Staying largely home this last year gave me a pretty good chance to continue work on the studio and the major milestone of getting the roof on was accomplished, allowing the actual start of use as real studio (albeit very ‘unfinished’)
A few additions came from my sister-in-law in Atlanta. She and her husband bought the house next door to their house with various potential plans for the future. As it turns out a lot of ‘stuff’ was left behind when it was cleaned out by family members. Along with furniture, kitchenware, wine/liquor, there was a lot of stained glass as the deceased husband was a very accomplished stained glass artist. His wife has gone into assisted living and decided she did not need everything and neither, apparently did her children. So we ended up with a very nice piece of stained glass for the upstairs sunny sliding door (currently just covered over as a temporary window).
The other ‘finds’ were a filing cabinet – useful for my myriad of weaving/spinning handouts, lesson plans, and miscellaneous papers (along with Anne’s recipes and garden magazine clippings), and a wonderful 1940’s Remington typewriter.
The filing cabinet cleaned up easily. The typewriter was ‘mostly’ working, but had been stored for many decades without use. Luckily this particular model was built like a tank and despite a couple of stuck keys, some (non-essential) missing pieces and a load of dust, it only took a few days with appropriate tools and lots of careful cleaning and it was ‘working’ again. I resisted the urge to disassemble, clean and re-assemble once I took a look inside and saw how really really complicated the mechanism was. It is a Remington Noiseless Model 10 which has quite a unique but highly innovative way of moving individual keys. I’ll continue with cleaning but the fun part is it now works and will become a feature of our ‘Steampunk” office/guest room in the studio.
The other work progress is insulation and wiring which are both going well. The insulation is 3/4 finished but in places only temporary as the wiring inspection is carried out without insulation. In the meantime it has made quite a difference to the temperature in the studio and means I can warm it up to a comfortable 60 degrees despite it being freezing outside.
We have a friend who is a qualified electrician and has visited and started off the process. We were able to buy all the wire and fittings at a great discount from Anne’s work. It is a steep learning curve for me as I keep having to refer to the current wiring guidance as typically our electrician glossed over a lot of the fine detail. Next visit he’ll check my work and we will finish everything off ready for the first inspection. Everything then gets connected followed by the final inspection and sign-off. I’ll then put back the temporarily removed insulation and begin putting up the dry-wall.
Lots to go, but at least now on the down-hill slope.