The work on the previous page - building the air duct - was in October last year ... Since that time, there has been absolutely no construction work done down there at all.
As the weeks passed and the thermometer on my desk continued to drop, I continued to work away at the carving and printing, fully expecting that at some point it would become just too cold to continue. That didn't happen ... Here in December, of course wearing warm clothes, is a typical printing scene ...
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Part of the reason I didn't move back upstairs is that it really wouldn't have made much difference - the house upstairs is itself so poorly insulated that those rooms too, get bitterly cold in mid-winter.
The air duct was not so successful; it did pull a stream of air from the warm attic, but 12 meters is a _long_ way, and very little of the warmth made it to the bottom of the pipe. And what was worse, because the lower room was so cold, any moisture in that warmish air instantly condensed at the mouth of the pipe, and the room became damp. Cold is OK ... cold and damp is unbearable. So it stayed off. Perhaps in the future, once this room is properly insulated, thus negating the large temperature differential, it will be possible to move the air around without the condensation problem ... we'll have to wait and see.
The months went by; the temperature dropped to near freezing in mid-February, and then gradually started to climb again. By April, the room had become quite pleasant and comfortable again!
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And of course, buried in the printmaking work, I gave no thought at all to workroom construction ...
