Old stuff with great potential! DIY

          Sometimes you might find in your garage or in your storage room an old piece of furniture. Most of you will just place it next to the garbage bin with a "free" sign on it. DON'T  do that.! Take a better look at it and imagine it in a different color, try to picture it with stripes, with dots or with a scene painted on it. The same could happen with a space or with your house.

When Sky and I found our space for Artful Ruins, it was.. ruins for us. That's how the name came...

take a look at this picture , an old lawyer's office, with 20 + years old carpeting, plain white walls and no style. None!

However, we loved it! wasn't the space that someone will give you, ready, perfect; it was a challenge! 

First, we needed the previous owner out of there. And that was the easy part! within a month he was gone, and his furniture..

It was almost the middle of September when we finally received the keys for the store and we had less than 20 days to the opening day! In fact, we had only the evenings free to work there because of our daily jobs. 

We removed the old nasty, commercial 20+ years old carpet and let it bare concrete.

Getting the inspiration from one of my paintings of Greece, we decided that we want to model our baby after this scene..

...and we started with the floor, it needed to change, to be more inviting, more Mediterranean ,more colorful. The real stones or marble was a very expensive solution, and we definitely didn't like carpet!


I decided to paint the floor. I used stains, primers and sealed varnish...

Now everyone admires the result and we are very proud of our floor!

did the walls...

add a "brick" wall

Aaaand it was ready, with much work, plenty of hours, sweat and only by 2 people, us! Ready to be filled with art, re-crafted old furniture, antiques and

1950's Ethan Allen re-crafted entrance table

everything we and our clients like!

view from the outside

              Emmanuel & Sky, www.artfulruins.com