Resurfacing

So I've been in Lowell nearly 6 months and life is finally returning to something like normal. Is it the new normal? The move ended up being tough because I was out of town two weekends in a row prior to the move and sure enough the night before I found myself up at 4 in the morning giving up on packing the kitchen. I ended up finishing the move the following weekend. But at least with what did get moved, the movers were great. They even came in under the estimate. I was worried about them having to deal with the stairs at the new place, but it wasn't a problem at all.

What ate up my summer was getting the place into liveable condition. Though everything was brand new, the floor was coated in some kind of weird rusty dust. It was drywall dust, but there were other things in it. Sweeping did virtually nothing. Vacuuming was laughable. The only thing that worked was scrub-scrub-scrubbing. I didn't have a shopvac so I just mopped it all up with big sponges. Had I not already moved in I would have stripped it with an acid wash. Because while the paint I used did adhere, it came up very easily with any little scuff. Over time it hardened a bit so it doesn't scrape up as easily as it did back in July. I went this way because I didn't want to deal with the dust any longer. It had to have been unhealthy. I'm planning to redo it maybe next year with a different kind of paint that will make it smoother. I totally miss being able to slide around in my socks like i could at the last place. I wish I knew how they did their floors. It might have been polished epoxy resin.

As I neared finishing the floor, my bed arrived. I'll go into detail about that in another blog post, but all I'll say right now is it was a major undertaking. It was expensive and scary, but it's awesome! Then there was the painting of the walls, the 2 attempts at getting the bathroom color right, the mural in the kitchen and most recently part 1 of a mural for the hallway. And so many other projects to come!

Somewhere in all of this I am slowly finding time to make artwork again and I've been opening up for open studios. It's funny to have been so distracted by the apartment thing since making art is the reason I'm here. At the same time I am reminded that about 10 years ago I briefly thought about going to school for either interior design or architecture. I figured since I couldn't find work as an information architect, why not be a real architect. 'Course now I know a lot of them struggle in various ways too. I'm still pretty obsessed with it. But I can still learn enough about all this stuff without going to school. It's the great thing about these modern times.