UNSCHEDULED: kiln surprise

Nothing used and suitable was popping up on Craigslist and when I calculated how many mugs I’d have to sell to break even on a new one, it got me pretty down. I admit I looked into doing a go-fund me, but at the end of the day, asking my friends and family for cash for a kiln of MY dreams felt ick when everyone is working so hard on the basics and not always getting to their own dreams of music, surfing, travel, yogaing etc. Plus my spouse was still saying, let’s do this! Let’s just do it right, it’s an investment, it’s too late in the game to get cheap.

So it was time to brainwash myself into spending the retirement savings again! At least I wasn’t spending $200 a month on the community studio and I had basically paid off the construction as we did it with a side gig of after school ceramics for little kids down the street.

Sketch by Raina Mast

But then my friend from the pottery studio called me and told me her friend had a kiln that had been given to her by her church after they had nowhere to put it and no way to use it anymore. The friend had accepted it a few years ago but, because she was a renter, needed the landlord to agree to install the electric to run it in the patio outside of her apartment, which he would not budge on, apparently. So there it had sat under a tarp. And she was moving and decided to NOT move it with her. She was looking for someone to take it off her hands.

The kiln was an 18” Cress from the early 90s. I looked into how much it would cost to revamp all the wiring and put in a new controller. It was smaller and old and would use more electric than the newer thicker-bricked ones that I was shopping for from Skutt…. but it was FREE. And Cress is a good company and it was made before all the crazy planned obsolescence.

The owner of it and I chatted about figuring out a custody order, so to speak, in case she ever got a place where she could plug it in, but in the end she sort of was like, nah, it’s time to say goodbye to this thing and wish it on its merry way. And she didn’t want anything for it since she had gotten it for free and wasn’t sure if it worked. I’m not sure where she moved to but I am grateful to her for letting me adopt her kiln no strings attached.

Will got his truck and Andy and I jumped in and went to get it. It was only a few blocks away, but it was heavy and my back was not good that day so I watched. As her relief to get it out of the way exhaled, I was getting filled with excitement. Energy can’t be created or destroyed!

I organized the little pieces of kiln furniture and we removed the handles to get it through her apartment and then, bippity boppity boop, I had a kiln. We got it out into the studio and plugged it in. And bibbity bippity boop it turned on!

I’ve invested in getting it to fire correctly and feel like it’s pretty dependable now. It’s a bit of a codependent relationship we have- kilns are sort of bratty by nature and can’t imagine leaving someone else to fire it because of the little things I’ve learned that make it functional: how to angle the kiln cone in the sitter, how much to compensate for kiln assembly being set too low, where the best spots are in the kiln, how to deal with the exhaust fan when the switch doesn’t work, etc.

In the pottery world, people name their kilns. If you have any suggestions, for a fussy but loveable old kiln, please leave a comment!

Notes on first firing. Photo by Raina Mast

UNSCHEDULED: construction

I’m very cheap. Nice things are usually overrated wants that I don’t really need, so building a home pottery studio started out with a zero dollar budget in my mind.

Accepting that we would actually need to spend money was a process. My spouse and I have a therapeutic saying when we need to joke away our buyers remorse after falling for a sale, “You have to spend money to save money.” This saying also applied to wrapping my head around an $18,800 studio quote: 1. if I stayed at the community studio for at least 94 more months (9.83 years) at $200 a month, I’d have paid the same $18,800 and have no home studio. If I was going to be doing pottery for longer than 9.83 years, it was worth it to build it. You gotta spend money to save money. 2. It would add value to our property if we ever sold it, if not as a ceramics studio than as as an exercise space or writers cave. You gotta spend money to make money. 3. We were getting a very reasonable quote from someone we trusted and loved and I would much rather give my money to a friend than a stranger. (Will is our neighbor who helped remove our stump; See prior journal UNSCHEDULED: tree) I knew he’d do amazing work, collaborate well, not leave me hanging, and getting me in there ASAP so I could start making money with my pots. You gotta spend money to make money later! And better to spend money on a dear friend’s hard work! 4. Pottery is a physical sport. If I was saving my money to retire at 70 and pursue my clay dreams then, chances are my arthritus and herniated disks would be worse and put a limit on age 65 wheel throwing. So I convinced myself that spending my retirement savings now was sort of like early retirement in a way (even though I’m still working my teaching job). I could do what I was planning to make me happy in retirement NOW instead of waiting and not being able to actually have the happy retirement I was hoping for do to aging. So, yeah, you gotta spend money to, well, not just save money. You gotta live life now as fully as possible, even if it means retiring later! Life is short. We don’t know how long we’ve got. If you build it, they will come. You get the point :)

