Making the Pottery Studio more inviting

The floor was the biggest problem with lumps and holes and very rough patches that were impossible to mop or sweep. Floor leveler helped to even it out after we patched the holes with a few bags of concrete. Rick and I did this before Jay came to help us.







The walls were stone at the start.









Jay and Rick parged the walls to make them more even. Jay also filled in several large holes in the walls between the basement rooms. Rick has been avoiding this for several years.











Then they were painted. None of these were fast or easy steps. Notice, the clock spontaneously started working again after the wall was painted. Nice.














Rick patching the lumpy wall over the work bench.










Rick Painting the wall.







There are some leaf stamps on the dungeon door to dress it up. It's already dusty again from the concrete work going on.








The floor is coated in an epoxy paint that has to sit to get ready for 30 minutes and then allows a 2 1/2 hour work period followed by a 12 hour drying period. We painted the floor in 2 sessions and did every other stair each time. It was important to remember which stair to walk on.





The walls look nice after they are repaired and painted. Not gorgeous, but nice.










This is the basement phone when clean.












These are the storage and ware shelves. The 2x4 supports were never painted until now.






The shelves will stay a bit tidy for a while.


















The basement stairs are much more inviting now with the epoxy paint. The paint chips keep it from getting too slippery.







This cupboard was originally in our kitchen. It now holds kiln shelves on the right and posts in the drawers. The top is our old kitchen counter that was replaced with Corrian a few years ago. Another chunk of that counter is an extension in the table saw.



The new shelves are from Linens N Things. Sad to see them go but these are nice strong and clean shelves.






This small collection of junk may inspire me or I may never use them.




























Diagram of location of glazes and raw materials.

Dumpster Diving

Story Jar April 2 2008

It was called garbage picking when I was a kid, then dumpster diving and now the Freegan movement. It’s the fine art of giving rebirth to discarded objects. Karrie, an artist, says that people should look at nearly all trash as opportunity. Our house is full of great opportunities.

My dumpster diving days began when I moved into my first apartment in Greene, New York. All that I owned fit into a Volkswagen bug and this was an unfurnished apartment so when I saw an abandoned, maple drop-leap table nestled between the trash cans I gleefully dragged it upstairs to my empty kitchen. Not long after, I discovered a brass floor lamp in the same place. With a new wire threaded through and a lampshade added, it became a treasure. Now antiques, both are in Emilie’s Boston apartment.

The next major treasure was found in Binghamton in the late 70’s. I was jogging past a huge carriage wheel placed near the curb. It was clearly garbage with two rotted spokes but it was a "treasure" nonetheless. I rushed home and dragged Rick to our station wagon. Grumbling, he came along and found that the wheel was larger than the car, a Chevy Vega. The only way to get it home was to roll it.

Inconveniently, we lived at the top of a steep hill. It was so steep that on an icy winter day, Rick stepped into the road to put the garbage at our curb, slipped and flanked by bags of garbage, slid down the hill past about ten houses before he could stop.

Rick considered the wheel unworthy of further attention but I started rolling it. In a short distance, it became clear that I was a lousy wheel roller. Thankfully, Rick felt sorry for me and, grumbling a little more, took over the rolling while I drove the car. I cheered him on. He growled.

That wheel came with us to Alfred and again to Wellsville (with additional growling). Jay dressed up in Daddy's hat and stood in front of it once for a photo before several more spokes finally gave way to rot and we put it at the curb. In just a few minutes someone else began rolling that wheel away to their house.





My dresser was once trash. The mirror was gone and a few pieces were broken. We bought it at an auction with few people bidding in competition. They didn't see potential the way we did. With the discarded wings from an old vanity making a frame for a new mirror and a few other pieces of wood it has provided decades of service.






Rick once trashed a narrow, paneled door but I pulled it back into the garage and he eventually built a wonderful blue cupboard around it. Sometimes, the reflection of the cupboard can be caught our half-round window.




Once part of the Wellsville High School, it now is part of our kitchen along with some discarded oak cabinets from Andover School. Andover also gave us a glass lamp found resting on a pile of old light bulbs and Alfred State College "sold" oak book cases for $5 - not far from a dumpster price. Things made of oak, beveled glass or brass just aren’t meant to be garbage.















I rescued a 1972 dress model with wheeled cast-iron feet, stamped metal arm and neck plates and a fancy cast-iron finial. Discarded by the girls moving out of Jay’s Cherry Street apartment, it now stands in our living room in an outfit made (and discarded) by members of Thailand’s Karen Tribe. Leaning against the wall are some fly fishing poles that Jay rescued for us from another Philly apartment. You just can’t find stuff like that in a store.

The only time Rick gives any discarded stuff a glance is when he notices my pottery. Once he took an enormous but perfectly ugly bowl out of our trash and shipped it to a gallery near Chautauqua where it sold for over $200 – a record. I’m still astounded.




photos of other rescued items are at flickr

Story Jar - The Chair in Room 318

The Story Jar - a biweekly column in the Patriot and Free Press, Cuba, New York

Published October 18, 2006 - Copyright Elaine Hardman 2006

I saw Bob Goodrich lugging it out with the trash at school in 1992 - I think. It bothered me because I am a fixer and this chair deserved to be fixed. It wasn’t a great chair, as in perfect. There were three legs on a chair that needed four. The flange under the seat was broken and two spindles were cracked. A hole was worn where the chair had rubbed for years against an unknown wall. But, it was an old, oak, office chair and I rescued it.

Bob said that he hated to throw it out but it had been in a pile in the basement for years and he never found a piece of oak thick enough to make a new leg. Besides, a new leg wouldn’t match the other three so the chair wasn’t worth keeping.

Undaunted, I dragged it home to Rick, a champion fixer and descendant of one of West Virginia’s professional tinkers. Because of the propensities of his family, Rick has been surrounded by objects in need of repair and restoration, and he has valiantly tinkered his way through a mountain of projects. It was worth a try.

The chair went from spending years in the school basement to spending years in our basement where it accumulated dust, spider webs and a few new scratches while waiting for a thick piece of oak. Over those years, Andover School acquired a new wing, the site of room 318. At first, room 318 was a study hall and then health classroom but eventually it became my language arts room and I moved in with all of my computers.

It was on the top shelf of the upper cupboard at the far end. I felt it before I saw it and had to climb on a chair to get a good grip. Three inches thick, golden oak, with a wheel on the bottom. I held up the missing chair leg and gave a shout.

That wing of the school wasn’t even a drawing when the chair was broken. How did the leg ever find its way into what became my cupboard? That lonely and lowly, disembodied chair leg had been rescued, more than once I’ll bet, for about eight years. I asked around the school but didn’t find anyone who remembered ever seeing it before. “Nope. I have no idea.”

Inspired by the find, my husband attached the leg, machined a new flange, glued the spindles and installed an engraved plate over the wood filler repairing the hole in the back. Now it really is a very nice, old, oak chair and I think that Bob would have been pleased.