Monday, April 8, 2013

Barn-Studio cleaning

            As the weather warms up, I'm pursuing a number of projects that are best done when it's not freezing outside. First, I'm doing a spring cleaning of the barn-studio to prepare for summer. The studio isn't heated (or remotely heat-able), so I abandon it for the house in the winter. This winter, that meant a bunch of stuff got piled up out there while I wasn't looking! Thus, some cleaning needs to happen before I move my wheel back out.
            Part of the issue is that the barn is actually our household garden shed/trash shed/giant closet/random furniture storage/tool shed. In addition to being my ceramics studio. Before last summer when I barged in and added my things to the mix, it was a perfectly fine place for all those other things to be.
            But this time around as I'm cleaning the barn, I'm trying to actually find new places to put those other things. It's a pretty big space, really, and it does have a loft. I'm hoping to get things shifted around so that I don't have to work around saws and weed whackers and wheelbarrows. My solution last summer was more along the lines of pushing those things to the wall and taking up whatever space I could squeeze in to.
            This year I expect to be a bit different from last year. I'm planning to open the barn-studio to visitors in the summer. It wasn't exactly not open last year; if you had appeared at the door I'd have shown you around. But I wasn't ready to be publicly available at set times during the week, and the studio was, err, a bit crowded with all those things I mentioned above. I don't intend to hide the fact that I'm working in an old barn (I think it's kinda cool!), and I'm not fussed about things like the uneven floor, the "rustic" decor, the lack of any level surface anywhere. That's all fine. In fact, I don't mind having some tools hanging about, especially if we plan to use them for something. This year I draw the line at storing my clay in the wheelbarrow, is all!

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