Week 7 - Studio clean-up in progress

It's been a rough week here. We narrowly missed the brunt of an ice storm. Various other things went on that disrupted the daily routine so less got done than I would have hoped.

I had hoped to show you a completed pendant - a chased copper brain I was going to call "Don't Leave Home Without It". It was almost done last week. Then on Monday I was closing over the last prong on the setting and the prong pusher slipped. It put a dent and a gouge in the chased copper and knocked off a bunch of the patina. I had to cut off the setting and take the whole thing back to bare metal before I could repair the damage. I need to go through a number of finishing steps and remake the setting before i can get it back to the point it was. Perhaps this time I can close all four prongs without mishap.

Anyway, I decided to take a break and do some work on getting the mess in the studio cleaned up. When we moved in all sorts of stuff got stuck in the basement. Some of it should have been there but some really belonged elsewhere. It was a mess.

Just a jumble and no floor space to move in.

There were a bunch of woodworking and blacksmithing tools that ought to have gone into the shop space in the garage. So I wrestled them out of their various hiding places and set them aside to get moved into their proper location. I was also able to go through several boxes of mixed items and sort them into bottles and boxes, labeling them as I went. I was able to move a shelving unit which held a lot of miscellaneous stuff and get it better arranged. Various other items got moved out or rearranged and now the west side of the studio is looking a lot better.

Look! Clear floor!

It's not finished by any means, but I now have this side of the studio in better shape and I know what is actually in the boxes. Almost all of them are now labeled.

I had hoped to move all the stuff that had to go to the garage but only got it to a staging area upstairs. The ice interfered but another complication came up that made things worse. There were two bulbs out in the side area of the garage which left it pretty much in darkness. I figured I'd replace the bulbs, rearrange a few things to make room, and then move the woodworking and smithing tools into their proper places. Easy, right?

Not exactly. When I got up on a ladder to change the first bulb it briefly lit, then popped and sparked. Then the socket came off in my hand. It had been installed badly and was waiting to fail. Okay - try the second bulb. Same thing. So now I have to replace two sockets in order to have light so I can put things away. I can see that the coming week is going to be more interesting than I had wanted.

But I've got floor space in the studio!