Day One: That's a whole lotta yellow, Jenny . . .

Dear Reader -  I unceremoniously stopped by my beneficent landlord Ted's inn to pick up my key first thing this morning. And then I popped over to the store to start in on getting it ready for the contractor on Monday morning.

Allyn and Beth left the shop in happy shape:

They even kindly left their super-cool open and closed signs for us:

Now some of you may be wondering, what're all those stripes on the walls? That, my dear Reader, is the slatwall - a whole lotta slatwall - that fills two sides of the shop. Allyn invested in it a a couple years into his business, recognizing that it'd give his gallery way more flexibility for display (and save he and Beth hours of patching holes in the walls).

The slatwall has little half inch groves running the length of it - hence the stripes:

I'm inclined to keep the slatwall because it:

• offers me the same flexibility for hanging a variety of art as it did at the gallery;
• provides an alternate display option for my cards;
• is a benefit for most any retail store that'd be in the space; and
• would be a major endeavor to remove and repair the walls.

However, I'm not really wild about those stripes. And since my contractor says that we can't spray the walls (concerns about the trim, yadda, yadda, yadda) and since his painters are starting Monday, I decided that I'd spend my first couple of days in the space cutting in the slatwall (yippee [insert mildly sarcastic tone here]!):

I chose a warm, medium-toned yellow with the help of Beth and Allyn and some of their artists. And I really, really love the shade - well, I really, really loved it 'till I turned on the bright fluorescent track lights in the center of the store - then the whole place just glowed (and not in the warm and cozy way that I'm looking for). I'm planning on switching the fluorescents over to a whiter hallogen and decreasing their number significantly, so I think we'll be okay, especially once we fill the space. But by the end of the day I was sorta dizzy with all that yellow, Reader.

Luckily, I had a couple of other tasks to give myself a yellow break. I wanted to put up some "coming soon" signs, but I didn't want to do anything too major 'till I was out of the way of the painters - so I did these little ones around the base of the windows:

They attracted a lot of attention throughout the day - that and the music I had playing through the open door (it was a gorgeous day here, so it gave me a great excuse to be hospitable to all of the passersby):

I also grabbed my trusty razor blade and started to clean the signage off the windows in an effort to avoid any confusion. Thistles' logo was lovely (and part of me felt sad taking it down), but that big square of stick-um took a good while to peel off (notice the lady at Kings - I gave her a good 30 minutes of entertainment):

With all of that cutting and scraping, my little shoulders hurt, Reader. I'm gonna go get myself some ibuprofen and something to wash it down, so that I'm ready to get up and get that second wall done tomorrow. I'll keep you posted on our progress.  - Jen