The Schtudio Schtory

The long and winding journey to a finally finished studio.

I can finally say that my bricks and mortar studio is open - yippee. I’ve already taught a couple of classes, had a new private client start yesterday and am hosting a 1/2 day retreat in a few weeks.

It feels so good to get going…

I use the term bricks & mortar loosely because it was actually a steel machinery shed that I’ve named the Dragonfly Schtudio. (the hubby says it should be Shtudio but I like the emphasis of the extra ‘C’ plus I think it lets people know that the misspelling was very much intentional but maybe I’m delusional on that front and folks are thinking it’s wanky - I don’t care)

Getting this thing up and going’s been a bit of a slog especially considering that we moved to our property almost two years ago. Never in a gazillion years did I think it would take so long.

I’m taking full responsibility for the part that was due to my ostrich like tendencies but mostly it was circumstances (and one really bad company) that done us wrong. For suresies it’s been a lesson in patience!

The original plan when we bought this property was to turn the two car garage next to the house into my studio. However, we’re on tank water and the pump is located in the garage, once we moved here and realised how loud that sucker is whenever someone even thinks about turning on a tap, we changed our minds. It’s quite loud and probably not the best soundtrack for some quiet, focused, mind body exercise.

While it would have been much more convenient because the garage already had power and water, we turned our attention to another structure on the property:

As you can see originally the shed was just three walls and a slab with no infrastructure whatsoever so we could make it so there would be no pump noise issue. Also, since it’s further from our house than the garage it became the better option to provide a bit more separation between the biz and our home life (although clients do have to drive by the house to access the shed).

Part 1 - enclosing the shed

The saga begins two years ago…

The first step of the project was to hire a company to add a fourth wall to enclose the shed so a few weeks after we moved in off we trundled to a shed company that had good reviews online.

My first mistake (and later biggest regret)? Not going to a few other companies or even thinking that a builder would have had the capability and skills to do the job but more on that later…

So, we moved the end of October and in mid November we’d had a meeting with the shed company salesman. 

Things we discovered:

• The shed was not certified by the council.
• It was not on aerial maps in 2011 but was there in 2014 so was built sometime in between those years.
• It was not up to code because it was too close to the side property line - on a rural property the code is a 10 metre setback and our shed was only 2 metres  - whoops.
• It could not be expanded/added on to because it sits on top of a hill and of none of the changes would pass the wind shear force engineering requirements.

After hemming and hawing and a couple of site visits by the salesman and the company engineer it was decided that we would enclose the fourth wall, bring it up to current code, make it strong enough to hang my aerial hammocks, and vermin proof it (yes, you read that correctly - vermin proof!)

It all sounded pretty simple…

Yes, yes, yes, we can take care of you, said the salesman - blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…

Can you tell where this is going?

Things almost immediately ground to a halt partially because we were still trying to acclimate ourselves to the big move and it was getting on towards Christmas. If you’ve ever spent any time in Australia you realise that not only is December the Silly Season but the month of January is also a wash. It’s still the school holidays so families are traveling and then Australia Day comes towards the end; the country really doesn’t start moving again until February so we didn’t press ahead with any urgency.

The first thing we did need to do was to acquire an easement for the only 2 metre setback because if council didn’t approve of that our project was dead in the water.

Evidently the building code that says you need a 10 metre easement on a  side boundary on a rural property is so that your dwelling or outbuildings don’t not get in the way of your neighbour(s) view or ruin their quality of life. I totally get that, you don’t really move to the country to live on top of other people now do you?

Once we’d handed the application into council, an inspector came to the property to check things out. He took one look and said it wouldn’t be a problem.

We were very easily granted the easement because these are our neighbours:

Yes, we border a cow paddock and it turns out that they don’t really care that our shed it too close to them.

Side note: these were our original neighbours, aren’t they cute? Since then we’ve had several other herds but they all eventually moooove on - we live a few km from the local abattoir. 

Alrighty, step one was complete, we’d gotten the variance for distance from the side property line so now we knew we could move forward with the shed company, off we went to get a contract ironed out and signed so we could move forward.

