Launching the New Studio

The studio is mostly done.

• I finished the clay trap, and tested it for leaks.
• We installed a new faucet to the sink, since the old one leaked from ice damage.
• I used a dolly to bring in our slab roller.  I had to pull the rollers and wheel off of it to get it through the door from the basement equipment room, and then reassemble and re-string the cables.
• Julie and I used the dolly again to bring the wedging table from the old studio to the new one.  I never thought that I would be able to move it without destroying the the hundred pounds of cast plaster slabs embedded in the surface, especially when we had to flip it up on end to get it on the dolly.  It worked out fine.  I just need to add a good cutting wire to it to finish it.
• From used lumber, I constructed a four foot by six foot hand building table, with a recycled plastic work surface.  I'll keep everyone posted on how durable it is.  We should be able to get six people comfortably around it to work.
• I moved our clay shelf into the alcove just outside of the studio.  That's where we will keep our boxes of clay.
• Julie finished plastering and painting the partition wall on the west side of the studio.

More lighting would be nice, and we need to scour the house and outbuilding for clay tools that have wandered off over the years, but we can start playing with clay again.

The Clay Trap

Work on the new studio is progressing.  I took last Friday off of work to focus on getting it complete.  I put trim molding around the two doors, and helped Julie install the rubber base molding on three of the four walls.  I also shut water off in the house so that I could cut the caps off of the water supply pipes, and install valves.

TJ helped me carry the sink into the house from the old studio.  We had recycled about six feet of counter from when we re-did our kitchen a couple of years ago, and were able to re-use the double stainless steel sink.  I had built a rough frame out of two by fours to support the counter and sink, which I reinforced with a few diagonal pieces of wood to make it more stable.

We wanted to install a clay trap for the studio drain.  For our studio in New Jersey, we had made due with a plastic tub, placed in the sink, that we carefully washed everything into.  The waste pipe from the studio sink goes strait into a sump in the basement, and the water is pumped from there up into the drain line and into our septic system.   When we first moved in, most of the plumbing for the house had been going into the sump, and we burned out a couple of pumps in the first two years before we could address the issue.  We had plumbers re-route the pipes, so everything on the ground floor and up bypasses the sump and goes directly to the drain line out.  The basement bathroom, utility sink, and now the studio are the only lines hooked up to the sump.  A clay trap to protect the sump pump is a really good idea.

I found a design that I liked, made from a plastic storage tote, two square plastic buckets (the bright yellow ones that kitty litter comes in), and an assortment of inch and a half plastic pipes and fittings.

The water from both sinks go into a common drain, which pierces a hole in the lid of the tote, and drops into the first bucket.  I may need to add a p-trap before the whole clay trap if odors become a problem.  Near the upper rim of the first bucket, I created a hole, and joined it to the second bucket (with a male and a female threaded connector).  The water is supposed to settle in the first bucket before flowing to the second.  The second has a set of quarter inch holes drilled in a row, a little lower than the height of the hole from the first bucket, to drain water into the tote.  These holes face the front side of the tote/sink.  Around the back side of the tote, I drilled a hole and added connectors (a male and female threaded connector again, with some improvised plastic washers with compression fittings to join to the house plumbing)  to drain the water from the clay trap along the back side of the tote.  The height of the drain pipe leaving the tote is lower than the holes drilled in the second bucket.  There is a p-trap between the this drain pipe and the house plumbing, which is lower than the height of the drainage for the tote.

I had to build a platform of two by fours and plywood to prop the clay trap up to the proper height, so water could flow through it correctly and then exit through the house plumbing.