A tale of two rooms (part three)

(Part one; part two)

So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I was quoted in the paper, talking about the 3/50 Project? My friend Juanita saw it, and called me at the shop – she didn’t know about the shop; in fact, I hadn’t seen Juanita in years. She owns a ceramic shop out on Williston Road, and I hadn’t been there in years since I hadn’t been working on ceramics. But I’ve been itching to get back into it for a wide variety of reasons (I miss it, I need to be doing something creative that isn’t about yarn, I miss it, I’m good at it, I have all this stuff why waste it, on and on). So I decide that this is a confluence of events and I should to to Juanita’s on Tuesday in order to pick up some slip and new paints.

All day Wednesday and Thursday (and by “all day” I mean the time “before and after I go to work”) I putter around the house, finding and reclaiming old paints, locating old brushes and taking stock of both them and whatever tools I can find.

Friday morning I go to clean out the ceramic room. I pull out everything that doesn’t have to do with ceramics (OK; I leave the comics and photos in there, on the large bookshelf). Since the room had become a stockpile for All Things I Didn’t Know What To Do With, I wound up taking out two very large bags of trash, breaking down close to 2o boxes, and just generally Purging. I piled up all the supplies for my other hobbies in a different room, expecting to go through and sort and prune from that… because it still looked pretty tight inside the small room and I wanted to get a table in there for a workspace.

I decided that instead of four three-high adjustable shelves, I could get more in there if I made three four-highs. So I did one, and then went to do the second one… and that’s when everything came to a screeching halt. The shelves were in corners, so they could have walls for support. Those walls had paneling on them that started just a couple inches above the shelves… which meant I couldn’t get the shelves any higher because I couldn’t get the bracer for a fourth shelf into the hole on the third shelf. Unless… unless I wanted to move the shelves over by about an inch. Which means unloading the shelves because with the molds on them, they weigh close to 400 pounds or so. FLAIL!!!! Also, FAIL!!!!

I go to get Tim, thinking that if I have to move one thing, I might as well think about moving other things around, but I’m flailing at all the spatial stuff – things that I think should fit turn out to be an inch or two longer, and I really need to plan this out before I do it, and yadda yadda. Enter, The Tim.

This is getting pretty long; I’m going to put the rest after the cut.

So. Enter… THE TIM.

Also enter, THE CATS. THE CATS are very excited that the ceramic room is open – they never get to go in there, and… well, you know about cats. Curiosity, and being little fuckers who break things, and all. So while I’m standing there talking to Tim about moving stuff, and getting the table in there, and blarg… Tavi keeps winding herself around our feet. So happy to be in the room. So happy to be where she’s not usually allowed to be. So happy to show us that she’s there. And generally being a pain. So I look down at her, exasperated, and say “if you want to be in here so bad, I should just switch rooms with you!”.

Blink.

Blink.

And then it was like a mad race between Tim and I, shouting out ideas of how things could be changed, built, moved, made better (we have the technology!). And this is the place where Tim rocks like a rocking thing that rocks a lot – this was Friday morning, and I told him that I was really ready to work on things and that it was important to me that I be doing things by next week… whether I had a new studio or not. I would be fine either way, but I didn’t want things to be in limbo for a long time when I had greenware precariously packed in the trunk of my car.

Friday after I went to work, Tim plugged everything into Visio and came up with floor and shelf plans.

Saturday he purchased and cut all of the wood for the shelves. Saturday was also the day I threw the fuck out of my back.

Sunday he deconstructed the habitrail in the cat room, built shelves for the molds, moved ALL OF THE MOLDS HIMSELF into the new area.

Monday he reconstructed a new habitrail for the cats in the old ceramic/new cat room, and moved my work table into the new ceramic room.

Tuesday I spent my day off pouring ceramics and making messes.

It. Was. Awesome.