A work in progress…

Building a studio

For a change, instead of a pottery work in progress I thought I would show you the progress of the shed which has taken up so much of our time, energy and money for the last few months – all worth it, I hasten to add!

Demolition

First things first – getting the old sheds out of the way. Despite the rotten floors, mice nests and smashed windows the shed was very strong and had an iron structure in part of it. It took us a long time to take off boarding, remove windows and wiring, bag up the old and mouldy insulation and then, a couple of days of the actual demolition. I didn’t expect the time it would take, nor the big clear up of the lawn of scraps of insulation, wood and nails. We had marvellous help from our marvellous friends and I think we owe them a pot or two…

Rebuilding

Rather than being able to put a shed up where we had taken one down, as I had naively thought at the beginning, we had to start all over again. Filling in a big hole in the patio area, laying new foundations, building concrete blocks up to create a level on our sloping lawn and finally building a wooden structure to hold the shed base.

We designed the shed that we wanted – three rooms – a woodshed, a storage space and a pottery studio. We have two doors, one onto the patio area for pottery workshops and visitors, one for Chris and his sawdusty feet. We also have plenty of windows – having worked at the old house in the basement I was desperate for a studio space with light and a view!

Designing a studio space

All of that took heaps of time and work – thankfully the Argyll winter has been fairly mild and we managed to be working outdoors for a lot of the time. Then we had to wait – booking in with Beaver Timber in Oban to bring us down our shed now we were ready….

The shed is much yellower than we expected. What colour shall we paint it? And the inside now needed to be fitted out with insulation and boarding, then painting and then the electrics – another couple of weeks of work and waiting and with some brilliant assistance from dae-it-yersel in Dunoon – possibly the best customer service possible. Alasidair Mirrlees cheerfully worked on our electrics and now we have power! We were so glad to get all our gear unpacked and get ready to get stuck in. A big thank you to Pauline at Sea Drift Pottery for letting me share her space in the meantime.

I spent Friday afternoon putting up my collection of arty postcards and such like and painting myself a blackboard area – all the arty stuff I have been planning for months. And then Saturday was our first full day in the shed. Do come and visit us – but be warned, we are taking a snap of our visitors for our Instagram page. Here are a few snaps of our first finished piece this weekend, our first visitors and a the space starting to look lived in…