Gutting the gallery

Piles of glazed pots on our throwing shelves? What?

Stacked pell mell, hither and yon?

Last year we changed our booth design to be more "high-end", in light of getting into more prestigious shows like Craft Boston and State College. The major change was moving from an off white shelving idea to a rich dark espresso brown instead. As soon as we did that, we realized we would eventually need to change the way our gallery looked too.

Mind you, for the last 6 years, the gallery has basically comprised of our travelling booth loaded to the gunwales with pots. On the one hand, it made things cheaper to have one object doing double duty, but it also meant if we were at a show, everything had to be torn down for the show, the gallery closed, and then rebuilt at the show, torn down, and then rebuilt upon returning home. After 6 years we'd had enough.

This year we only plan to do a few small shows. I would much rather encourage folks to come and find us HERE anytime of the week. Easier on my back, my wits and my pocketbook.

After talking things over with my designer,decorator and awesome wife, we decided that things needed to change in the gallery too. We needed something more open, more modern, etc. Meanwhile, we're not in the cash-flush season yet (or even IF there will be a cash flush season this year).... so we waited and waited all through the winter.

I got fed up on Wednesday.

With our apprentice Hannah here, and ready to work, we tore into this project. Moved all the pots into the throwing room, broke down all the shelving and basically made the wall completely open.

That accomplished... a clean slate so to speak.... we started measuring things out, laying out how to reorganize the arrangement of shelves etc. Ten hours later, the new shelving was up...sort of. We ran out of shelf brackets and the brand we're using seems to no longer be carried by Lowe's or any of our local hardware stores. I wanted to use super heavy duty shelf brackets and these will carry 150-300# per bracket. I also wanted space below waist level to store backstock BEHIND our bamboo curtain. So far, we're out of shelf brackets BUT we have them on order.

Here's what it looks like in process.

New, bare and unadulterated... till this weekend!