The building process was clear to Will, but I learned a lot. People often ask me how long it took and about the electric etc and it makes me realize in retrospect how much I didn’t know before we got that stump out of the ground. I had no idea in what order things had to happen— do you buy a used kiln and then do the electric to match it and build the space to be big enough? Or do you do figure out the max space and limit of electric and then find a kiln to match later?

The following is a summary of all the things it took to build the studio, written out in approximate chronological order (some things overlapped). I hope it helps anyone who is thinking about building a home studio for themself:

1) SIZE: Will knew the building codes and told me the biggest square footage we could fit and the height limit. There’s a reason that Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Amazon have so many prefab sheds online— most cities only require permits if a shed is over about 100 square foot max. SF is 100; my home town is 120. Check your city building code before you build. If you have less limits on time, land, and money, then, obviously you can ignore this part and build a pottery mansion studio and deal with all the permits and inspections, etc. I looked at ADUs for a millisecond, but we have such a little property, we didn’t seriously consider pushing this to something we’d get a second mortgage for. Also, if you’re considering using part of your existing living space, be very careful. In fact, I’d not recommend it at all unless you have separate Hvac for the studio (you do not want clay silica blowing into your home giving you potters lung). I also can’t imagine watching a kiln as it gets to 2,200 degrees and not worry about burning down the whole house. Maybe I live with too many combustibles.

3D mock-up by Will Hassinger

2) DIMENSIONS AND ORIENTATION: I sketched a birdseye view of the yard about a bunch of times to figure out the best spot for the studio. Sun or shade? Do I want people to see what I’m doing from the house? Do I want it as a centerpiece with a little stage porch to play concerts on with jack or something that blends in? 10x 10 or 9x11? or 9.5 x 10.5?!! Now that the stump was gone, there was even freedom to move the trampoline! I decided to build studio against the fence skinny side of the 8X12 rectangle facing the house, so it didn’t close off the space so much. So no concert porch. :(

Sketch by Raina Mast

3)INTERIOR LAYOUT: I also drew a bunch of zoom ins of the interior of the studio: where the wheel would go, shelves, and most importantly how big a kiln I needed and could fit in the space. Most kilns need to be 18 inches away from all walls and surfaces.

Sketch by Raina Mast

4)WHICH KILN: I obsessed over kilns for a long time. Kilns are the biggest expense in a home studio. You want one that is good on electric, fits your work, and fits in your space safely I don’t like running kilns if they are at all empty. But I also have made big work like platters and sculptures. If I went too big, the kiln would take forever to get completely loaded and leave no space for a work table or storage. If I went to small, I’d be like that artist I met in PA whose paintings felt claustrophobic and when I asked why she didn’t go bigger, she explained it was because she limited herself to only canvas that fit into her little Honda trunk.

5) KILN ELECTRIC REQUIREMENTS:

Once I narrowed down approximate size and which brand I liked, then I had to listen to contractor Will’s electric lessons on amps and phases that would work that far from the very crowded little electric box . The Skutt kiln website was easy for this part and I narrowed it down to:

KMT-1018 23”x 23.x 18” high

or

KMT-1027 23” x 23“ x 27” high.

Both followed Will’s restrictions on single phase, 240 volts, and under 50 amps.

Both were very expensive new, but Andy said I’d be doing this for the rest of my life, so even if we didn’t buy it right now, we needed to lay the electric for when we finally did get it. “If we’re goin to do this, we are going to do this!” In the mean time, I checked craigslists for used ones and could keep firing at the community studio.

6)ELECTRIC ESTIMATES to run electric for my dream kiln. (AKA the part that stalled the project)

FYI, you can’t just run an extension cord and plug in a kiln! (I learned that some clothing dryers do have the same volts/amps as a kiln, so you can look into changing the socket for the weird kiln plug if say you have your dryer in a separate building like a garage. But chances are you’ll need to run new electric. )

Electric in SF requires a permit so you need a real electrician that can get everything to code under the permit and you need to get the permit closed with an inspection that it was done right.

