6 months later

We’ve survived our first winter! since opening in October we’ve settled nicely into the new space. The days go by quickly and its been relaxing to just chill in the space and listen to music while working on our awesome clients. Its been nice to say that we are as bust as we ever were in Burlington and the new clientele we’ve taken on have been creative, supportive and have a lot of cool fresh ideas for us to riff on.
Brants record collection is growing slowly, adding a lot of metal and reggae to the mix, and we now have 10-15 super nintendo games and probabl 15-20 n64 games so if you are in the area and want to have a fun flashback to the 90’s pop by and see if you still have your retro gaming skills.

Looking ahead we are going to have an open house on a Friday sometime toward the end of July. Brant and Ryan are just gonna be chilling in the shop giving tours around the space, cooking hot dogs and hamburgers and shooting the breeze. When we nail down a date I’ll make a separate post about it but keep an eye out and pop in if you’re on old client or just curious about the space

The shop is complete!

We’ve been tattooing here for the last 2 weeks but because of some contractor emergencies my contractor was only able to get in and finish the trim work last weekend. It looks fantastic if i do say so myself and is a huge feeling of accomplishment to know that all major construction work is finished. Enjoy these photos and if you find the time feel free to come visit the shop and enjoy it in person

Flooring is installed

The flooring installation just finished up this afternoon and I’m pretty stoked on the end result. Now all that’s left is baseboard and trim work, and some final details like painting light switch covers. I also heard today that they’ve begun construction on our sign although it’ll be another month and a half before it’ll get installed

Wallpaper is coming along

Wallpapering can be a bit finicky but overall it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. As of today I finished putting up the wallpaper in what will be the waiting room. I was also able to put up a black and grey section of wallpaper in the entry way which will serve as our photo area for completed ink. By the time we open we’ll have a couple adjustable lights and a nice digital slr camera so our picture quality should go up considerably.

For quite a while during the early phases of construction it felt like I was just dumping thousands of dollars into a pit but now that the most expensive things are complete and I’m doing the decorative work its really feeling like its coming together. Its pretty fucking exciting

walls are painted

I bounced back and forth between doing muted mellow colors to make a better backdrop for photos and deep rich colors that I love. After buying 20-30 color samples I finally settled on a deep plum for the main color with grey trim, pale blue for the clean room, a golden yellow for the bathroom, and a deep turquoise for the waiting room.

My wife Erica suggested doing some wallpaper to get the Sherlock Holmes study sort of look that I’m going for. At first I said no, I’ve never done wallpaper before and it seemed intimidating but I started looking at different designs and after a few hours I was sold.

the ceilings are in

By mid may the new ceilings were installed and some of the lighting was in as well. The bathroom plumbing was finished at about the same time, and the future clean room finally has a sink

A good start

In 2018 I bought the building at 181 n Main Street with the dream of building the custom tattoo studio I’d been dreaming of for years. Originally the building was office space on the bottom and one apartment in the back, I figured I’d put another apartment upstairs do a little redecorating and bam things would be up and running! It was not so easy, when the fire inspector came by to check out the new apartment he informed me that before the space downstairs could be used it needed to be brought up to modern code.

It would take 2 years to save up enough money to get work started but in mid December 2021 demolition began. They tore the ceiling down to studs, removed most of the existing electrical,as well as the entire bathroom and the flooring. Things had finally begun