Fifty Sheds of Grey: The book

Here's the book of the Twitter feed that you've all been waiting for. Available very soon in Kindle and old fashioned paper formats. Here's some info about it:

'Hurt me!' she begged, raising her skirt as she bent over the workbench. 'Very well,' I replied, 'You've got fat ankles and no dress sense.' Colin Grey's life was happy and simple until the day everything changed - the day his wife read THAT book. Suddenly, he was thrust head-first into a dark, illicit world of pleasure and pain. This is the story of one man's struggle against a tide of tempestuous, erotic desire and of the greatest love of all: the love between a man and his shed. WARNING: This book contains graphic shed-based images. Please don't look if you are easily offended.

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Beauty therapy in a garden office

This is the first time eDEN Garden Room has been asked to build a garden room which will be used as a beauty therapy treatment room.

"The customer had a vision of creating a tranquil space for friends and family to enjoy beauty treatments surrounded by nature," says eDEN's Rachel Wichall. "Living in a medieval village, nestled in the Kent countryside, the customer’s property is Listed. For this reason the garden room did require planning permission from the local authority, which happened to be a relatively painless procedure. The only restriction the local authority put in place was that the garden room doors did need to be hardwood which was not a problem for us.

"The result is a tranquil space, which fits beautifully in the natural surroundings. Designed to meet the planning requirements and achieve all the customer’s detailed requirements for her beauty therapy room – we think this is a smasher! The team had a great time working on this project and it was a lovely client who sent a special message to the team when the garden room was completed thanking them for their hard work."

The full spec is: hardwood double glazed French doors (with security locks), slit window and hardwood opening window, clad in durable and high quality redwood larch cladding, fully insulated (walls, ceilings, floor), plastered and painted, heated by underfloor heating, finished with an overhang and decking, lit by spotlights and decking lights. -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Is Ireland becoming a nation of shedworkers?

An interesting piece in the Irish Independent by Mark Keenan suggests that the economic downturn is "transforming Ireland into a nation of self-employed entrepreneurs who are increasingly working from home". Dublin based Bizquip, an Irish-owned supplier of office equipment, says supplies to home offices are rising fast, with homeworkers accounting for 15% of their furniture supply business. Bizquip owner and CEO Jim Leyden told Keenan:

"Particularly high demand has come from professionals in the 45 to 55 age group who have been either made redundant or have taken early retirement and have started working from home. They're either based in a box room in the house, converted a garage or else built a dedicated office in their gardens."

Sean Brett, owner of Galway-based shed outbuilding company Steeltech (pictured above is one of their shedworking designs) added that their garden office business had increased tenfold in the last six years. He told the paper:

"A return to home working after redundancy has certainly been a factor but we're finding that most of our home office buildings are going to self-employed individuals renting a small office in a commercial building but who are planning to base themselves at home to save on rent. Demand also comes from people who have retrained and are putting buildings in their gardens in which to offer counselling, therapy or sports massage."

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Cross stitch shedworking

Like sheds? Likc cross stitch? You'll love this then from Hancock's House of Happy (click the link for full details) who has this to say about their shedworking setup:

"My workshop is a 6'x6' shed that takes up about a fifth of my backyard. Tired of having to share my living space with a messy hobby and never being able to leave clay out I cleared out the shed and that is where I do my pottery now. The arrangement seems to be working so far. It is going to be tricky in the winter as there is no heat or light in there. There are plans to get some electricity in it this year so that working in the winter time will be more comfortable."

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Shedworking in Los Angeles: before and after

Jason Priluck bought a new house in Northridge, Los Angeles, six years ago. "Along with this beautiful house, came the most decrepit shed you’ve ever seen," he says. "We used it to store gardening tools, pesticides, weed killers, and the dead bodies of whatever animals “croaked” in there. Eventually, we forgot about it. It was just something that we agreed to never acknowledge existed.

"This past July, I found myself standing in the yard while staring at the shed. A light went off in my head and I decided that maybe there was something we could do with this after all! I spent some time on Shedworking doing research (along with a few others and a nifty iPad app called “Houzz”) and I came up with a plan. I recruited my 5-year-old son and together we’ve spent the past seven weeks turning our shed into a Man Cave."

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The drawing shed

The drawing shed, a non-profit arts organisation based in Walthamstow, East London is the shedlike brainchild of visual artists/directors Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd. It is made up of three mobile studios – the drawing shed, ClayOven and PrintBike – which are housed in garage/lock-ups on a housing estate in E17 from where the artists run socially engaged projects on the local estates, in the YMCA and across London. The drawing shed was established in 2009 by artists Sally Barker and Sally Labern as a custom built, portable drawing pavilion. Here's what they say about it:

"The two artists worked with an architect, Mark Parsons of Studio Polpo, to create a mobile drawing studio. the drawing shed was constructed in the café garden of the YMCA so that residents could see it being built. Over that first summer, it was wheeled around the community and workshops were held in various locations to get people talking and drawing together. the drawing shed aimed to use drawing as a medium which, as a by product, increased community cohesion and inclusivity, creating a safe space for residents to pursue their own creativity, take creative risks and experience drawing in the broadest sense."

You can catch them this month on the E17 Art Trail where they're presenting exhibitions, performances anda a pop up cinema. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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100 wild huts

You couldn't do too much shedworking in these huts, but this is a marvellous project by Kevin Langan. Here's how he explains it: 

"100 Wild Huts is 100 Wild Huts is an experimental challenge I’ve set myself to build 100 small survival shelters on any piece of ground that harbours enough natural resources for the build. I intend to sleep rough in each shelter for one night and blog about the experiences. I intend to experiment with the huts form, structure and materiality in the hope that in due course, this may become a useful resource for budding adventurers and outdoor enthusiasts alike."

He's up to Hut 5 and is building them all using a small £10 hatchet and only natural resources around each site.

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Tuesday posts are sponsored by 3rdSpace modular garden rooms.
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