I love our homes, past and present   – painting them, rewiring them, planning improvements in them, coming home to them, and going to sleep in them. For years I have taken photo walks so I can enjoy all the creativity in their homes, their yards and yard sculptures, the trees that salute or enfold them, and the experiments in form they show.

Finding, renting, then buying our first house (on Buena) was great. We could enhance it with book-matched redwood floors, painted flowers on bathroom tiles, self-designed and made kitchen cabinets with glass doors.   We got to knock down a teetering garage to build an artist studio and darkroom, doing all of the finish carpentry.   After moving to our Santa Clara Ave house, we got to do similar enhancements and more.

There were the usual owner crises – a flooded basement, a deluge from the upstairs bath, a big section of rot in the studio bathroom, the month of winter cold without heat or hot water while a foundation was rebuilt — they don’t seem so bad in hindsight.

Our home is a workplace for both of us. Much productive and enjoyable time is spent in the woodshop, studio, and computer/photography room. A dry basement means I don’t have to get rid of the media and creations from our kids, ourselves, and generations past. There’s never enough storage for art and photo prints though.

Home is also our gallery-in-progress, showing something we have just made or that we treasure. A full house!