having an exterior darkroom

MID JUNE, 2016

Once I had caught up on sleep after my trip to Peru, I was eager to get to work.  Of course, with life being the way it is, I did not jump out of bed after arriving well past midnight to sort out my darkroom.

About a week after I got home, I gave myself a designated darkroom day.  The goal was to clean off start staining the outside.  As I eagerly opened the doors to my little darkroom, I was greeted by a host of earwigs (an important thing to know at this point is that I am not, by any means, a bug person, especially concerning the slithering, tiny scorpion monsters that are earwigs).  My initial reaction was to slam the door shut, which I did, but that doesn't make an earwig colony disappear.  I spent the next 20 minutes or so standing at the threshold with a gallon of bug killer, and I, Megan Crawford, managed to squish earwigs with sandals on (as opposed to the more defensive close-toed shoes).

The moral of the story, as there is a point to this, is that an outbuilding is going to have bugs in it from time to time.  Just mentally prepare yourself for that, be it a spider making its home on the ceiling or a herd of earwigs living in the doors.

After the earwig debacle, I pulled out the can of stain (Cabot semi transparent stain in Cordovan Brown), and my mom and I proceeded to stain two walls over 5 hours.  Staining the exterior might not be entirely necessary, but that all depends on where you live.  In Montana we get all four seasons, sometimes all within one day, so I wanted to be sure that the walls would last and weather well.  You could also simply seal the walls with a spar urethane, but I seem to be good at making projects more complicated than they need to be.