Just when you think it's all over...

...you find another stash of boxes.

Okay, so I'm house-sitting for 2 weeks while my parents are out of town (which is why I was picking up my nephew from school last Friday) and one of the things I promised to do while they're away is go through the *gulp* boxes of painting stuff in their basement. And by painting stuff, I mean all the porcelain related things I took after my Nana died.

There is a storage area under the stairs which is about a 5' x 6' space that is packed up to the ceiling...

This is before I started on Tuesday morning:

 This was Tuesday evening, 10:30pm:

...and all that stuff that's out... barely a 1/3 of what's stored:

This was where I was at around midnight last night, after I hauled a car load of stuff I'm donating to the next Porcelain Artists' Convention, May 2014, of which I'm on the board, helping organize, and handling all individual & commercial registration:

Sorting through the actual porcelain pieces to pull stuff out for donation has been relatively easy. There are pieces I obviously am interested in working on, and ones I never would... like a million tiny cute animal figurines...

What's taking a long time is that I'm also going through all the paint, and all the different mediums. To break it down quickly, depending on what oils/additives you mix with the dry paint, you can get paint that dries on the porcelain immediately, stuff that takes a few hours or days to dry, or paint that never dries, ever. Yes, you always have to fire the piece to set the paint, but depending what style you are painting in, having a closed medium (the one that dries) or an open medium (one that never dries) or one in-between.

To give you a better idea of the scope... this is one box (that was inside a much larger cardboard box) which is about 12" x 6" x 18". It's full of paint. Some of these colours are old... and if/when you use them on a 1st firing, then paint another colour on-top, or even if the colours touch, they will cannibalize each other and make a horrendous mess. Only about 1/2 of the paint vials have labels. About 1/10 of the bagged paint have labels. Some of this paint can only be used on glass because it has a lower firing temperature. I've got probably another 2 boxes worth of unorganized paint.

...all those stacked plastic storage containers you see in the previous photos... those are all filled with different mediums, paint, firing cones, etc. And there are more smaller boxes, like the one filled with paint.

And when this job is done, I have more boxes to go through, including a bunch from the Victoria house (the witch's hut) which are full of things from the shared life with my soon-to-be-ex husband.

Which makes the porcelain/paint stuff an easy, less emotionally-taxing task.

Well, I've got less than an hour before I need to pick up my nephew from school, so I better clean up what I can to get it out of the way, and out of temptation's way for a curious, imaginative, energetic 6 year old boy.