Our Handcrafted Journey: Moving a Home and a Handcrafted Life

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. Soooooooooo much has happened in the last four months! First, and foremost, we have moved. That means that we not only had to get our house ready to sell and move, but we also had to move our business, PAWS IN TIME, since it, too, is in the house. My, oh my, what a time.

We got a place that is about ½ the size of our old house, so we had to downsize considerably, which isn’t a bad thing, but frustrating when trying to make everything fit inside the new place. A real bonus of the new place is that we now have about an acre to plant a garden, have a few hens, let the dogs run (in a fenced area of course). After having lived in town on a very small lot for the past six years, we are so excited!! It’s also by the water, which is calming. When we go for our walk in the morning, we step out on our rural road and see the bay. Just beautiful.

However, the new place was in desperate need of renovation. We’ve lived in an RV for several months while fixing things – starting with the majors…plumbing, plumbing and more plumbing, roof replaced, putting sheet rock in, floorboards down, cleaning and painting. I never thought I would know so much about sheet rock - the different types, how many sheets can be fit into a Dodge Caravan (weight and measurement wise), how to use sheet rock mud and tape. Who knew there would be so much to know? But we’re finally in and even though there is still lots of work to be done, it’s nice to be in.

Here's a picture of what the house looked like when we first got it. Note the roof - truly a "green" roof with all the moss.

Next time, I'll include a picture of how it looks now.

Thankfully, there is a fairly good-sized sunny landing at the top of the stairs and that is now where PAWS IN TIME resides. It has a deck off of it with a fabulous old maple tree covering the whole area. We also use a downstairs back room for drilling tiles. I was terribly spoiled in our old place because I had room for everything. I loved looking at all my materials - even what I wasn't currently using. I could say to myself, “Someday I’d like to try making such and such out of that.” Unfortunately, a lot of those creativity inducing items that I’ve been collecting will need to stay tucked away. However, I will try to keep the boxes handy for those days when I want to do a little treasure hunting to try something different.

My work area is ready (cleaned, painted, carpet down) for all my stuff to be put out…Yeehaw! All the materials for our Scrabble Bracelets and Scrabble Pendants are out and organized. Due to our move, our inventory was down from over 400 items to under 200. Yikes! We’ve been busily making bracelets to rebuild our stock. The holiday season is looming. This was to be the year that we got ahead and had plenty of stock for the holidays. Hmm…guess not. But we are going to do our best to have enough stock to at least have an acceptable season.

We even took our personalized gift / custom bracelet listing off for a while to get caught up, but it's now back up and we've had several orders in the last few weeks where people use their own pictures on a Scrabble bracelet. I’ve been using the tiles as fast as my htp (husband type person) can drill them. Now, I really need to start on our vintage art dog frames…as soon as I can find the box the glue and seal are in.

Well, I better get going, but before I sign off, I thought I’d share a couple of our newer bracelets. I did have time to create a couple of new ones. Always love that!