New gallery space, cleaned up, ready for pots

We've been painting the space over my studio for the past month or so, off and on, and I spent a couple of days ripping up the rose-colored wall-to-wall carpet and loading it into my pickup. Last Friday, Mike and Tammy Race came over and helped me get the floor down. Mike's a builder and owns (and knows how to use) a gazillion power saws. Tammy knows how to put down flooring. So, in about three hours, we had the floor laid. It's a Pergo floor that looks just like a light oak flooring and goes down like a jigsaw puzzle with only right angles. I finished off floor where it meets the wall, with painted quarter-round molding. (Now, if anyone has any bright ideas about how to get the radiator cover back on the radiator, I'm listening ... )

For the moment, wooden Japanese screens divide the room. The end nearest the stairway (bottom two images) will be the gallery and the far half of the room (top two images) remains a guest space and work room. The rough barnboard of the room was stained a dark gray-brown, so we put on several coats of white sealer and finish paint, which brightened up the room considerably. It already has lots of windows, so there's a lot of light in there now.

Next step is to build and install the shelves and tables that will hold the pots.

This gallery will be an understated part of our home and I don't expect everyone who comes here to go up to it. For one thing, you have to enter through my studio, which is only open when I am here on the property. The current shed gallery, behind our house, will continue to have the majority of my pots and will be open every day, whether I'm here or away from the house. This new space will be for the best pieces that come from the kiln, and they will be priced that way.

Now, to build the shelves and make more pots.

Oh, and some family history - the big framed portrait is my great-great-grandfather Hiram Jackson, who emigrated here from the English industrial Midlands late in the 19th century and worked in the mills of New Bedford, later settling on the tiny island of Cuttyhunk, which is not far from here. Hiram was a member of a local lifesaving crew on the island. He died in 1893 with five other men when their lifeboat overturned in the waves of a gale as they tried to rescue people from the grounded sailing ship Aquatic, which was on Sow and Pigs Reef offshore. More than you want to know, perhaps, but our son Marcus and daughter-in-law Anastasia, who work in backcountry search and rescue near Seattle, might want to hear that they're carrying on a family tradition.