Here’s a red flag I willfully ignored:

We’d been sent an email notifying us of a price rise in the cost of steel due to Covid and building supply shortages, and supply chain issues. This was early 2021 when the Covid building boom was revving up. Remember when no one could travel so everyone decided to renovate their houses instead?

To avoid the steel price rise the contract needed to be signed by a certain date.  Because the company was so busy and every last one of the potential customers were trying to beat the price rise, the salesman could not guarantee that our needed engineering would be sorted before the price rise. He basically shined us on saying our project was so small that it didn’t matter if we missed the deadline because it would only be a few hundred extra dollars for us.

Well, I don’t know about you but I really resent someone telling me that I shouldn’t mind paying more and as someone I admire once said, keep your hands out of my wallet because you know nothing about what an extra couple of hundred dollars does or does not mean to me. Basically don’t make assumptions about people’s finances because a. you have no idea and b. it’s none of your freaking business.

Even though we’re well aware of the sunk cost fallacy and should’ve pulled the pin right then and there, we knew that every shed company and builder was just as busy and we didn’t relish starting over from scratch and being delayed further. So we stayed. 

Hindsight is 20/20 for sure because even though we stayed, it was nothing but one big, huge, ginormous DELAY…

Originally we were assured that because our job was so ‘bespoke’, ‘small’, and ‘unique’ that once our supplies arrived our job would be slotted in between bigger jobs and would take about a week. Okay, we thought, sounds good and we signed that contract the end of Feb, 2021.

Wanna know when our steel was delivered?

Twelve weeks later toward the end of May.

It was left in a pile under a tree close to our house:

We cleaned out the shed in anticipation for the impeding construction, lol:

Wanna know when the windows and doors were delivered?

A month later:

Great we thought, now that our supplies are here we’ll be next on the list because they’re going to ‘fit us in’.

Umm, wrong-o!

After numerous phone calls to the poor gentleman who was tasked with scheduling the shed builds it transpired that he knew nothing about the salesman’s b**s**t telling us that our job would be fit in between bigger jobs. He informed us that we were at the bottom of the list, yep, the end of the queue, and were 4-6 weeks out from having the job start.

Well…

That time frame came and went and we heard “just a few more weeks until your job starts” over and over and over again.

Wanna know how much longer our steel sat in a pile on the ground and our windows and doors leaned against the unfinished shed walls?

Another five months!!!

Our shed enclosing started in November of last year:

Pay particular attention to this very last photo 👆

This is what the sliding door looked like on the Thursday afternoon in November when the shed company builder finished, packed up his equipment and left.

Take a good look at the door frame on the right hand side - see how it’s not straight and has a slight bow just over halfway down?

Here is what that sliding door looked like less than 72 hours later on the Sunday morning:

If this happened to you you’d assume there was a flaw in the door, right? I mean that’s what we thought.

Well, the shed company said that since it was intact on the Thursday when the builder finished and they couldn’t be sure that a rock hadn’t hit the door and caused it to shatter that it was our responsibility to pay for the replacement.

Yep a rock leapt up while we were asleep and hit that door, I mean come on!

They made a big point of letting us know that they wouldn’t be putting a markup on the replacement door and that we’d get it for their cost - wow, how magnanimous of them!! 

Oh, I forgot to mention that the sliding doors were built backwards from how we wanted them to open. Luckily when the company came to replace the shattered glass they were able to switch the one that really mattered.

So the ‘builder’ was finished so now it was time to get it inspected by council.

Guess what?

Surprise - it failed!

Turns out the builder hadn’t read the plans correctly and forgot a few braces and brackets that were shown in plain sight.

When I showed him the council report he complained that his plans were different and didn’t show those things but when he actually checked, well son of a gun if they weren’t there (since they were the exact same plans that council had).

Okay, so a few weeks later he fixed the missing bits.

There was also another fix that council required that the shed company said was not their responsibility because it had to do with the roof and they weren’t dealing with the roof, only the walls. I countered that since we’d paid for engineering so that it would be up to code assumably to pass council inspection I did see it as their responsibility.

After me being the pissed off, disgruntled, squeaky wheel they finally said they’d do it and we passed the council inspection. Finally a win for me but by now it was December again and the world went into holiday mode.

