General Update

I thought I’d give you a brief update on what is currently happening here. Quite a lot of work has been done to the outhouse and the future studio. In the picture above you can see the damp-proofing stuff on the floor. That was some smelly stuff! The workers worked shifts with one going in, putting it on the floor and running out and gasp for air while the other runs in. Luckily the area isn’t that big and it got done quickly. Then it needed to sit for a day. They opened the windows to let the stink out. – And I should say, maybe, that indeed it has all gone now.

Then I flew to Germany for a long weekend, Hamburg to be precise. I met up with my mother and two of my three sisters, and we spend a grand day exploring the city. On Sunday I met with my sister in law and a fellow message-in-a-bottle-writer Ina, and we tossed some bottles into the river Elbe. I am going to write a detailed dispatch report on my other blog shortly, right now it is not yet finished, though.

And when I came back to my little outhouse studio this morning, I found that it has been painted, and the flooring now is in place. The skirting needs another coat of paint, and then it is ready for me and my inventory to move in.

The outhouse now is completely damp-proofed and insulated. It would be absolutely fine as an additional bedroom. Actually this is what many of the people working there thought it was going to be. The walls are double brick walls, then comes some air insulation and a damp-proof membrane, then plasterboard on top, plaster and paint. The roof is insulated and overed with isolated plasterboard, plaster, paint. The floor has been damp-proofed and then in went some vinyl. It looks surprisingly good, I think, with even some structure in it that matches the print-on images. Very convincing. The only downside with the damp-proof membrane is that drilling in the wall, or any holes in the wall are a bit of pain and should be avoided. However, this is a semi-detached outhouse, and the shared wall doesn’t have a membrane. So this is were pretty much anything that I want to hang is going to go. the walls with the windows and door are too low to hang anything anyway, my plan is to have working tables along these walls with storage space underneath. That leaves me some additional workspace in the middle of the room, I think. I’ll have to see how big it really is once everything is in place.

That brings me to another topic: I have received several emails in which people ask me when my thread will be available again. The answer is, I don’t know yet. Right now the thread is in boxes, and I don’t have anywhere to unpack it yet. Our moving date is June 4th. I had been hoping to move Büchertiger before then, but currently it looks like this won’t work. So it might be mid June until I’ll open again.