Cleaning Out the Darkroom

This is my darkroom that I built about 50 years ago back in the days of film.  You remember film, don't you?  I used this darkroom for my black and white work, especially with my medium format Hasselblad camera and with my 4x5 cameras.  I developed the film here and I had a really nice enlarger for making prints.  I also did some color printing here, for a large exhibit I had years ago in a gallery in Sea Cliff.  What's also cool is that when Kathy went back to college, she took a photo course and used the darkroom to process her film and make prints.  And when Liz was in High School, she learned how to develop her film and make prints.  So this darkroom has been well used.  Well, about 10 years ago, we switched to natural gas for heat.  We were supposed to have the oil tank which is behind me in this photograph, drained of fuel and cut up and removed.  But I would have had to completely clean out the darkroom before the tank could be removed.  So I never got around to it.  Until now.  That beautiful "varnished" sink is something I built from birch plywood and then covered it with two coats of marine epoxy and it has lasted all this time, and it was beautiful!  I cut it into three pieces to make removing it easier, which killed me, because of what a beautiful thing it was!

So as you can imagine, the cleanup was a monumental job!  I built a temporary table in the garage  with a piece of 3/4" plywood, 4 by 8 feet in size.  So I took everything out of the darkroom in a hurry and put it on the table in the garage, and after the tank is gone, I will go through everything when I have time, and only put back important things in the darkroom, like telescopes and astronomical imaging gear and so on.  What a job, but what a relief to have it empty!