In the same week we finally finished fitting out the studio, I put the open fire on to warm up in the mid winter chill, noticed a strange smell but couldn’t see anything wrong inside, sat back down, then wondered why there was so much smoke billowing outside. Hmmm… It was just the ENTIRE BLOODY WALL ON FIRE! Seems that the wall cavity had filled up with sawdust over the years, which ignited from the heat of the chimney passing through it, went through the cladding and internal frames and started lapping inside the ceiling. Luckily Emma was around, and cool as a cucumber she manned the fire hose while I frantically ripped the flaming cladding off to remove anything it could keep burning. Bit of a shock, but no major damage luckily, and all quite ironic and amusing in retrospect..

Mike & Hazel Ito are moving back to Hawaii and wanted to give their beautiful collection of furniture a home before leaving, an offer we gratefully took up. So now the studio looks more like a slick New York loft than the stinky store room in the forest it recently was. All I need to do now is work out how to get clients to come for meetings here…

The biggest job all year is making sure there’s enough firewood during winter. We probably go through about 50 or so quartered logs a week over the course of 4-5 months (May > September). This equates to about 10 medium size trees in total, or about 10 trailer loads of logs. The romance of chopping your own wood wears thin pretty quickly - especially on weeks like this when it’s incessantly raining and you need to re-stock supplies. The only way to ensure the wood was ready to burn today was to stack about 100 logs on either side of the fireplace and hope it dries out sufficiently. A nice side effect is a house that now smells like a sauna…

I’ve been able to move back into the studio after Tyson finished putting down the floor. It’s a pretty amazing transformation from what it was previously…

Tyson’s been on site for the past week getting the old studio back into shape. After pulling down the old shed that was partially attached, we’ve re-sealed the exposed wall with recycled colorbond, laid some termifloor over the old particle board flooring, given it a lick of white paint and are now laying some basic Ikea laminate flooring. It’ll be weird to not work in the corner of a salmon-coloured, leaking, bat-infested storeroom any more…