The Built By Jane Shed

Shed Features

I designed and built my workshop using self-taught traditional timber framing techniques and English larch. It took me a year too make, slowly cutting all the joints and hoping the frame would fit together at the end! The workshop has a wildflower roof and it makes me intensely happy every day. Of course I can now never move house.

Other Shed info

Armed with two timber framing books, a small A3 drawing board and a hefty dose of naivety I started spending my day off each week cutting joints into pieces of timber that were too heavy for me to lift. I quickly learned to lift one end onto a wheelbarrow and then move the timber to where I wanted by carrying and steering the end furthest from the wheelbarrow, it looked ridiculous but it worked and now I could move the timber singlehanded. The workshop frame was only ever assembled on the floor and only ever a side at a time. It was only on raising day that i would see if it all lined up and fit together, and with help from great friends lifting everything into place (and a few whacks of a mallet) it did!

The frame is held together with oak pegs made from a salvaged bit of oak from a broken kitchen and I rounded every one by hand with an old spokeshave as I didn't have a lathe. English Larch planks were bought for the cladding and to save money, all then ripped to required width and finished by chamfering the edges with a block plane.

Friends came back again, this time to help install the wildflower roof, with a chain of hands passing up the soil bag by bag until she was finished! Beer was drunk.

I've since insulated it and had an electrician install power and lights and now I'll spend the next 10 years trying (and failing) to keep it tidy!