Quentin Bates: shedworker

Quentin Bates works for a trade magazine and also write Nordic crime fiction. Here, he talks about becoming a shedworker.

I used to have a room indoors to work in. In some ways it was fine, but work is always there. There’s always something to be done. Banishing the workplace to the garden keeps a necessary distance between work and home.

This is actually my second attempt at shedworking. For a while I had a room to work in that was part of a stable block, but for some reason it didn’t click, didn’t feel quite right. Maybe it was too remote, or it could be there were too many distractions. Or it could be that I got tired of sweeping mouseshit off the desk every morning.

So now it’s shedworking mark II. My Dad built this shed 30 years ago and as sheds go, it’s quite magnificent, built of concrete blocks and with a tiled roof (The shed has been there long enough for a respectable vine to be growing at one end of it
). When it had started to outlive its usefulness as a shed, we decided to turn it not a workspace. It was a surprisingly straightforward conversion. We put in a ceiling with plenty of insulation above it and a friend sorted out the electrics. A coat of floor paint, an old carpet and some bookshelves, and it’s fine. It’ll be chilly in here next winter, so I’m wondering the convenience of an electric heater or the lower cost of running a wood burner?

Inside there is still semi-chaos after moving from a larger workroom elsewhere. Shelves are in place, but there are still boxes of stuff to be sorted out. The old workbench along one end is still there, complete with my blacksmith ancestor’s massive iron vice.
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