I’m so bad at making appointments. I’m even worse if I have to talk into a phone. But I called around and it turns out that there are a bunch of electricians dealing with running new electric from the fuse boxes in our area because of all the electric car charging going on. The problem is, they already have enough work doing these boxes all over so they weren’t so interested in my weird job.

But we got 3 estimates and eventually I passed the buck to Will as my official general contractor and he dealt with interviewing the electricians and helped us decide which plan sounded the best. Since we were running electric to the back of the yard, we landed on investing in a thicker conduit to carry the current across the distance. This would prevent fuses blowing.

I would say it took a good 6 months of a lot of patience with busy electricians and bogus estimates to get this completely set and scheduled. Once we had electric decided, things really started to flow. (pun) We just had to build the space the electric would go to!

7) CONCRETE- We could have done a cabin like structure of a wooden platform hovering above the ground. This would have lessened our costs and our carbon footprint. My old colleague did this for her home ceramics, as did a writer friend. We chatted about how to keep raccoons from nesting underneath. I contemplated this design, but dealing with clay drips between boards just seemed like a silica nightmare and I landed on concrete as worth it.

It was a small enough space that we *could have done a bunch of bags of concrete and mixed them ourselves. But it's not that expensive to get a truck compared to how much our backs would thank us and it IS worth it to have one, nice flowing pour to fill up the forms all at one time.

This was a fun step in the build. I obsessed over flattening the dirt the days before Will came and used a level and put the forms down. Then the truck showed up with the long snuffleupagus hose that pumped it all the way from the street the back yard. Then we tapped it to try to get the bubbles to rise and we took long four by fours across the top of it to make it perfectly flat, then we brushed it, and then we watched it dry and wiped it some more after it dried. It was so smooth that I didn’t think I’d put flooring on top of it.

(Video above of Will Hassinger of WILLBUILT.COM taken by Raina Mast, May 19, 2023)

8)FINALIZE ARCHITECTURE- While we waited for the concrete to cure, we got to work on final decisions and gathering all the things to build. You wouldn’t think that there’s much to be decided for a one room structure. However, there were about 100 conversations about which way to slant the roof, the roofing material, what the outside finish would be. We decided on rain falling towards the property fence into rain barrels hidden behind the studio, the higher opening towards the middle of the yard where you walk in. We talked shingles, but eventually agreed to just board and batten with sheets of plywood and some nice slats to cover the seams.

9)OBSESS OVER WINDOWS: I spent hours looking for free shit on Craigslist. I found the sliding door, a long window for the fence side 12 foot wall, and a crazy big sky light that an old man had us dig out from his garage by moving a bunch of heavy things for him to get to it. It was pretty fun “free”.

For the 8 foot wide walls, I searched for stainglass and considered a collage of vintage old panes like a house in India I saw and loved. However, my neighbor Bonnie had misbought a couple windows that were oriented the wrong way and couldn’t return them, so she gave them to me! Glass on all sides! Woohoo! We washed them down and stored them for later.

10)WILL BUILDS- Will is a one-man show. It was incredible to watch him go. Reminded me of the Amish in PA except he had no help. He’s got grit. He bought all the materials, brought all the right tools, AND kept track of receipts! One day, I came home and all four walls were up. The next day, a temporary roof was put on to keep out the rain while we worked on the other parts of the project. Our friends came over and checked it out.

Friends enjoying the space May 26, 2023. Photo by Raina Mast

11)DIG ELECTRIC DITCH- Once the studio was standing and Will decided where the electric sockets and lighters were going, we had to get ready for the electrician to arrive and install. You have to bury the conduit pretty deep so no one hits it with a shovel gardening, 24 inches, I think? To save money, (I know eye roll) we asked the electrician if he’d give us a discount if we dug our own ditch. I think we cut off $300. My spouse got to get his dad crocs dirty and blast his music and be very proud of his big ditch. Win win. It was a very nice ditch. Will sawed the concrete patio open nice and neatly and we even got to de-clog our rain drain while we had access to the house water pipes. Another milisecond rabbit hole I went down was looking at putting a powder room “shed” (outhouse?) off the back corner with a pulverizer toilet. We were going to dig a ditch to run the electric, so we could run some water and sewage pipes. But nah, I have a good bladder that can make it up the stairs to the apartment. But if you are thinking of running water out, those pipes supposedly can go in the same ditch above the electric conduit.

