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I moved in early February, at the coldest time of year. It was so cold that I had real trouble working - you can't make woodblock prints while wearing gloves! I started to make plans to get the workroom built down in the lower level before next winter. As the days went by though, and the climate improved, memory of that bitterly cold time faded bit by bit and the urgency dissipated; this is a very nice place to live in warmer weather!

But the chills of November certainly reminded me of what was to follow, and I realized that I had better get busy ...

There was a major problem facing me though, in the fact that there was no stairway down to the room that I wanted to use for the workshop. The construction company who made this place only added the lower room as an afterthought, and didn't bother to make good access to it. The only way to get down there was by an outer metal staircase, unsuitable during a long and cold winter ... So a hole had to be cut in the thick concrete slab that separates the two lower levels.

I first planned to rent a jackhammer and try it myself, but when I chatted with friends about this their unanimous recommendation was to hire out the job. I tossed the idea around for a while, but then decided to follow their advice.

Here are the workmen, standing in the space under the stairway that runs from the ground floor down to the first basement level, ready to begin hammering out the space for stairs to be built down to the second level ...

They soon discovered something about this building - that while the little house up on top is quite shoddy construction, the concrete platform on which it stands is massively built. This slab is more than 20cm thick, and has two dense grids of rebar build into it.

It took the two of them all day to get through, first bashing out the concrete, and then cutting the 56 pieces of steel that still bridged the gap ...

Watching them do this made me most grateful for the decision to hire them and not try it myself. It would have been a back-breaking job that would have taken me an immense amount of time ...

They left me with a neat hole in exactly the right place for stairs. Once they were done, the air started rushing up through the space and the fairly stale lower level became fresher by the minute ...