A New Comfort Zone: Our Family “Paint Café”
Over quarantine, we all adjusted to a new normal. It definitely pushed us out of our comfort zone in many ways. But the kids and I ended up creating a new comfort zone that we are still enjoying even after quarantine. We converted our great room into a “paint cafe.”
As studios usually go, it started out fairly neat… 
Parks pouring paint! 
Cat easily found her own new comfort zone – several, in fact. Homemade Paint Dry Rack 
Watercolor station with a house in progress. And here’s how the paint cafe looks most often: in use!
I placed two easels in the center of the room with two others available to the side . We covered all the wood furniture with brown craft paper so tubes of paints and palettes could rest without damaging surfaces. Of course, our cat had to lay down on each piece of craft paper so she could assess her own new comfort zone. And after a few days of placing our pieces to dry “here and there,” hoping the cat would not step on them, I finally made a drying rack/tower so wet paintings could stack up in one neat space. That was the most handy feature to have! I used a metal wire cube storage set and built a tower of cubes! Wooden dowel rods were purchased (thin enough to easily be sawn in half) and then placed 3 or 4 dowel rods deep in rows across each cube, skipping every row or so for room, so canvases could easily be rolled in or out. (See picture, bottom left.)