Sara Baume - Handiwork

THE WORKSHOP IS the craftsmans home, Richard Sennett writes in The Craftsman. Traditionally this was literally so. In the Middle Ages craftsmen slept, ate, and raised their children in the places where they worked.

THIS HOUSE is a house of industry.

It has four bedrooms, only one of which is devoted to sleep.

THE STRAIGHT-BACKED CHAIR at the eastern end of the living room table, parallel to the windowsill and its clutter, is one of several workstations dispersed between rooms, starting outside the back door with the rusted yard tap and extending all the way through to the weatherworn garden bench.

THE SHORT STRETCH of countertop alongside the kitchen sink is a mixing station. Theres a sack of modelling plaster and a stack of plastic containers rescued from the recycling bin the tall, round pots of yoghurt and the flimsy trays of rectangular biscuits fig rolls, malted milks, custard creams. Theres a porcelain scoop for measuring the correct ratio of plaster to water, and a tall-stemmed teaspoon for whisking the powdery lumps away. Wet plaster must be creamy. Once poured, I bump the base of the mould gently against the surface of the countertop in order to hustle any residual air to the surface, to set it free. Tiny bubbles obligingly rise and burst a stippled pattern of negative space appears.

A SIGNIFICANT PATCH of floor in front of the unused hearth in what would have traditionally been the good front room and which is now the guest bedroom is a sawing station. A miniature scroll saw trails from a socket and sits on a mat of shaped foam. Adjacent to the saws table, theres just enough space for me to kneel before it as I work a person-sized circle cleared in the sand-coloured dust. Behind the clearing and the saw, theres a box of cuts and offcuts balsa and ply, pine dowels and cherrywood lathes. Strewn about the lino and the rag-rugs, theres sandpaper of varying grits from course to fine and from unfolded to extensively folded.

THE LOW COFFEE TABLE in front of the sofa, which faces the log stove and the TV set, is a painting station. A glass jar of brushes is permanently accompanied by another of cloudy water, and a ball of clotted kitchen roll. The ferrules of the brushes are narrow and wide, rounded and straight; the bristles are natural and synthetic, soft and rough, filbert and fanned. I only ever use the same three, the plainest three, but I keep them all because I am constantly susceptible to future projects to the possibility that some day I might be confronted with a surface that requires a more exotic class of stroke. Beneath the table, on top of a large tub of white emulsion, theres a dish of contorted tubes of acrylic paint and a thickly blotched palette in a ziplock bag.

THIS IS THE STATION where each evening comes to an end. I spend its final three hours cross-legged on the sofa; the same cushion I use as a tray to eat my dinner off becomes a platform upon which to apply paint to a succession of small objects after dinner has been eaten. The television flickers and I listen to it. In most cases, a story can be followed from sound alone, but I glance up every now and again in order to identify speakers, in order to maintain some kind of visual momentum through each programme. At dinnertime, a drinking vessel is added to the other glasses on the low coffee table and so it often happens, as the evening wears on, that I plop a sullied brush into the clear water, or take a thoughtless sip of the paint-tainted stuff.

AS EACH WORKING DAY ends on the sofa, it starts upstairs on the swivelling office chair in front of my writing desk. During the course of an ordinary day, between the swivel chair and the sofa cushions, I shift from station to station according to the hours demands, returning most predictably to the eastern end of the table in the living room.

There, in the nook beneath the windowsill, I keep a narrow timber box of knives. Inside, there are several handles and an assortment of steel blades flat, pointed, curved, tapered, some sharp and some blunt but most at some stop along the trajectory of decline from mint to spent, unused to overused.

It is important to differentiate between sharpnesses. The sharpness of each blade dictates the pressure applied by my carving hand, the speed and ease at which each shuck of set plaster slips away from its block and into crumb. Between the surface of the table and the knife box and the plaster blocks and the crumb pile, theres a sheath of old newspapers positioned to protect the table-top, even though theres already a jagged tear in the cotton and a tracery of stab marks in the vinyl.

Somehow I never manage to remember to place down a protective layer until after some initial damage has been done.