About three years ago I moved onto a really cool property in Gig Harbor.  In the back of the property was a big red barn with alot of potential, but a ton of obstacles.  I really wanted to convert it into my studio, but it seemed like more of a dream than a reality.

I had some friends that wanted to rent a building and setup a studio together. So we could fix up the barn or rent a shop in tacoma from a friend. The shop in Tacoma needed alot of work too, but it was more convenient for everyone to work there. I put about two months of work and a couple thousand dollars toward setting that studio up.  Seven of us were working on the shop, but most of the work load was put on 2 of us.  It was really frustrating, but I had nowhere to blow glass at the time so I had to do it.  All I can say is the studio came out really nice.  My friends sheetrocked the walls for us and we got really nice stainless steel 10 ft x 10 ft hoods built for us.  My friend Doug and I ran power for all the kilns and fans.  Two amazing artists made a huge mural on the new wall.  Here are some pictures:

This mural was made by Craig Brown a tattoo artist in tacoma, and Joey from the band LifeCycle

Adam's a hard worker

The Tacoma studio was awesome in looks and function, but it very quickly turned into a negative enviroment. I had to bail after doing alot of work and not getting very much time to enjoy it.  Although it was really good for me to get out of there, it left me with no place to work and not very much money to do anything about it.  Since I owned part of a lathe, I sold my share which gave me a little money to spend.  I had to ask for help from my family and thanks to my grandparents and my mom, we were able to transform our barn into a studio. 

I had to figure out how I was going to make this barn work.  It took many dump truck loads to clean out all the garbage that was inside the building before we could even start.  Only a small amount of power was running from the house up to the shop which would not be adequate for all the kilns, ventilation, lights, music, and heat.  You could barely run a power tool with it.  I thought I was going to have to run power from the transformer for thousands of dollars. Luckily there was power! The service had just been turned off and there was nothing in the building to hook it up to.  So my friends Doug, Sean and Aaron came to the rescue...we got permits and they wired me up!  We had power, and since we didn't have to spend as much on that as I had planned, we had money to build an awesome break room for taking breaks and storing supplies.

Here are some pictures of our transformation:

It was kind of a disaster area at this point

built the walls and the ceiling with Doug's expertise.

We got the kiln in place

Built some tables

Put a restaurant fan on the roof

My friend Matt built me this awesome hood! 

I wanted to build some walls around the area we blow glass so we could insulate the walls and make the studio a little warmer, and to seal it from the elements.  I first had to jack up the front of the building and put new posts in to free up the front door that has been settling for 30 years.  Next we did some framing, insulating, sheeting, and painting.   Here are some pics:

Thanks Tevis for all your help

That's our new storage room

What we ended up with was a blank pallette

And that's what it looks like now