12) INSTALL SKYLIGHT: The dome skylight added extra engineering and wood cuts, but it was so worth it. Will worked on this over the summer so that it could just get popped on after we got home from being back East. The installation was no joke, but it fit like a glove. Will laid the roofing and I caulked around the skylight with some extra good sealant he gave me to be sure it’s airtight. Will says there are two types of skylights, ones that leak and ones that don’t leak yet. I have the latter!

Will installs roof framing for skylight on September 21, 2023. Photo by Raina Mast.

tah-dah! Will installs skylight September 23, 2023. Photo by Raina Mast

13) DRYWALL (October 2023) I learned a lot about drywall. One, it’s very easy to cut. I did most of it by myself after some instruction from Will on how far apart nails go and how to work his little air hammer. It was like quilting. I liked taping and spackling. I hate sanding. I guess everyone does. For paint, I primed and then did a couple coats of a good gallon of green paint. For the interior, I decided against semi gloss even though it’d be easier to wash down. I’m not that messy so I like the matte finish. Feels like I’m surrounded by moss in the sun.

Photo by Raina Mast

For the exterior, I labored over whether to leave it wood and just stain it and polyurethane, all white, or a dark color to have it blend in more to the surroundings. I decided on dark and my interior designer sister-in-law weighed in on the hue. After two coats, I saw I was hitting the palette from my elementary Catholic school uniform, nostalgic and familiar, but brightened up a bit.

Photo from Etsy shop AboutTimeDesign

Photo by Raina Mast.

14) MOVING IN: While Will built, I was gathering the interior necessities. I found the perfect amount of Pergo flooring and underlayment on Craigslist. (I decided the smooth concrete was too cold). Someone down the street was giving away nice old wooden book shelves. We stopped in Sausailito for a free ikea chair on the way home from a hike. I had stored my wheel under a tarp outdoors for my balcony studio and could finally let it breath indoors. All the bookshelves fit nicely. The first time I brought in a bucket of water and my tools to throw the window sills and trim weren’t completed and I was still using the community kiln, but I couldn’t wait to get into the space and get to work! Unbelievably, it had only been 14 months since the tree had fallen on September 22, 2022 until the last day of my membership at the community studio November 23, 2023! My home studio had been built! The best lemonade out of lemons experience EVER!!! The first time I threw in there was a core grown up memory. So quiet, so well lit, so alone to experiment and make mistakes. All I needed was to save up and get my kiln. Little did I know there was another suprise in store for me! I’ll write about that in my next journal: UNSCHEDULED: kiln

All moved in. Photo by Raina Mast.

UNSCHEDULED: tree

A tree fell and I heard it.

Back story: right before the pandemic, we moved from our teacher housing to go in on buying a building with two apartments with my father-in-law. He’s a great neighbor! The bonus of finding this little property was NOT that I got to share one bathroom with my beloved family of five, it was that it had this big momma tree in the back yard that was bigger than the house and became our living room and playroom. It was the key to our sanity during the pandemic when even the playgrounds were closed. We hung swings and trapezes and placed a hammock under it to watch the kids play under the bow of its branches.

Momma tree in the yard. Photo by Raina Mast, 2019. (Photoshop used for child privacy)

But in the fall of 2022 (no foreshadowing pun intended), we had some rainy days, and then a few really hot days, and our thirsty old Italian pine sucked up too much water at once and the next morning at around 7:45, it split itself in half from the weight of its branches. At least that was the arborist’s theory.

I was leaving for work when I heard the loud pop. How weird to remember sound. (Try it, it’s a fun meditation if you need to procrastinate or calm down— think of the way the last time you heard a dog bark or how people sang happy birthday to you or your first concert. I’m a visual thinker so maybe remembering sound is harder for me. People say you don’t remember the pain of labor once the baby is out, but that’s another weird thing I can remember if I think really hard. Please comment on this if you have thoughts! I’m curious how other people remember their senses).

Anyway, when I heard the pop, I just thought someone had slammed down a dumpster down the block. I actually left for work through the yard and did not see the tree had fallen because I was reading an email on my phone. So I didn’t know what the sound was until Andy called me and said, “Did you see the tree fell?” I cried a lot over the following days. I probably looked crazy to my art teacher coworkers as we talked about our new Wabi Sabi book and I fought back tears in reading, “Wabi sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” (Koren, page 7)

The tree had such a presence in our lives and there was no saving it. It was just a giant mess to clean up.

