studio room: before

We picked a big room upstairs from the kitchen to be my studio. It’s got six beautiful windows and lots of open space. On the negative side, the floor is in bad shape, it’s got damaged old wood planks with a few big gaps where you can see through to the kitchen below, all covered over by vinyl flooring which is peeling and curling and torn away in a few spots, then covered in some places with a second layer of peeling and curling vinyl, it’s hideous. And the walls are covered with seventies-style fake wood paneling which someone partially painted forest green and then gave up and just punched a few holes through the wall instead of finishing the paint job. They even painted over a few random sections of the cruddy brown trim with what looks like black nail polish.

ugh.

I don’t need my studio to be very fancy at all, it’s just a place for making messes anyway, and we’re supposed to be focusing our renovation efforts on the kitchen and bathroom downstairs, so the studio is like the last priority for real renovations. But the ugly splotches of green paint were going to drive me crazy, so I decided to do a quick and dirty paint job just to give the place a little bit fresher look.

first order of business: cover up those crazy patches of green paint. I can’t possibly concentrate on work if I have to look at that crazy paint job all day.

I even primed everything and then painted it all some historic shade of greenish-blue. (I will admit that I have a strong urge to paint EVERYTHING in the whole house greenish-blue or bluish-green or robins-egg blue or dusty aqua or anything along those lines. I am going to have to use a lot of self control to avoid making the whole house look like a swimming pool.) Anyway, I haven’t totally finished painting but it’s looking a lot better already. I was in a rush to get working so I could print up a bunch of t-shirts and new cards for the Renegade Craft Fair, so I had to start filling up the studio and working in it even before the painting was done. I swear I am going to finish the paint job soon!

it’s not all painted yet, but at least one entire wall is done…

silkscreen printing table

silkscreen set up! My first screen made using my new light table!

I found some small shelves for free on craigslist, and got some more cheap sturdy shelves at a big box store (ugh). Shelving is the one thing I can never find used at the salvation army or on craigslist. My parents gave me a beautiful, incredibly heavy, big long work table (I think maybe an old army mess table?) which they’d in their basement for eons. The table-top is too rough to print on directly, so I made a portable printing station with a smooth, flat slab of wood and silkscreening hinges. I covered the wood with a layer of clear acetate so it’ll be easier to keep the surface clean. For drawing at my worktable, I found a super comfy giant office chair by the side of the road in Limington. For drying printed t-shirts, I strung a clothesline across the back of the studio and tied little loops for hanging clothes hangers at regular intervals. For drying printed cards, I found a beautiful folding drying rack by the side of the street in White Rock, what luck! (I have a sharp eye for free stuff, right?) The biggest studio project was the light box which I need for exposing photo-sensitive emulsion to create my silkscreen stencils. It’s just two long fluorescent shop-light fixtures inside of a big box, on legs, with a thick sturdy glass tabletop. I built one a few years ago when I was setting up my first studio in New York, and it took me a few days in the workshop with my dad’s help. But this time I whipped it up in just one day, in my dad’s workshop, with just a little help from Mike to screw in the light fixtures that evening. And it works!

building my new light table (in Richard’s workshop) … and the finished product!

At the moment I’m using the icky, windowless downstairs bathroom as my darkroom though I would like to eventually build a little darkroom in the closet attached to my studio, I just need to do some major clean-up in there, and hang a door. And I’m using the garden hose for all my washing-up needs, but one day soon we will get running water and plumbing in the studio! I found a utility sink in the back yard at limington (perfect!), and my parents have been trying to get us to take this old claw-foot tub that’s been sitting in their back yard in Gorham for thirty or forty years at least. I think the tub and sink will go side-by-side on the back wall of the studio, by the chimney. I can use the sink for cleaning up small stuff like paintbrushes, and the tub will be excellent for washing out big screens. And gorgeous too. I am going to have such a great wash-up station! The studio’s definitely not finished but it is really exciting to have ONE room in the house that is actually functional. I spent a lot of hours in there during the past few weeks, working late into the night. It’s a great space already.

peeling back the layers of wallpaper on the old chimney in the kitchen

a tiny snippet of wallpaper in the attic

the old chimney in the kitchen was covered with wallboard; behind that we found many layers of wallpaper and horsehair plaster over the bricks!

old wallpaper in an upstairs closet

in an upstairs bedroom

more wallpaper from the kitchen

layers of wallpaper in an upstairs closet

We got a tour of our neighbor Mike’s place, also a historical house undergoing renovation. He had some great old wallpaper too!

