The Artist's Cottage

When we moved into our house last year, there was an extra room attached to the garage.  A simple room with windows and electricity and heat.  You can safely bet that Abby begged for weeks to be able to use it as her bedroom.  You'd win the jackpot if you also bet that we firmly denied that request each and every time (Because, really?  A teenager in a room that is not connected to the main house?  No good can come of that).

   

I don't know if it was pitched to us as an extra cottage, or if we later found out that the previous owners were artists, but we took to calling it the Artist's Cottage and that is how we still refer to it today.  For the first few months the Artist's Cottage housed all of our moving detritus - the stuff we couldn't find an immediate home for.  Then winter blew in and it suddenly became a catch-all for our summer stuff - bikes and stroller and wagon and sandbox toys all found their winter respite in the Artist's Cottage.

We spent the winter dreaming big dreams for the space - my favorite being an extra guest bedroom. But that would require a little more work that we have time for during Uriah's busy season, so it continued to sit through the spring as extra storage space.  Finally early in the summer I gutted most of it.  I threw away a ton of junk, swept up a sandbox of dirt and rocks and dust.  I found homes for the items that needed to get out of there and organized the items that remained.

And suddenly it turned into an Artist's Cottage again.  We brought out all of the crayons, markers, craft stuff. The paints and the paint brushes, paper, coloring books and scissors, even the sewing machine all found their happy homes on the shelves of the cottage.  I strung up some string with clothes pins to dry pictures and I brought a bin of Uriah's old toys out for Finn to play with; I set up a very big table in the middle and stuck some of our folding chairs around it - giving space for imaginations and crafty ideas.

And over the course of the summer, Finn would ask me to open up the cottage for him and he'd play planes, or play-dough or color pictures.  Abby and her friends would visit in there and they even did a couple of paint craft projects.  We used it and we loved it.  But somehow, when I walked in there earlier this week, the play-dough had melted all over the table, the pieces of paper craft projects were scattered over the floor. The blow-up pool had found a temporary home in there, along with our charcoal, bird food, and a bag of quick-set cement.

In other words: the Artist's Cottage was more like an Artist's Junk Pit.  So I swept and organized.  I threw things away and stored things in the garage.  I scrubbed all the grody, melty play-dough off of the table and cleaned up the shelves. 

And although organizing that room was very, very low on my list of tasks to tackle this week, once again we can use the cottage for it's intended purpose: art and imagination.