all to ourselves

Monday, our host for the workshop came and picked us up.  The workshop was at a studio and glass school in Batavia.  She took us there on the back roads, ‘farm to market’ roads we call them down here, through the countryside.  We paralleled waterways, passed old homesteads and farms.  I really loved all the old farmhouses.  Eventually we came to LeRoy where we would be staying during the workshop.

The front of the house.  We never once went through the front.

Lance and Amanda, the owners of Oatka Studio, bought a large victorian on about 3/4 of an acre and are converting it into a bed and breakfast.  They have finished one of the bedrooms upstairs and modernized one of the two bathrooms upstairs.  The house is filled with furniture they have bought, antiques and oriental rugs all pushed into the center of some of the rooms covered with plastic.  They have, so far, managed to remove all the wall paper (every room in the house) and sealed the walls which are waiting for paint.  The previous owners had already modernized the kitchen and added a family room onto the back of the house with a gas fireplace and a concrete deck out the sliding glass doors at the back.  It faces the large backyard which faces a golf course so the view is endless.

The side of the house, the door we used.

Every room upstairs is on a different level.  There are two staircases, the front staircase and the back staircase which comes down into the kitchen.  This is, of course, the one we used.  From the kitchen, you climb the narrow steep stairs, turn left, pass through two rooms to a short hall.  From the hall, the front bathroom is to the right and you step up about four inches.  If you continue down the hall, the front stairs open to the right as well.  Then it’s three steps up to the front sitting room.  Our bedroom was also to the right off the sitting room (another to the left) and it was two steps down.

Lance and Amanda live in the studio which is in an old industrial building in Batavia (about a 20 minute drive from LeRoy).  They have a beautiful little apartment up there separate from the studio.  The students stayed at a motel near the studio so for seven days, we had that huge house all to ourselves.

tomorrow’s installment:  rat roulette

a few more pics:

This little chipmunk scurried around the deck.  He was very shy and this was the only picture I could get of him.  He’s climbing up the pole that the bird-feeder hung on.

More peonies.  So beautiful.

Bunny in the backyard.