The Studio and the Krug, a Tale of Devotion

This year Dima turned 37 (on October 29th)! And in the five years that I've known him he hasn't had a decent space to practice his passion—painting.

When we bought our house three years ago, one of the reasons we chose it was the potential that the garage held for being a spectacular studio for Dima. (It certainly wasn't for the ceiling height in the basement.) Well, three years later and that is all that space still is... a lot of potential.

Last year (2006) when a group of us traveled to New Jersey for Memorial Day we started talking about an article that I had read in Real Simple Magazine about some friends that organized a group to help one another complete home improvement projects. They called their group "the Tong" after the Chinese word for gang. (They were not Chinese.) Being a group of Russians and spouses of Russians, we decided to call our own group, Krug Molotok (the Circle of the Hammer).

What I'm getting down to is that I finally activated the Krug in honor of Dima's 37th birthday. I'd really like for him to have the space to paint and thus far we've been unable to get around to taking on this project for ourselves. Our other house projects have always taken precedent and I decided to put a stop to that. (Granted, we are at this same moment remodeling our upstairs bathroom. You can't blame us for trying...)

So tomorrow is the official, inaugural Krug Molotok project, though in name only. We've all gotten together multiple times before to help out with this sort of thing. (All we need now are t-shirts.)

I'll keep you updated during the day on their progress. It should be fun and at the end we get a studio, finally!