Shed Photo of the Year update

You may have remembered that Andrew Culture won our Shed Week Photo Comp with his great B & W shot of an allotment shed.

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Well I have finally been able to track him down, so over to him!

This is me in my own shed (just after I had built it)

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The inspiration behind my interest in sheds is a fascination of how we carve out tiny pieces of this planet and claim them as our own.

The truth is I don’t actually have much in my shed, everything in there belongs to my wife as she’s the real gardener. I just like to stand in the shed and survey the allotment.

The winning shed photo is of a good friend’s shed down at the allotment, it’s a bit more representative of a proper allotment shed as it’s a bit ‘Heath Robinson’ and our shed was built from a kit.

Our previous allotment shed was made up of four posts knocked into the ground, and four walls of weatherboarding reclaimed from a derelict plot elsewhere on the allotments. It regularly blew down.

We seem to accidentally collect sheds, in addition to the shed at the allotment we have had three at home, we now only have two as one was gifted to a friend who needed somewhere to store his moth watching equipment.

I am a writer and photographer – www.andrewculture.com

My wife is a ‘classically trained’ gardener, she served her apprenticeship caring for the listed gardens at a local stately home, she keeps a blog here

>> Thanks Andrew, of course do you think you lot can be top Shed photo for Next year, then please add the photo to our Flickr Group now.

Everybody Wants To View … the Punks not Dad

Everyone’s favorite middle aged punk band Punks not dad with a shed leaning and of course the blokes who come up with the shed anthem & official song for shed week, that is “In Me Shed” may have hit the 14000000000000 (Fourteen thousand) views mark on youtube by the time you read this, if not then why not view the video in full not just the bit about Lisa Rogers.

You can also read an interview with the band which took place after their dadstock gig

They will be appearing with the The Sex Pistols Experience at Cardiff Barfly next Friday.

last plug you can Still buy the single IN me Shed from various online shops as a MP3 download, amazon and Apple’s Itunes

If you are a band/musician that’s into sheds then contact me and I will feature your Youtube clip on Shed.TV

Shed Week 2009 interviews: Secrets-of-shed-building

This is the last of the Shed Week guest posts from my favorite sheddies, hope you enjoyed them? You can View all the Shed Week Interviews here.

secrets-of-shed-small

Structures and how they are built have always interested me. As a Structural Engineer I spend most of my working life in an office designing buildings, calculating what works (and what doesn’t!), attending design team to meetings and inspecting work on site. I enjoy my work, it’s interesting but very rarely do I get to do any of the really fun stuff – practical building!

One of the reasons I love sheds is that I can have my own building project on in my back garden to work on as and when I choose. I started building my first shed, a lean-to shed to keep the bikes in, about a month before my second son was born. My wife thinks it was something to do with the pregnancy, I got the urge to build and before I knew it I had a new bike shed and a new baby!

The idea for Secrets-of-shed-building.com came about just over a year ago, 7 years or so after I built that first shed. I have always been a big fan of readersheds and Uncle Wilco, however I thought that a web site to share some of my more technical shed knowledge would complement his fun approach to the subject.

My latest shed (that one in the background behind me) is almost finished now, just got the gutters and water butt to install so it should be ready for Shed Week 2010. Secrets-of-shed-building.com however is very much a work in progress. When I started building this website I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for and now with over 170 pages of content, I feel like I am just about getting started!

Shedworking – the book – the cover

On this great Shed Week, Alex over at shedworking has reveled what his book on shedworking will look like.

Here’s what it’s probably going to look like, give or take some tweaks. Just to remind you, it’s out in June 2010 with Frances Lincoln at £16.99 (there will be a special offer on this price for all you loyal subscribers to Shedworking and The Shed magazine).

shedworking_book_cover

Shed of the year winnner 2010 looks like they may be getting another prize(if I can nick some from Alex) ;)

International Shed of the year 2009

If you think your shed is as good as their’s[theres] then please Share your Shed

As you know Shed Week/Shed of the year started out as a National Shed week in the UK after getting so many great sheds on readersheds.co.uk, we had to have an outlet to celebrate them.

But as the international entries poured in we had to do something about it to..

So I asked international judge Lloyd Alter and shed man of the world Alex Johnston to join me in picking one shed from the sheds voted for in the International Category.

So now we not only have Shed of the year (for the British sheds) and now International Shed of the year (for the others), yes its confusing!

It was not an easy decision but I had the casting vote… and went for


The SHED Chuck Witmer, Silver Spring, MD USA

The SHED - Chuck Witmer

OK its a posh shed/workshop and its not the norm here in the UK, but its show what an architectural designed shed can be, Chuck did build it himself and I think if I had the room for it at the end of me garden then its a great looking structure to have.

Here are the finalists in international sheds category voted by the sheddies in our Shed Year 2009 Vote of which Chucks shed was one of them, see if was a hard decision… as they are all different and have some great features – I think our international cousins are getting this shed thing!

The Pip Laura ,Northland, New Zealand, Summerhouse
The Pip - Laura

Eco-Shed James Glave,Bowen Island, British Columbia, Canada

Eco-Shed - James Glave

Hobbit Hole R Estelle,Kenai, Alaska

Hobbit Hole - R Estelle

Inspiration House Terry Rathje,currently Fairfield, Iowa

Inspiration House - Terry Rathje

The Church of Gardening Maundy Mitchell,White Mountains, New Hampshire, USA

The Church of Gardening - Maundy Mitchell