Marja-Leena Rathje
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floor.jpg
the first coat

The domestic scene here has kept us very busy lately. We arranged to have the worn-down hardwood floors in the main living areas of our home refinished. In the end it will be lovely but it has been an incredible amount of work to remove all the furniture, the art work, the knick-knacks, the plants, and clean out the fridge - like moving house! Fortunately we've been able to settle into a space downstairs formerly occupied originally by my late parents. This entailed taking down linens, clothing, kitchen stuff, personal necessities, and computers of course!

A side benefit of all this work has been the clearing out of unnecessary and no longer used stuff, being the packrats we are! (Maybe that's why many people move every four and a half years?) Once the floors are dry and hardened, we will take advantage of the cleared spaces and having to wash down everything but the floor anyway, by painting the ceilings and walls. So it will be a few weeks before we are back to living in our normal but freshly renewed spaces. No, dear readers, there's not much art being done, as usually happens in my summers with their various domestic and holiday distractions. My little studio is also inaccessible beyond those transforming floors, with no room to work in it anyway with the piles of books on the table and other household stuff on the floor! But I still have my Mac and can still blog now and then to satisfy the creative urge!

Marja-Leena | 21/07/2005 | 5 comments
themes: Being an Artist, Home


5 comments

and wow, what a great image :)

Moving and renovating can be a very exciting experience, but don't do it twice a year.

That happened to me some years ago, and it nearly killed me, well at least it made my my neck and shoulders very, very old.

Glad you like it, Karen!

Welcome to these pages, Pirkko! I already have a bad neck & shoulders from many years of renovating, heavy gardening and of course, it's an occupational hazard for printmakers. :)

Oh, you'll feel so utterly deeep clean and organised. Well worth the agony. I bet that you start some entirely new line of work when you get back into that pristine environment.

Thanks Anna, I hope so. The floors look lovely right now - the guys did a great job, but there's fine wood dust thick everywhere even though they covered the kitchen cabinets with plastic, so there's a lot of work yet. Cleaning isn't my favourite activity :-)