at our neighbor Mike’s house

at Mike’s house

This is the barn on the back of our property. It used to house a dairy operation, cows and milking, probably in the 1940′s or 50′s, maybe earlier. There are old beams in there that look more than a hundred years old, like lots of farm buildings I think it’s been recycled and repurposed many times over the past century, possibly longer. Right now it’s not good for much besides wood. It looks like the structure had been altered in a number of ways (to accommodate the dairy operation) that compromised the original strength of the structure. Then the roof got leaky and, unattended, the water rotted out the structural beams that held the roof until they stopped holding the roof up anymore… We found a snapshot of it standing, looks like that was in the sixties or seventies.

the barn, seen from our driveway

Right now it’s filled with junk and debris. There’s a huge toy race car perched on top of a soggy sofa. There are dozens of winter boots under a pile of rubble and broken glass. There is a rusted fridge on its side. There is a big stack of old storm windows which I think we might be able to salvage and reuse. I’ve peeked inside the doorway and gone a few steps in, but I won’t walk further in because I don’t trust the floor to hold up.

inside the barn, first floor

For the moment we don’t have any plans for this poor old barn. We’ll probably have to take it down someday, but for now we’re just admiring what remains, it’s quite a sight. Richard salvaged two big boards from the barn to use for building our new work table! Hopefully we’ll be able to use more of the wood for projects and repairs.

the back side of the barn

Custom tiles back from the tile factory!

SO EXCITING! these are really heavy… we are shipping them to Maine via boat – I hope we don’t go over our weight limit! The colors aren’t exactly as we wanted, the orange came out as a very pale pinkish color where we’d asked for a more intense pumpkin-orange color… so they look a bit more dusty and washed-out than we had pictured them, but… whatever. I’m sure they’ll look amazing when they’re installed on the floor! Hooray!!

Moulton Family House, c. 1880-C,
Route 11
This two-story three-bay frame house is comprised of what appears to be an earlier side gable building to which have been added a pair of Queen Anne style corner towers and a wraparound porch. Presently, the dwelling is clad in asbestos siding. The original house has corner pilasters with round arched panels and gable end returns, whereas the alterations feature three-sided towers with two-over-one windows and turned porch posts with sawn brackets. A one-and-a-half-story ell extends to a small, much altered barn. To the northwest is a larger, free-standing barn.

According to local tradition, this house was erected in the 1870′s or early 1880′s by the Moulton family. Its materials are said to have come from two houses that had been dismantled in Hiram.

this is interesting – my parents had thought the house was older, I wonder if we’ll ever find more historical info about this! I know that my parents’ house in Gorham included several structures – including an original house and an ell, which had been taken from a location a few miles away and dragged off its foundation by oxen, in its entirety, and transported across the fields using rollers made from giant logs, a team of oxen pulling the whole structure to its current location, where it was just tacked on to the side of the original structure. So I wonder if our house was also transported from Hiram in the same manner? or was it dismantled and re-assembled on the current location? Anyway, it would also be fun to find old photos of the house someday…

Meanwhile, we’ve been doing lots of research about the place. Because the house has a historic plaque on the porch, Mike started researching the history and has been corresponding with the Limington Historical Society, he’s found some colorful stories about the history of the town but hasn’t found anything specific about our house yet.

historical plaque on the porch

We read all about the Francis Small nature preserve, hiking on Sawyer Mountain, and swimming at Pequawket Beach on Horne Pond, just down the road from our house! (Of course there’s also the Limington Rips, where I remember splashing around as a kid.)

Anyway, I’ve got some more pictures of the place! Here is the exterior:

complicated roofline (front side of the house)

In back of the house is the ell, which is in terrible condition:

side view of the house and ell

I think this is currently the main entrance (on the side of the house)

trashy looking junk piled up beside the ell

The ell is filled with junk. My mom found a fridge in there, still filled with food! yuck.

there is also an “in-law apartment” in the ell, but it’s badly damaged by water from the leaky roof so it’ll have to be all torn out and… maybe we’ll even have to demolish the whole ell. or maybe we can save it. who knows.

Here’s the back yard:

i’m pretty sure that’s one of three apple trees growing in our back yard!

too bad about the barn

squash growing in the back yard

basketball hoop behind the barn

richard and backyard

backside of barn

back side of the ell – looking towards the house from the barn

inside the house!

nice wood floors and windows. first floor, front room (this is inside one of the front turrets)

downstairs

kitchen

nice bannister, missing plaster

upstairs, turret bedroom

more missing plaster, upstairs bedroom

in the cellar – the granite slab & boulder foundation

front porch & front yard:

the front porch

barn view from porch

retaining wall, street view from downhill

hydrangea bush

pampas grasses

here’s the hitching post where visitors used to tie up their horses

it looks like there are lots of other pretty old houses in the neighborhood! here’s a video of my sister and brother-in-law driving around getting lost in the neighborhood: