My husband and I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan where we rent a lovely old farmhouse just north of town. The house  is paired with a small 19th century milk shed that I had always envisioned as a studio space, but until six months ago that vision was more of a daydream than a reality.

With the pandemic, naturally we’ve all done some rearranging of priorities, and this past fall I suddenly realized that space really needed to be converted to my ceramics studio, largely due to the fact that I find the constant concern about silica dust when working in my house to be stressful.

The first hurdle to making the milk shed my own was definitely to clean it out. I am kicking myself for not taking a proper “before” photo! This property has been a rental property for some years, and prior to that it had been in the same family since when it was built (1879) and it was obvious by the clutter in the shed that every single person who ever lived here had left something behind. Cleaning it out was kind of like going through a time capsule (of junk) in which I found everything from late 80’s polyester blouses (victorian revival!) with massive shoulder pads to 19th century tools rusted beyond identification. The shed itself is made of poured concrete, with a more recent (but still probably 100+ year old) cracked and heaved concrete floor and it has a lovely old wooden roof and paned windows. It’s apparently just large enough to house literally more than a century of junk (treasures?).

After several days of hauling things out – whether to the curb, or to be stashed in the massive “Michigan basement” in the house, I found myself left with the skeleton of my soon-to-be studio and was both excited, and a little intimidated. The final task was to rake and sweep enough dirt/debris off of the floor to fill more than six 18 gallon muck buckets. It. Was. Gross.

I was left with a cavern of a room containing the original wooden workbench, a strange hutch/wardrobe that looks like it should lead to Narnia, and a kind-of-gross corner shelf with a couple of years worth of Carolina wren nests built into it.

There are a LOT of tasks ahead of me still, including repairing and remounting the old paned windows on their hinges (someone had put plexiglass up instead of them, which was so sad!), adding a birch plywood topper to the workbench, installing a garden-sink, scrubbing out the old wardrobe, installing a framed plaster reclaim bat/wedging station, putting up shelves, and getting the electricity run to the shed so that I can actually fire my kiln! (Don’t worry – I won’t ever be working in the shed any time the kiln is firing!)

Stay tuned!