The shed and its history
Our garage has not sheltered a car for many years. In this space you can find power tools and useful bits of wood, metal, paint…. you get the idea. I partitioned off a section to become a bike shed for the children. No bicycle has been stowed here since I built a breeze-block bike shed at the bottom of the garden. This purpose-built bicycle shed contains bicycles, garden furniture and useful bits of things. The old bike shed contains tools, tape recorders, internet gubbins and lots of useful bits. Behind that shed is a studio. This used to be my music space with lots of gear and useful things. Then it became Krishula’s studio. When Krishula moved out I moved in and ‘tidied’ up her stuff and made this a music room again. Also, in this space one can find cameras and lots of useful bits. On the other side of the garden I had built a small shed/sunroom. The roof got blown off and it eventually suffered from age/rain/lack of care. I then built a bigger shed and it became a sunroom and marking shed. It’s role as a marking shed was important because I had to have somewhere quiet and prison-like in order to steel myself for the pain that would be induced whilst marking student work. The students were good at film-making but crap when it came to writing. It was evident that the students would leave the ‘Contextual Analysis’ ,or whatever, until the last moment, usually after an evening in the pub. Then they would open their laptops and out would pour a stream of unpunctuated fuzzy consciousness. I marked one page that contained no sentences, (or sentences that I understood from my schooldays experience of clause analysis). I also marked one page that was one sentence, or rather, a series of unconnected concepts concatenated into a melange of obscure obfuscation, pseudo post-modern irony and a complete lack of understanding when it came to the rules of grammar.
This shed saw many a painful marking session, fuelled only by biscuits, coffee, favourite writing implements and the knowledge that it wouldn’t last forever. It also was the repository for many useful bits.
A little while before I retired we noticed on our peripheral vision what appeared to be ginger cats encroaching upon our territory. Upon closer observation we deduced that these fox-like cats were indeed fox cubs. Somehow, the vixen had given birth to four pups in a small space beneath the marking shed and had ignored all my clumping around. When they were old enough, these cubs roamed the garden as long as we kept our distance. The vixen would catch a pigeon and take the cubs into tour neighbour’s garden and teach them how to tear it to pieces. Long after the cubs had grown and left home the neighbours admitted to watching the cubs through the patio window. We both had kept the knowledge of the cubs a secret lest they would be perceived as ‘vermin’
I went out one sunny morning and managed to film a few minutes of the cubs enjoying the sun. There are no pyrotechnics or car chases in this clip, merely a few minutes of peace in. the garden. The foxes have never returned.
When I retired I did a lot of walking in an attempt to clear out my head. I had gone through treatment for bladder cancer and experienced ‘bullying’ within the academic environment by an ineffectual and self-serving management. I wasn’t really in a great place. The hills helped. Then I realised that I needed another shed to augment the now defunct marking shed. The design started on a bit of paper and was basically a cube. That wasn’t going to be suitable as a sanctuary and so I decided to use Sketchup to help me sort out the design. At this juncture my obsessive nature comes into play and I do a trawl of the Internet for shed designs and eventually manage to reign in my enthusiasm and design a shed that is based on units of 3 metres. I was also going to use the wood from the old shed in order to reduce cost and waste… otherwise, the wood would be stored in the garage under the heading of ‘useful bits of wood’.
shed design
Then one checks to see if it’s going to be OK. I suppose I only did this because there was an animation option and it was something else to play with.
OK. So it means that the waterfall will have to be re-sited and a load of earth moved out before I can start the foundations. Hopefully it will be big enough without appearing to take up too much of the remaining garden.
Things didn’t quite happen as I had hoped. Whilst clearing the area I caught a dose of shingles. People indicated that this would last a few weeks. Mine lasted months… Singularly the most painful few months of my life. Unfortunately I got no help from my GP and I became very crabby in the end.
Some time later I began in earnest and documented my progress. This is riveting stuff. I took loads of photographs at the end of each section of the build. Here’s a gallery of some of them. You can scroll through these quickly.
the shed build
The idea was to recycle the old shed and to be as economic as possible with the new bits. To that end, the wood on the shed interior is made up of all the old shed and a few bits of useful bits found hanging around in the garage. The doors were refurbished and re-used and all the windows were made from some nice elm that I had stored safely in the garage.. When it came to the roofing, I did a lot of research and came to the conclusion that red cedar shingles would last a lifetime. Stainless steel nails were also recommended and wouldn’t leave any nasty rust streaks. In the end, the cedar shingles and stainless steel nails cost rather more than I had anticipated, but the roof should outlive me and there are no rusty streaks to be seen.
When it came to the paint I trawled on-line for paint that was used in Norway on their wooden houses. It seemed a good idea. Eventually, I discovered a paint made by Jotun. It’s really expensive but really hard-wearing. Drum-Red may not necessarily be a colour associated with sheds in the UK but I like it.
I found the flooring on Gumtree ( a bit like ebay) and had been ripped out of someone’s lounge because it was too slippery and hard for their children. It’s a nice bamboo floor which now had old carpets covering it. Laying it was a nightmare because you got loads of really fine splinters which were difficult to remove.. The shed has its own distribution box and speaker cables installed behind the walls. The lighting came from Gumtree and had been in someone’s lounge..
The shed has become my work/music/computing/editing room with most of the gear rescued from University skips. You would not believe what is thrown away because it is over five years old. I’ve rescued far too much stuff and now really need to sort things out a bit.
The latest photographs of the shed are rather minimal because I have had to store lots of garage gear here owing to the leak in my garage roof. Things are on hold for a minute. However, I can still use the shed, albeit somewhat minimally. The bottom line is that the building of this shed saved my sanity and is a wonderful sanctuary from all the madness that is going on at the moment.
