The Honest Courtesan

For the past three years, I’ve had a regular feature sharing the progress on building the annex to my house, but there’s a lot of work around here that I rarely mention.  Of course when I was working on the inside I talked about that, and I recently wrote about extending the paddock.  But it wasn’t just the main house that was in poor condition when we bought this property, and we’ve had to do considerable work on the outbuildings as well.  Last summer Jae did a lot of work to straighten out the garage, but Grace’s shop was still in such a disorganized shop she felt overwhelmed every time she walked in the door.  Then last Christmas two friends gave her worktables, one for woodwork and one for welding, and during the warm spell last month I was able to cajole her out to the garage to set the woodwork table up.  As I expected, that got her rolling; she next wanted to set up the welding table, but her shop was such a cluttered mess (due to everyone using it as the default place to stow anything that had no designated place) that she was forced to go through it methodically, putting each tool and other asset into its proper place and getting rid of accumulated junk and trash.  I’m letting her set her own pace with it, but if I work nearby I can ask “Where does this go?” and be available to take things away or help her move heavy equipment.  Just Saturday I burned three full barrels of garbage and a few extra odds and ends (and our burn barrel is a 55-gallon drum), then swept out a staggering amount of dirt, metal shavings, sawdust and other refuse, so the place is actually starting to look like one where she can work; she also has a wood-burning stove in there which has never been set up, and I plan to run the chimney for it when I run the one for the atrium stove.  I also need to get up on the roof sometime in the next two months to lay down a waterproofing coat in order to stop a few persistent leaks, and we need to wire some new outlets in both shop and garage.  But with any luck, by this autumn the outbuildings will be more orderly and usable than at any time since I bought the place, and that gives me tremendous satisfaction.