Saturday, February 26, 2011

A Beautiful Mess

Our work is going well on the new studio, just chipping away at it each day. In the two weeks since my last post, we have completely moved from the old studio (all 12 truckloads of stuff!), cleaned it and turned in our keys. All of our stuff ended up in the yard around the new studio as we began cleaning it out from the last 30 something years of its previous incarnations as a residence, a hair salon, an office, a studio, and lastly, storage of holiday decorations and other random stuff.

It has also fallen into disrepair in many areas, and has sustained water damage. It requires flooring and roofing repairs, plumbing repairs, ripping our old carpet and tile, and major cleaning of all surfaces. We did find some adorable nursery-themed linoleum under the carpet in one of the small rooms (pictured below). The plumbing is almost finished, but is particularly tricky with the line going to the glaze room. Jason's dad bought us a large utility sink for the glaze room which will be awesome! The other two sinks and toilet are working now, which is helpful for cleaning. Jason completed installation on a real door on the porch, complete with deadbolt, so we have something more secure than a flimsy screen door. We held our breath when it rained last week, and were relieved that the roof only leaked in one place! Evidently, the area where the leak occured had been patched right before a big rain, and hadn't had time to cure. The area has been repaired now, and will hopefully no longer be a problem.
Last week, we put down new linoleum in the large area of the studio, and it made a world of difference! I also washed down all the walls and windows in that room, and encountered more tiny spiders than I cared to in a day. I also washed down the majority of the kiln/glaze room (former laundry room), and organized all the glaze ingredients onto shelves. We are still working on the porch area, where much of our stuff is stored, and the kitchen area, as well as all the back rooms, where there are still many repairs to be made in the floor. We are slowly bringing our things inside from the yard, as we are able to make room for them in the studio.

We long to get back to work, and are frequently impatient with the slow progress. The work is hard and exhausting, and there is only so much our bodies will allow us to do at a time. I bought myself the best respirator mask I could find, and thankfully that has helped with my sensitivity to the dust we're working in. We hope to be close enough to being finished with the major repairs and cleaning in another week or so, and then we can resume working and teaching again. There are many things we will continue to fix up as we go, and at some point we'd love to add on to our existing space. For now, it's a work in progress, but we're both very thankful that we had somewhere to "land" when the old studio situation became unworkable.
Another benefit to our move is that it has pushed us to seek other places to show and sell our work, and I have recently begun consigning with Daly Designs and Coffee to a Tea, both downtown Greenville. I will continue to seek other venues of this sort, as we don't currently have a show space to sell from. We do plan to have events, kiln sales, and the like at our new studio, and we plan to participate in Greenville's Open Studios in November. Hopefully, when I post again, we will be working, teaching and finally open for business!!

4 comments: