured above) so we can see the colours and furniture ideas coming together. I always love doing boards like this to double check that everything will work together.

I’ve listed the products pictures above for you below:

Paint – Earthborn Lifestyle Paint in Can Can
Wallpaper – Driftwood Wallpaper by Galerie from Wallpaper Direct
Desk – Halberd Gaming Desks
Desk Chair – Secret Lab Gaming Chairs
Dining chair – Homesense
Shelving rack – Amazon
Drawer unit – Amazon
Prints – Displate 
Guitar stand – Hercules
Blinds – Adorable Shutters
Speakers – Yamaha HS Series and Logitech Z906 5.1 Surround Sound System
Monitor – Dell
Mouse – Logitech Pro Wireless Gaming Mouse
Keyboard – Logitech G513 Lightsync RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard
Guitars – Suhr and Taylor

We got to work straight away. Sam painted the ceiling in white, I sanded down the skirting boards and he sanded down the windowsill. Sam and his mom worked together to rip up the old carpet and got started on painting the walls.

After the walls dried, Sam and I painted the skirting boards and windowsill with a fresh coat of white satinwood paint. We also cleaned, sanded down and painted the radiator to lighten it up a bit. A trick to getting the pant smooth on the windowsill is water the paint down a bit, paint a coat, then once dry you sand it down a bit, wipe clean and paint again. Do this a few times until you get a perfectly smooth finish.

Then once all the paint had dried, Sam’s mom and I started applying the wallpaper to the feature wall.

Video is my own. Music sourced through Bensound.

This wallpaper is paste the wall paper, so it made sticking it up much easier than if we had to paste the paper. I’ve never done wallpapering before, so I’m so glad that I have Sam’s mom who is the DIY queen to help us out.

After this we had the carpet delivered and fitted by Tapi Carpets. Sam also got an electrician to come round and install these large LED spotlights which he’ll use for when he is filming in the studio. Sam also decided to keep the normal LED spotlights that have a softer light for when he isn’t filming and just using the studio to do work and play games.

Then we could move all of Sam’s furniture from the lounge (which at the time was our storage room) in to the studio room and Sam got to building it all.

The very last thing to go in to Sam’s studio was the blinds. We used a local, family company called Affordable Shutters. They’re a really nice company and although true to their name, their products are very good! They had so much to choose from and in the end we chose a set of blinds that matches the wallpaper perfectly!

All images are my own.

As he teaches privately in his studio, we needed to get a couple of chairs for his students to sit on, so we found these dining chairs from Homesense which matched his desk chair perfectly.

And there you have it! Sam’s home music/gaming studio is complete!

When I asked Sam what he thinks about his new studio room, he responded with “What?” and then told me to put that in my blog. Such love.
He then said “I love it. It’s my own personal, private space to contemplate the universe and separates my working life from our personal lives. Whereas before, I would do all my work in my room and you’d be there trying to sleep whilst I was working.”

What do you guys think? It’s quite a big change from how it looked before! Do you know of anyone that is in need of some design inspiration for their home music studio? Let me know in the comments!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and are keeping safe during this isolation!

Love,

Danica x