Or too much time.  When I retired a couple of years ago I thought I would love painting and hopefully selling my art.  But even though it sells here and there, it is not enough to make me want to paint or draw everyday. Sometimes I am inspired and sometimes I am not. 

So last year I took up sewing and thought it would be fun to make dresses for my than my beautiful granddaughter Claire, so made a lot of dresses and got a booth, which then needed more to fill the space than dresses, so I started “junking” and renewing furniture.  I quickly realized you can only make a $5 an hour for the work you do, rather than the $100 an hour I charge for interior design work or the $55 per hour I was paid teaching adjunct.  

The second part of the challenge of having cute little girls dresses, some stuffed animals and children’s chairs and rockers in an mostly unsupervised space is that the clothes got dirty, the caning on antique chairs was broken,  displays were broken, things were scratched, moved and used and even a few small things were stolen.  Stuffed animals lost their ribbons on a daily basis and even though originally everything was labeled, those often disappeared.  

I discovered that most people don’t want or need style or fashionable things; they like what I kindly call junk.  Often a chair I might buy for $10 had four layers of dirty fabric covering the seat.  I would take it all off, redo the padding, and neatly attach a new more stylish cushion. In the long run, I found most of my furniture sold to friends.  

Now I am canning everything from my garden and trying what to do NEXT!  Since I have a PhD in business marketing, that might be a fun new adventure.  I passed the comps, but never at 62 wrote a dissertation.  Maybe I should do that, just so I can say I did.  I am fascinated by Airstreams and Shipping containers.  

Anyone have any great ideas?