It took many hours, and many workers, but I finally have a new wall in my studio.

To recap: After a gutter repair, rainwater was flowing down the outside of the downspout, soaking into the exterior bricks, and wicking through the plaster wall. This left me with bubbly paint/wallpaper, efflorescence and mold. I peeled away some of the bubbly paint/wallpaper layers. It was not pretty.



Luckily, my contractor offered to repair the wall since the damage was caused by his gutter repair. It took a little while to fit me into the schedule, but this morning he was on his way.

I had moved most of my shelving away from the wall, but since the space was still kind of crowded, this morning I asked him how much room he would need. He said about 4 feet (!!!).

So I went into scramble mode. Piles of stuff went on top of other piles of stuff. My big metal shelves went into the living room, which gave me room to break down the dog crate, which gave me room to move my other shelves and my pottery wheel a little further back from the wall.

Luckily my scramble did the trick, and the workers had enough space to drape the room with plastic, put down tarps, and start ripping out the plaster. A few hours later, the drywall guys came by to put up my new drywall and skim coat (?) over the interior part of the exterior wall (the part that looked just like mud on the backside of the bricks).

And now, I give you. . .*insert trumpet flourish* . . .my new wall.



I know, it's not exactly pretty yet. This weekend I'll get some paint, then hopefully get my studio back in order by Monday.

Image copyright MonkeyPowered.etsy.com

I love living in the city. I love having sidewalks and actually being walking distance from places I want to go. I grew up in what was then a fairly rural part of a nearby county. It was a 30 minute drive to the nearest grocery store, so me and my Mom would joke in our best Virginia twangs that we were "goin' ta town" whenever we needed to go shopping. Then I lived for several years in a town that, although it had a grocery store, was lacking in many other things like a bookstore and a craft supply store. So every few weekends my spouse and I would drive an hour each way to get stuff we needed, sometimes even bringing the dog along for a special trip to PetSmart.

It's in that spirit that I spotlight MonkeyPowered.etsy.com's lovely print "A Trip to the City". I hope it brightens your day as much as it does mine. (Bonus points for having a monkey in her shop name like I do.)

--reposted from Lark Studio--

Today I've been taking on the dusty, icky task of ripping up the gross carpet in my upstairs hallway.



I say gross not because of the design of the carpet, which, although a bit extravagant for me, had been tolerable and functional. I say gross because this carpet is, I'm guessing, at least 30 years old and probably has several years of cigarette smoke trapped in it. I could smell the smoke on particularly warm days after I vacuum up the dog fur, which had apparently been holding the smell down.

Our house was built in 1901, but the carpet was installed later. There are decent hardwood floors underneath (so far), so I'm tearing the carpet up so I can rid my home of a few more lung irritants.

Today as I was ripping up the carpet and underlying "padding", I found a few things UNDER all of it which struck me as odd. I mean, if you're laying carpet, I'd think you'd sweep ahead of time.

Anyway, these are the things I have found under the carpet so far:

• 1 big random old slotted screw. Looks like it came from a piece of machinery. It's got a flat head and a pointy tip, but it's fatter than most wood screws I've seen. It kinda looks like it's on steroids. It could be the bone in my pinky finger.
  
• part of a Blow Pop wrapper. Blow Pops were first put out by the Charms company in the 1970s and then acquired by Tootsie Roll in 1988. Unfortunately, I threw the wrapper into my big bag of carpet trash before I got a good look at it.
• 1 white feather. Not small enough to look like it came from a pillow or anything. It was about and inch and a half long. Can't decide whether it was from a pet bird, or maybe from a crafting project.
• a small screw screwed into a plastic wall anchor
• a spring, maybe from a clicky-top pen, but big enough that I feel like it must have come from a giant novelty clicky-top pen. (Hey, now that I think about it. . . I once had a big promotional pen from the Philip Morris plant in Richmond. That could tie the cigarette smell and the spring together! . . .I'm starting to feel like Robert Goran on Law & Order Criminal Intent.)

If I find anything else, I'll let you know. And I'll post some pics as the carpet removal unfolds.

I've spent a lot of time at my computer today.

Reorganizing digital music files can be a monotonous pain in the butt. Especially when you're a DJ who has a lot of disorganized music files.

After a few rounds of Tetris and a few Sporcle quizzes to break the monotony, I stumbled upon what is now my favorite time-waster: http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

This site lets you make your own Pollock-esque "painting". That's it.

You can keep it simple.

You can paint with color:

You can switch colors mid-painting by clicking your mouse button:

The hardest part is knowing when to stop:


But it makes for a nice break from numbers and letters and folders and files.

And, you can always take a screen shot of your masterpiece, print it out, and hang it on your wall if you need something to brighten your workspace. Have fun! Then get back to work.