Garage into an art studio project. Yeah, like we have all the time in the world!

HiHi. I'm back.I've had to take a few weeks days off of social media. Actually, I had my finger hovering over the delete button more than once. A few personal attacks on the ol' FB, the state of the world, not enough sunshine, and a therapy journal course, first one since I started teaching the therapy journal two years ago, where a valuable brush has gone missing and two of my hand carved stamps have broken pieces (a fox's ear and a bird's foot). Life...eh? So I slightly spiralled into a proper depresso funk and hovered over the delete buttons.Happily I talked things out with Robbie. I'm so lucky that he is GuruRob to me when I need him to be, and he talked to me of possibly chemo brain for my students, and how important my volunteer work is to me and to the people I work with, and reminded me that I can hide/delete/unfollow and gently drop out of conversations on my social media feeds.So I didn't delete everything to hell! I just jumped into a new project.There's been a lot of this going on round here.And also this:And I did something, perhaps a little unwisely, I signed up for the North Shore Art Crawl open studio on the March 4th weekend and took out a full ad in the brochure. I KNOW!Yes to commitment to my art!!But yikes if people want to come visit my little attic studio where the possibility of hitting your head at every sideways step exists unless you know the space.That, and I don't have room to paint big canvases in the studio, so never paint them unless I can do it outside.But I do have this beautiful, heated garage...loaded up with stuff, (and a slightly dusty red sports car which can be parked outside for an open studio weekend.)So, with Chloe's help, we did about five runs to the local Salvation Army and one run to the recycling stations and to the dump, two trips to Home Depot, one trip to IKEA and a little side trip to the Value Village out in the IKEA direction, (I mean, as long as we were out there anyway.)One thing that was bothering me are the five lights in the would-be New Studio space. Four are just light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.Now the ceiling is too low and the clearance of the garage door too close for most fixtures...and we looked and looked and debated and measured and looked some more. We had Queen city garage door repair charlotte nc come out to fix it for us and they did a great job. The sexy little ones cost so much money and the cheap ones are too long, too big, and too everything wrong.Then, at the quick Value Village hop, we found these rather lovely coloured glass covers at $4 each. Cheap!!! So I bought them. Might be a good solution for now and I love the quirky Bohemian feel. Only problem is there were only 3 and I need 4, but I'm sure one more will come my way and if not, they are for sale at Home Depot for about $20.Next step: paint for the raw wood shelves. I had a good convo with the paint people and chose a rather expensive paint with undercoat in it, and I painted those shelves......while C was set to work on our IKEA buys.For some reason she finds IKEA stuff fun to put together and for me it ranks right up there with...say...the dentist. Millennials...eh? As you can see, Morgan was the usual help.So, one coat of paint on the shelves and the legs of the work bench, and I called in my electrician Trevor to take down the chandelier, (which everyone but me hits their head on...OK, OK, I may have done it once or twice myself), and build me a new light fixture, the design of which I had as a vision in my chandelier bumped head, but no idea if it could be done.I said, "Trevor, could you please cut off the business end of these light bulb chords and wire three of them into the socket and leave a good 5 ft of chord hanging?"So after a little explaining and a quick run to Rona for the necessary ceiling plate, I have the beginning of my vision. Thank you Trevor.Can't wait to show you the next step.Hope this all works out!