Tree on Trampoline, September, 2022.

It was very sad. And expensive. Insurance companies don’t see value in trees like a bike being stolen or a fire burning a cabinet or even the stuff a tree breaks. Oddly, half of the tree landed on the trampoline, which not only bounced back after the tree was gone, but also kept the weight of the tree hovering from breaking the old fence. So home insurance covered nothing. My spouse is as cheap as me so we ended up deciding we’d pay for its removal just to the stump, saving money by convincing ourselves that removing the stump ourselves would be no big deal if we had to do it. We tried to live with it, but it was taking up the whole corner of our small yard and limiting what the heck we could do: put a table over it?

Removing a stump is no fun. Outside the city, I hear you can burn it out. We pondered how long mushrooms would take to eat away at it. We regretted just not coughing up more money for the arborist to use a big drill thing. Yes, we did save money, but were in for a very rude awakening… and a lovely showing up of neighbors to support Andy in one of his most romantic gestures in our 10 year relationship.

While I was away for ten days for the trip of my life in Argentina, Andy dropped everything to not only take care of the kids, but dig down 6 feet deep and 15 feet around the stump and sap root. It was like a whole upside down tree under there.

Our neighbor Will is a contractor who does everything AND is a wonderful friend; the type of guy that goes out in a giant rainstorm and makes sure every neighbor’s drain is unclogged of debris. He reminds me so much of my ironworker grandfather whose hands were always jacked up from working with them all day. So Will came and hacked out the roots with a little saw one log at a time. Amy, Will’s wife jumped in to get swole lifting logs and helping get the sand out the way. Little by little, they chunked away at the stump.

To say it was moving to be half way around the world and receive those text messages of them happily working so hard is an understatement. Up until that point, the pottery studio felt like a pipe dream, something so far off because I thought I’d be watching mushrooms for two years before I could even think about laying concrete. It’s not that I was putting my dreams on hold, it just felt undoable, unaffordable, unnecessary. My old roomie Catherine would point to my “only-the-potatoes” life philosophy to blame. I am a busy minimalist who does not like fusses to be made. I don’t think I do it in an annoying martyr way, more of like an annoying “I’m seriously fine with my life the way it is” risk-averse and maybe lazy sort of way. And I am good at visualizing big ideas and coming up with 10,000 possible solutions, but I have major trouble making final decisions and pulling the trigger to start big things. So to have my partner set it all in motion was a huge weight lifted, a gift of opening a giant door to my future. We don’t gush feelings for each other, but I hope he knows how life-changing that damn stump removal was. It set it all in motion.

Once that inertia took hold, the project flowed quite quickly. Will is a fabulous contractor who set me up with doable questions to obsess over and get back to him so he could go to his next step. In ADHD support, there is something called body doubling where you are more productive if you have someone there to even just watch, like when happens when kids get more homework done if they sit down at a table together while parents cook. Or when you try to record music by yourself vs. when someone else is there when you press record. Will not only offered skills as my contractor, he cared about my dream and got a kick out of solving the many problems I created. Our chit chats and sit down sketches with two pencils created amazing accountability and a drive to keep chipping away quickly at the project. It wasn’t because we were on a tight schedule— this thing could be built as fast or as slow as we were willing to push it— it was the happiness along the way of checking things off together. The camaraderie really kept me focused on completing the tedious tasks along the way and the home studio was built way faster than I would have guessed. I’d still be watching mushrooms eat a stump if I only had myself making decisions around here. I don’t think I would have ever invested in myself like that if I were alone, which is sad in a way. Sort of like how I took so much better care of my body when there was a fetus to worry about in there. I’ll admit that there’s a huge part of me that imagines I’d be chasing art dreams more if I didn’t have my family filling up my life. But I don’t think I’d have my studio or even my wheel if it weren’t for being partnered up with someone who wants to share the busy parent life and back my ambitions. Maybe my family actually makes me pursue my art more in those quick moments in-between all the responsibilities and QT. I may not be making as much art as a single lady, but the art I do make means a lot to me.

I’ll make a separate post of the actually steps we took to get the pottery shed built.