Hello hello! Happy everything to everybody, it's a new year which means we're that much closer to the beginning of a new world and The Brickhouse coming to life in full. Here's what's happened since we last spoke:
-The floors here have been completely refinished, bringing a new glow of original maple into our space.
-I've moved into the new frontier and am essentially camping indoors at The Brickhouse, complete with foldable single bed on wheels. Minus the thumping of sprinting children on the floor above us, the intermittent dropping of what sounds like very heavy objects from above, and the rattling of the windows that follows, all is safe and quiet here.
-A few days after I moved in I was approached by a woman at a conference wanting to know if I needed furniture. "Um...do you have any bookshelves?" "Yes!," she said, as if I'd said the magic word. "Yes...I do... can you come pick it up?" She said she was cleaning out her daughter's dorm room (the conference was at a college) who had just transferred and everything must go. She was so strung out about it that it reminded me of the tremendous feats of storytelling I've been given at bus stops by people looking for a single quarter, but I was more modestly strung out for the bookshelves, so at the end of the first workshop, I gave her a call and met her at a subterranean apartment a five minute drive down the road. As I pulled in, she was waving at me with both arms like a castaway. I went inside and she led me through her cave of wonders. "That's her old track uniform from when she was in college..." She pointed to a framed, royal blue nylon uniform. I scrunched my cheeks to smile politely and kept following. I'd never really considered that a proper bookshelf may or may not fit into my car and raised the question. "Oh don't worry, it folds." It folds? What kind of dollar store closet organizer is this going to be........the bookshelf was in what was her daughter's bedroom, now littered with books on law. "And you're sure she's not going to come home any second and be surprised about this, right?" She didn't get the joke. "No...she won't..." she said gravely, then snapped back to life. "So here! This is it!" Not only did it fold, but it made an immediate case for a style of bookshelf that should be replicated a thousand times over. This particular one originally came from Pier 1, so it no doubt has already been replicated perhaps a million times over, but the design was brilliant: the shelves themselves on hinges, which fold in, and when they fold in, the shelves on the side--on which the other shelves where just resting--also fold in, making the whole thing about the size of a card table. "Just give me 5 bucks." If she hadn't already given me something, it would have sounded like the most hapless holdup in history. But she had given me something, something great and useful. I emerged from the apartment with the bookshelf under my arm. It slid into my backseat without a problem.
As I walked back into the conference building, I noticed what could only have been the work of a mad mother: printer paper signs handwritten in erratic sharpie scrawl that read "Furniture for sale, all must go, daughter moved to California, will do cheap..." and a phone number. She had wallpapered the place. On the water fountains, on the bathroom doors. She even wrote it on a chalkboard hanging out in one of the hallways. I didn't dare look up.
-Swatchjousting continues. The first set of paint swatches was thought to be too dark, so we've got another set of the same colors in lighter shades that we'll be seeking approval for at the beginning of this week. If that goes, hopefully we can have a good ol fashioned Paintin' Party next Sunday! More details to come.
Once the paint is up, then bookshelves and other furniture can go up (we've got more on the way courtesy of our friend Pam of the NEK 99% group), then the books, and then the Brickhouse Reading Room and everything else about us will be officially open and alive with all of the invisible potential that surrounds us.
So!
Hold on to your hats, your pants, your socks (especially your socks, it's been freezing here!), and your Brickhouse fantasies and keep an eye on this blog for a Paint Party announcement sometime in the next few days. You can bring all of the abovementioned things there, and we will officially open our new home amongst our homes with pomp.
-Khris
