06/22/2026
Whenever I head out of town for artist workshops, I try to leave my studio tidy to welcome fresh ideas when I get back. (I also hope a clean space encourages my house sitter to play with some of my supplies.)
This time, I took the deep clean one step further. When I moved into my new home studio the summer of ’23, I needed to protect brand new floors and walls from paint splatter. The challenge? Living in a climate (Minnesota) that’s super humid in the summer and especially dry in the winter.
Here, wood needs to flex and breathe. Anything that traps moisture, such as plastic, invites mold. Therefore, many of the long-term floor and wall protecting solutions I learned from other artists won’t work here.
Years back, when contractors installed a new, gorgeous red birch floor into a home I was remodeling, they covered it right back up with “Ram Board” while they finished construction. I figured, if that protected those soft wood floors from contractor traffic, it would certainly keep paint splatter off my new ones.
Because my studio shares space with my entry foyer, I keep half the room furnished more nicely, then protect those floors with drop clothes when I paint. The other half (7 ‘ x 13’) is my more messy work space and that floor area is permanently covered with ram board. Half a 38” x 50” roll covered the space, so I’ve had the rest waiting for a replacement when the time came.
It’s now been three years, so I figured it was time, plus I wanted to inspect the job it was doing. Friends, it’s held up! The floors underneath looks like new, including a spot where I’d knocked over an entire jar of gloss medium. (I’ll likely need to replace the base shoe on the molding there, but that’s WAY better than replacing flooring.)
I also had an elaborate scheme to protect the walls in that space, and have more investigation to do to see how well that’s worked when I return. I’ll post what I learn, so if you are interested in studio solutions, make sure you are following!
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