This has been a busy year for me! I bought a 100 year old house in December 2020. It needed foundation work to start with. When I bought the house it had 3 cracks in the plaster and when foundation work was done it had 100! But I have a good painter and he has a friend that does plaster repair so they all got fixed and the downstairs all painted. The upstairs is one big room with 3 closets and a bathroom. A perfect studio.
And the house sits on a double lot, the lot beside the house was very wet so my foundation guy put in a big french drain which moves the water to the street and to the sewer. The result worked perfectly but it wasn’t very pretty. I had my landscaper bring in some rock to make it look like a river.
The next project was to gut the downstairs bathroom. And redo it.
After 
After
Then tear down funky weird garage and deck and put up two story garage and connect it to the house with an enclosed breezeway.
Breezeway underway 
Back of New Garage and New Breezeway 
Back of New Breezeway 
New Crevice Garden I love my new yard! 
Garage and Breezeway created a courtyard! 
Parking spot for my friends to visit 
Which created a courtyard! My landscaper friend Arthur helped me redesign the sidewalk and get it planted. We worked on the other side too.
In the kitchen I just replaced the countertop. Then am added a master bath on back of downstairs master bedroom.
While this all was going on I spent the month of March in Florida, Put my East Front House on the Market, came home and turned around and went back to Florida camping for a week.
Then went to Colorado and Utah for 10 days and got a contract on East Front street house.
Moved furniture in the middle of July. Up until then I had been kind of camping out at new house.
Closed August 3.
Designed 2021 New Bern ornament for Carolina Creations, number 29 I think!
Left for a month long camping trip to the North East I wrote 2 blog posts about it. Link to Part 1. Link to Part 2.
Got home on September 17 then had to do my New Bern Christmas Card for 2021. I decided to do an image of Tryon Palace on clay for it.
I spent the first night in my own bed in months on November 6. Am going to love my new bedroom.
Then someone asked for the 2022 calendar which I maybe wasn’t going to do this year if no one asked. But they did so looked through New Bern images I did on clay and used those.
And I hadn’t done the design for this years Christmas pottery either! When an employee told me I should do some Christmas pottery I couldn’t image how it would sell, that was 6 years ago, I was surprised how much of it I sell. Here is this years and another design from a couple years ago.
I was also the featured artist at Carolina Creations for the month of November – I posted some photos of those new pieces in my last post. AND I was on the studio tour!
I wanted to do the tour to remind people I was still around because rumor was that I had moved away. And I wanted to remind them that my work is still available at Carolina Creations even through I don’t own it any more. I DO have a website where I sell my work as well. http://www.janetfrancoeurfineart.blog but what I mostly do on this website is write a blog about my artwork and my travels. Mostly my travels these days!!
It was a very hectic year so didn’t get as much artwork done as I normally do but still did a couple big oils and and 3 new gouache paintings and tons of pottery.
This year I’m concentrating on oils. My friend Carol, who went to the same tiny college in Michigan I did, who moved to New Bern the same month I did in 1989, and I are having a 30 year anniversary of the first show we did together in 1992 at the arts council where she was the gallery director. It’s a big space so want to paint some new big pieces for it. I’m also working on garden sculpture for it as well.
Looking forward to a quieter 2022. But already have plans for 2 weeks on Virgin Gorda in the BVIs this winter (unless covid stops it), then a month in Ft Myers, Florida (I’ll go there anyway because I spend most of the month by myself painting, 18 days in Spain and Portugal (again if covid allows) and 2 weeks in Maine which I will probably do anyway because will be outdoors most of the time.
Looking forward to a quieter 2022. But already have plans for 2 weeks on Virgin Gorda in the BVIs this winter, then a month in Ft Myers, Florida, 18 days in Spain and Portugal and 2 weeks in Maine.
And I seem to be all over the place with my artwork, oils, watercolors, gouache, clay tiles, clay sculpture. It’s kind of exciting! Finally getting into this retirement business,
And while I’ve already planted a lot in my new yard I have 20 seed packets to find a spot for…. So much for quiet.