Waaay back in May, when I first decided that my rickety old work studio needed repairing, I honestly thought I could bang out those repairs before the month was out. I was going to clean the place up, spray in some expandable foam insulation, put up some redwood siding I had bought off craigslist and the Resource Yard, and get back to all the other house projects on my many lists.

Then I had a little bit of a revelation and decided to tear the old studio down and rebuild it altogether. Again, back then I thought I’d tear down the old place and have a new one up by summer’s end—it’s only 360 square feet, I thought. How long could it take?

Next week is August. Our plans for the new place haven’t been approved yet. The old place is still standing, in all its reusable-material glory. On Tuesday, my wife and I are going on a three-week road trip to the Pacific Northwest. (The dogs are going too, otherwise I’d make them tear the old studio down. They’re pretty handy with those big fangs of theirs.) That puts us into September before we can even get started on the studio—and we’ve got a weeklong trip planned right in the middle of the month.

Hopefully I can use part of the August trip to bone up on construction methods—and maybe to plan what’s going to go where and when—but that’s about the only “work” that’s going to get done for a while. I knew I should have stuck with brown building… I would have been writing this from a brand new studio by now.

Anyway, all of this is to say that the studio is on hold for now. I’ll only be posting once per week in August—every Tuesday—and I’ll likely not be writing about the studio, since I’ll be 3,000 miles away from it.

But before we leave it, I’m going to go ahead and make some more bonehead scheduling guesses. We get back around August 23. Here's what I want to have happen before September 15:

• The studio stripped of its salvageable parts. Right now the space is basically empty, and I’ve started pulling out the rigid foam insulation, but when we get back I want to really dig in and tear the place down.
• We’re going to have to cut away part of the underlying concrete slab’s perimeter in order to build a new foundation wall. This is going to involve renting large machinery and lifting heavy chunks of concrete. So for all I know it might take a month, but I’d like to get this done before the 15th.
• We’re also going to need to dig a trench for that new foundation wall. Whether this gets done by machine or by hand depends on how much renting a little backhoe will cost—I’ve seen a few for rent on craigslist—or how much beer I’ll have to buy for some pick-and-shovel-wielding friends to start hacking. (Volunteers can of course apply via my Limebox.)
• I’d like to pour the new foundation wall as well, but I’m concerned about exposure if we get that done by the 15th and then go away for a week. Also on the list: Buy a bunch of tarps.
• Finally, I’d like to get the heating system worked out. Sure, I’d like to keep it simple, but we’ve already got those free solar panels incorporated into our design for the studio, so I’d like to fit all that together somehow.

Hopefully this isn’t all just so much wishful thinking. I’m starting to believe that it is, but maybe a nice long road trip will help me believe again. And by Halloween—no, let’s say Thanksgiving—I’ll be fully installed in the new studio, snoozing on the couch instead of writing about how I got cheated by some backhoe-fronting craigslist troll.