THE FRANKENSHED
The shed that came back from the dead
In the Spring of 2021 as yet another pandemic lockdown dragged on I finally became bored enough to see if I could save the rotten shed at the end of my garden.
Little did I know that it was the beginning of the DIY saga of my life.
One that would begin with me on my knees pulling up slug infested floor boards and end two years later with being crowned the Cuprinol Shed of The Year 2023 champion.
The Sistine Chapel of sheds
When I began work on the shed I had never heard of the Shed of The Year competition. After people saw what I was doing with the outside they told me I should enter.
I went and looked at some of the entrants for the 2021 edition and the two finalists that caught my eye were both owned by Priests. Because of the lockdowns they had been forced to convert their sheds into chapels from which they conducted their sermons over Zoom.
I liked the idea of my shed being a chapel too, a place of refuge, but I’m not a Christian, and it still had to function as a normal garden shed. So I decided to make mine a Pagan chapel of sorts, a celebration of nature and the cyclical renewal of the seasons.
Winer, Spring, Summer and Autumn adorn the ceiling with illustrations of the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the seven major planets of Astrology and host of other gods and mythical figures for company.
On the back wall a 23 carat gold tree of life fills the space with all the tools I need to store in there hanging from its branches.
2023 Champion
The inside of the shed was finished in late 2022. Early the following year I decided to finally enter the Cuprinol Shed of the Year contest.
In the end my shed, The Frankenshed, beat over 200 other entrants to be crowned the overall winner for that year.
The win was covered in BBC News, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Metro and many more. I even did a live link direct from the shed on This Morning.
The Daily Mail also covered the win. And not content with this light hearted good news story they went in search of some spite.
The Mail found another shed finalists who felt I was undeserving of my win. He claimed my efforts were ‘basic’, ‘underwhelming’ and most damningly ‘just a shed’. Shots fired.
This sparked a few days of back and forth Daily Mail articles quoting my responses on Instagram. In the end it gave people more entertainment than the win itself. A true victory for small minded British spitefullness.
