I have to build yet another shed.  I already have three.  Sheds, it seems, are inevitable.  According to the locals, you can never have enough sheds – or ‘out-buildings’ as they are referred to in bureaucrat-speak.  It’s stupid, though.  Sheds and outbuildings are often visible proof that you screwed up when you designed it all in the first place. 

Mind you, some sheds should not, by design, be part of the main building.  I need a boat-shed because, well, I have boats and all the stuff that messing about in boats requires.  That stuff is heavy, oily, wet and sometimes smelly (but, then again, so am I and I’m allowed in the BIG house.  Mostly.).  Still, the boat shed should, by necessity, be close to the water and, since the house isn’t, a boat-shed was added to the estate. 

I also needed a generator shed for the genset (duh!) and it should be as far from the house as possible for reasons auditory.  And so the estate grew again – this time in the opposite direction.  

Everyone needs a woodshed if now for no other reason than to put wood.  Smoking behind it and spanking children in it has, after all, gone out of fashion. Woodsheds should be as open and as breezy as possible for drying the wood and relatively close to the house for the convenience of carrying same.  So that’s three sheds.  You’d think three sheds would be enough.

But it’s not.  Because we are off-the-grid, we rely on batteries and batteries, damn their acidic and fragile nature, are sensitive to the cold.  So I need to coddle my batteries in a warming shed of sorts to get them through the winter.  Poor dears.  For you handy-people, you’ll please note that batteries should be close to the house for wiring and line loss reasons and therefore not in the more distant genset shed or boatshed.  Since a battery shed should be well-insulated, it would not, therefore, be part of the airy-and-closer-to-the-cabin-woodshed.  Thus shed number 4.     

Because we built simple and small, we have limited space in the house.  Better put: we built too small.  Our space is so limited, in fact, that the freezer and the washing machine were, for the first year, outside on the porch.  This was OK with me as they seemed to be up to the task of facing the weather but, since they are so ugly, I was obliged to ‘hide them’ from public view.  This is all because my wife’s sense of aesthetics is not the same as her counterpart in Appalachia.  I pointed out as diplomatically as I could that there is no one viewing them except the two of us and we are all family.  “Your point?” was all I got in return.  Translation: ”….build them a house!”

So, I built a ‘wash-house’.  But before that, the list also included a dog house my wife aspired to eventually see featured in an upcoming issue of Architectural Digest and the simpler but new backwoods biffy that can aspire to a more vulgar standard.  The extra biffy remains as yet undone.   

Even though we live in a modest home, our empire is expanding as if by manifest destiny.  It’s all crude and rustic, of course, but spacious in an interrupted, willy-nilly kind of way. 

And I know that won’t be the end of it.  If I was a really good handy-man-type, I’d have a workshop.  But I don’t have one.  It may sound silly but I think I was in some kind of denial about workshops.  I believed: if a man has a workshop, people will expect him to do work in it.  So, logically, I didn’t get one.  I have buckets of tools and boxes of junk instead.   

Most annoyingly, my wife seems to think I have one and is always giving me things to fix or make in the non-existent work shop.  The irony is that if I argue that I don’t actually have a workshop, she’ll simply add that to my to-do list.  So, we both pretend that I have one. 

But I don’t.

A garden shed with an attached greenhouse is now on our list, a natural consequence of regular Lee Valley catalogues.  Such a shed is de rigueur in the country.  And then there’s the guest cottage I really would like to add to the inventory, the tent platform for the attendant kinder and, of course, the much-discussed and coveted ‘designer’ gazebo (as if that will ever happen……!).  Do arbours and hot-tub enclosures count?  They are on the list too.  What about garages for ATVs and garden tractors?  Chicken coops?

My neighbours have barns, yoga huts, yurts, saunas and one even has a squash court (currently employed as a birthing shed for his sheep).  Frankly, I think one can get carried away with sheds and outbuildings and I feel close to reaching that point already.  Still, with some judicious dragging of feet I have managed to keep the expanding empire somewhat under control so far.  But I am slipping.  I can feel the inevitable destiny of more small structures pressing against my future.  Resistance is futile.  Let there be sheds!