Nope, boxes would not work. My morgue is huge. Just the half I carried to Kentucky filled up 10 very large plastic tubbies. But I like my freedom, so I’ve lived a tidy lifestyle (raised my kids in an 800 square foot home and kept a home studio there as well).

I keep my morgue nicely organized, on book shelves, and shelf -lined closets and large hat boxes stacked up around the house and boxes that slide out from under my old four poster bed. If it wasn’t nice and tidy, there would be no room for us to work. My slide collection is huge and takes up too much space. So I‘ve been digitizing them, selling usage rights on-line and creating a digital library. I’ve whittled it down to half (just about 3,000 slides to go).

Yup, my kids learned brain-storming, thinking out loud skills and visualization techniques really young. They grew up super creative people. My oldest daughter and her husband, just bought 60 acres of forest land and she designed two homes. The 500 square foot home is for me and its just perfect for my lifestyle. Its more a live-work space, than a traditional house. Instead of a separate studio, she designed a kitchen studio where I can work on really large projects. Half the kitchen has art/design storage the other side has kitchen storage — one large space, multiple uses. I will put in an outdoor kitchen for canning and putting up food from the garden. We start building next month. By doing the work ourselves, including plumbing, electrical and construction, we’ll have both homes and the property paid off in three years and be mortgage/rent free forever.

I put my kids to work in kindergarten — their first job was walking to the post office after school to pick up packages and mail stuff. They used to complain — other kids got to do their homework when they got home from school, but they had to work first. Yup, we work for a living I would say and they thought doing their homework was a break. Both of them worked for me until they were 15 and found themselves jobs doing refurbishing work on houses (cause they had skills they’d learned working with the fabricators in our shop). They had such a good idea of the lives they wanted, they tested out of high school in 11th grade and started college.

Creativity pays in so many ways I can’t count them. :)