The Shed

I laughingly refer to my studio as "the shed". It is far more than that.

Today has been a successful milestone for me as I've decided that the sanding of the plastering is complete. I could continue to sand all the tiny imperfections, but I've realised that it is 'good enough'. This is not going into Homes and Gardens (or even Studio), so as long as the space is waterproof, clean and dry it is good enough.

I'll be putting up attachments for hanging the cupboards tomorrow which will allow me to start painting.

As part of the building of my new studio, I need some storage. We have some old Ikea shelving that looks a lot like their Gorm range. It's been sitting around in our laundry since we moved out of London, gathering cobwebs.

It's going into the studio. I've painted it white. and it will be going up along one of the short walls. I need to buy some Billy bookcases, but Ikea is over an hour away and while they will deliver, they're going to charge me more than the cost of the bookcases to do so. I won't get those until October when I go up to London for the Muswell Hill Crop.

Studio Building – the new home of Scrapperdashery

Since April, I've been building a studio in the back garden. I was putting off blogging it until it was finished, but people have been asking to see it and it is taking longer than originally planned because I'm doing so much of the work myself. I hope that it's completion will coincide with the release of the second "Studio" from "Cloth, Paper, Scissors" - it isn't featured in there.


If you're thinking of doing a project like this, I hope that some of my experiences will help you.

I've been thinking about this for a long time and all my research told me that this would be too expensive to ever achieve, as I wanted a space that was a decent size. Alternatively, I could do it relatively inexpensively, but would have to do all the work myself and I knew I didn't have the skills necessary. However, on a Sunday outing I drove past Phoenix Sales and noticed they had some buildings that looked appropriate. There was no one in, so I had a look in a couple of the buildings and went back on the Monday They had one of them converted into an office which looked great. However, the full cost of achieving that was £18k - again, way over my budget. But they had a shed on show they wanted to get rid of. Original price £5.6k, mine for £2k including VAT, delivery and erection.

Firstly, I needed to know if we had the space. I measured up the section of garden I had in mind and yes, there was space. Next, would I need planning permission? I did some digging and found that as long as the building was more than 5 metres from the rear wall of my house, took up less than 25% of the existing garden (including existing outbuildings), was no more than 4 metres tall from the ground to roof peak and because this is a home studio, I didn't need planning permission. You will need to check with your local council to find out what the regulations are because, frustratingly, they are not consistent across the country.

The building is a heavy duty workshop that came with standard garden shed windows which I knew would make the building uninsurable. I needed lockable windows. No company would estimate for windows or electrical work until there was a building to look at, so I commissioned my builder to build the deck. Here is my builder, David, putting the deck together.

They arrived about a week later to put the shed onto the deck base. It took them longer than anticipated to put it together so by the end of day one, I had walls but no roof:

It took them the whole of the following day to get the roof on and watertight. [First rule: everything will take longer than you plan, no matter how well you plan.] However, once the walls were up, I was able to get people to quote to put in windows and the electricity.

[Second rule: know exactly what you want before you have people come around to quote.] Draw or write down exactly what you want it to look like. If they are good, they will make suggestions. Note each suggestion down on your drawing so that as the next person comes in to quote, you can ask them to cost up the suggestions. Also, if you particularly like a suggestion, contact the previous sales person and ask them to include the suggestion in their quote – they will have seen enough to be able to include it without having to come back to visit.

By the end of the second day, I had a roof. Plus four electricians and three window companies had all come to quote. I decided to buy the windows myself and get my builder to install them. However, one of the electricians came back the following week and did the first fix.

We needed a way of getting into and out of the office. I had to really stop and think about what sort of staircase I had on it. My original plan was to have a small platform just outside the door and the staircase come down to the side of the building. From there, you would pick up the footpath and the steps that lead off the side of the raised area to the main section of the garden. Then I stopped and thought about this: If I'm carrying things into and out of this building a lot, will I be happy about doing all that turning and having to manoeuvre things up the narrow steps. I decided to increase the size of the landing so that I am able to put things down safely to open the doors and to keep the stairs as straight as possible. This was another task that I hired my builder to do, so that I could be sure that the stairs would be structurally sound and safe.

The next step was insulation. I wanted something that would make the room useable in winter, so having considered a number of products, I went with a solid foam insulation with aluminium on both sides. I had to buy large sheets and cut them down because the gaps between the rafters is non-standard. I (and later, my husband) spent the better part of a week covered in bits of foam (the insulation has a tendency to create a lot of beaded rubbish when you cut it). If I were to do this again, I'd use the standard sheeting on the walls, but the manufacturers make a special sheeting designed for roofs that expands and compacts to hold itself within the rafters. It would make things a lot easier. My builder had suggested that we put nails through the rafters to hold some of the sheets, but I couldn't make that work, so we used metal tape (the type used for insulation or for Alcohol inking) which held the sheets in temporarily until the vapour barrier was up and holding them in place. The vapour barrier was a large sheet 0f plastic which we cut down to fit each section and fitted with a standard domestic stapler. We allowed up to 5cm extra around the edges as overlap to just ensure that corners and the bottom were going to be safe.

Then came the plasterboard (drywall). I went for 9mm depth board, but in retrospect 12mm would have been better. I would also now seriously consider getting the plasterboard that has the vapour barrier integral. It would have saved a lot of time and made fitting a lot easier. My builder came back and helped with this and I have to say, his help was invaluable. It requires a lot of upper body strength to lift the boards above your head and you want as large sheets as possible to minimise the amount of jointing you have to do. In the UK, we usually do a skim coating of plaster over the top of the plasterboard, but I don't have the skills to do that and I certainly didn't have the budget. My choice was to go down the US example and just plaster over the screws and the joints. The trick that I've done which appears to have worked is to plaster the join roughly, then place some wet paper tape over the top of that wet plaster and then put another layer of plaster over the top of that. Once that's all dry, I've sanded it down and gone back and tidied up the rougher bits.

Where the plasterboard meets the roof joists, the plasterboard is a little uneven. An easy solution is to use a little quarter-round to edge the plasterboard. This is being held in with some panel pins and is just finishing off the ceiling perfectly.