Do you have a favorite something in your workspace? Maybe a chair that has taken on your shape to the point that you aren’t comfortable with anything else? Maybe it’s that favorite easel or how the natural light comes into your room. Well, I have something in my studio that is essential to my well being.

My Buffalo, NY Studio

When we moved to Ohio, I gave up a large 1st floor room flooded in light that I used as my studio. It was at the back of the house with the windows looking out onto our long, narrow backyard in the city of Buffalo.

My view was a row of arborvitae on one side of the yard and a high fence on the other that you actually couldn’t see due to the thousands of blood-red climbing roses covering it. At the end of the yard was the tallest tree in the city. You could see it for miles. It was my little bit of heaven.

I Gave Up My Studio for This

My Ohio studio is difficult to work in. This is disastrous for an artist. I know. Our new house didn’t have a big, unused space on the first floor, nor did it have the walk-out basement I was hoping for. So, I found myself in its’ unfinished basement.

My half of the basement is not much bigger than my room in Buffalo. It has two tiny windows without a view and the space is dark. It used to have three, but we eliminated it because the sun would come in at an angle that was blinding for part of the day.

The “Fixes” Weren’t Working

A great deal of money was spent to outfit the basement with lighting that simulated natural light. My brain, though, knows the difference. And nothing could be done about the lack of a view.

New furniture was brought in to make it comfortable and shelving galore for all my collections of art “stuff”. It’s not that my husband didn’t try.

I was unhappy and I could only work in there for a few hours at a time. And even then I kept making up excuses to come up into the sunny kitchen numerous times in the day.

I Went Back to Teaching Full Time

I don’t know if it was mainly to distance myself from the basement studio, or that I felt teaching art was my calling. Whatever it was, I found myself teaching in the City of Cleveland for 21 years. First at John Marshall High School, the largest high school in the city at the time, then seven years later at the new John Hay School of Architecture & Design. At John Hay, I had a huge studio for my ceramics, architecture and general art classes, with a wall of windows on one side and a door to the grassy yard just outside my room.

Across from the hall was a large kiln room with two large kilns and shelving for all the kiln furniture, tons of clay, molds, glazes, and tools. Next to that was an almost massive storage room for all my supplies that didn’t fit in the cabinetry above my three sinks in the classroom.

A bit further down the hallway was my own computer lab with 26 computers, scanners, a wide format printer, cameras enough for every student and photo equipment where I taught photography and digital imaging. It was ideal and every other art teacher in the district was jealous.

I can’t stand listening to myself saying the same things repeatedly, so it was perfect for me to teach six different art courses each year.  I soon forgot about my dreary home studio.

Back to the Home Studio

In 2020 I retired and had to face the home studio once again. I was looking forward to get back to being a full time artist. I would work in the studio but would come back upstairs every day with an aching back. Was it the environment? Was it a psychological thing?

My husband, Jim, thought my working table was not the right height for me and came up with the brilliant idea of a table that raises and lowers to the ideal height for what I was working on at the time.

Yes, just like my inability to teach two classes of the same thing, I was no better at sticking to one medium at home either.

He purchased a metal framed workbench with a butcher block top…the kind you find in woodworking shops. It was 7’ long but only 2’ wide. Too narrow to be practical for the studio. The cool thing is that it had a mechanism with a handle that you could easily crank up and down for whatever height you wanted!

No problem with the narrow width for Jim. He made a metal frame that was 4’ wide to replace the original frame and used everything else from the workbench. A replacement wood top is available for these workbenches, so we bought a second one.

In Ohio we have one of the largest Amish communities in the USA. They are close to where we live and are handy with woodworking. We delivered the two tabletops and they seamlessly put the two together to create a 4’x7’ tabletop.

That new wooden top slipped perfectly into the metal frame Jim made and voila! The perfect studio worktable was born!

Perfect for Anyone Who Works at a Table

In fact, this table DID fix my problem with my back! I had been hunching over the old table putting a lot of strain on my lower back. I found that when I was sewing, I needed it at a different height from when I was creating a stained glass window. And another height when I was cutting matboard to frame a painting… and still another height for a different project. This adjustable table is something I think everyone needs in their studio or workroom, because no matter what you do in your special space, you need a table that is specifically for you. Such a great idea.

Conclusion

Now I’m not saying that my studio is suddenly a delight to work in, but it sure is outfitted with everything I need PLUS a great worktable, big enough to do whatever I want on. In fact, the idea of an adjustable table went over so well that I have two more adjustable tables (2’x6’ and 2’x7’) in my studio for other purposes.

I’ll have to tell you more about my Ohio studio in another post. Spoiler alert… whenever my artist friends come over for the first time, they exclaim “This is like Disneyland for artists!”