Let’s Start with the Background

For those that don’t have the history, let me get you caught up….

Cara Jonas Photography started in 2015.  For those first few years, we did all of our work on location.  It became clear pretty quickly that I needed a studio space to continue to grow and to be able to provide quality corporate work and to support the sports montages I had fallen in love with.  So we built out a workable, but less than glamorous, studio in the basement of our home in Liberty Township.  If you were a client during those times, first of all, thank you.  Because you kept us going and growing.  And inspired us to take a very big, and scary, next step.  In the spring of 2019 we started searching for a new home.  A home that would give us enough acreage to support both my business and Brian’s growning home improvement business (silerhomeimprovement.com).  That proved to be very difficult.  Zoning, location, and a myriad of other factors stretched the search to almost 6 months (in a very hot housing market where homes were selling within 24 hours).  But last fall we finally found an amazing home in Lebanon.  It is a 5 acre horse farm with an existing barn/outbuilding that provided the potential studio and office space we both needed.  Over the winter we worked to design and plan the build out.  And we waited for spring….

Sometimes You’ve Got to Tear it Down to Build it Back Up

We had glorious weather this weekend in southern Ohio.  It provided the perfect opportunity to start preparing the studio building and workshop.  We began by tearing out much of what was already in the barn.  Which included two horse stalls full of old, dusty hay.  On top of yards and yards of cedar chips.  Some fresh, some not so fresh……there was a point where I said, ‘well it smells like horses in here now!’.  You can use your imagination on that one!

I should have counted, but many, many wheel barrows full of hay and cedar chips later, we managed to scratch the surface of the bottom of the stalls.  And found 300 pound (just my estimate based on how ridiculously heavy they were) horse stall mats.   Like the job wasn’t hard enough already. We had to cut them into thirds to even be able to move them! Kuddos to my husband for having both the tools and the experience to make much of the job possible. And many thanks to my wonderful parents who jumped in and did work that many people much younger would have backed away from. We were only able to complete the work because we worked together as a team. And maybe it doesn’t look like much to someone that didn’t participate in the actual process, but we’re awfully proud and I can’t wait to see the start of building it back up again! Stay tuned for more updates, we’ll keep you posted. Plumbing and finishing the driveway are major milestones for this next week.

Here’s quick video to show you what we actually did.  The space you are seeing here will be both the entrance to the studio space and our sales room.  I couldn’t be more excited!