Part 2 - The interior fit-out

Did I mention that builders and trades were so busy it was a miracle if you got any to call you back let alone show up. Or if they showed up and said they’d get back to you with a quote then they more often than not blew you off?

We’d had a builder on hold for most of 2021 and every few weeks we’d text him the update on the saga of enclosing the shed and when things were supposed to be finished. We wanted to make sure that we stayed on his list because he was recommended on numerous fronts, he’d already given us a bid, and we liked him (& still do!)

Our builder is a good guy and once he started things rolled smoothly - they just took freaking forever.

Jan 31st is when he started and he framed, insulated, and put up our interior plywood walls into the beginning of Feb and then…

RAIN!

Don’t know if you heard but we had the second worst flood in the history of recorded events - it was epic and while our house didn’t flood (remember we’re up on a hill) we were stranded at home for five days.

Now, not only was there the Covid building boom, the rising costs of supplies, the supply side issues (there was a countrywide shortage of concrete!!) - now there were people who needed their houses rebuilt from flood damage so they could get back to living and surviving.

Of course those people had way bigger problems than our little shed fit-out and we felt so incredibly lucky not to have any damage, but it added to slowing down our project since our builder, our electrician and all of our other trades were working round the clock to (rightly) help.

Another side note: I haven’t even mentioned how we got water and power up to the shed but our amazing sparky came through. Remember when we were delusional and thought that once we had our supplies delivered the enclosing of the shed was imminent? At that point he organised for a trench to be dug from the house to the shed and all the rough power and plumbing works were laid:

Now back to this year, here’s the rest of the schedule: 

Mid Feb the air con went it.

Mid March the epoxy floors were finished:

While all of this was going on we were also dealing with the engineering needed to safely hang my aerial hammocks. Each rigging point needs to be able to hold a ton (well 400kgs) of static weight so that when folks are hanging out in them and swinging around they are SAFE!

Unfortunately we had to deal with the evil shed company again, remember in our original remit their work was supposed to ensure that the structure could support the rigging?

You know where this is going, right?

When we finally got on to the outside engineer they had engaged to work up what we’d need to pass the council’s requirements it turns out that she didn’t know a thing about needing to have the steel ceiling beams strong enough to support people swinging around and hanging upside down.

I know that the salesman and shed company engineer were both aware of this requirement since:

• I talked about it all the time
• I sent them videos and photos of what was needed
• We talked about it when they visited the site before we signed a contract with them
• They had a copy of the rigging requirements that I’d sent them

But, of course, the outside engineer told us the salesman denied knowing anything about it - seriously?? We had conversations about it on multiple times. At least the shed company was consistent in their ineptitude but it sure pissed me off!

So we eventually found a fabulous structural engineer who came and assessed the beams and then made a plan for the steel brackets needed and our builder had a guy that could manufacture them. Yeehaw!!

All good except

In April the hubby and I took our Covid delayed trip back to the US and were there for the full month, what we thought would get done, i.e. the brackets being built  in our absence, did not happen at all.

Remember how busy everyone was? The bracket manufacturing fell through the cracks so…

At the end of May they'd been manufactured and were ready to hang:

Once the brackets were up the ceiling could be hung & the toilet walls could go up, this happened the beginning of June. And yes, they covered up the brackets but marked where they were:

And, after that, for some unexplained reason, the sheet rockers vanished for several weeks…

The mudding, taping, and sanding happened the end of June:

The beginning of July the hammock brackets were extricated from inside the ceiling - only one was a bit tricky to find -  the bolts could be screwed in, I could paint the ceiling, and the hammock rigging was finally finished:

 As you can see, our sparky had finished the electrical - those cans are now flush where they should be. 

After the three coats of paint on the ceiling (I always seem to pick a white that doesn’t cover very well so it needed multiple coats and I’m still not happy with it) I painted the toilet a lovely blue and began to fill and sand the bazillion nail holes in the trim:

The very end of July,  the fourth concreter we’d talked to actually followed through on what he said he’d do (yay! he was great) & the concrete surround was poured:

Beginning of August, the concrete cured and we could christen it with a  G&T (or two):

👇fuzzy picture because my phone was wedged into a tree?

Most of August was me finishing the bazillion nail holes, priming and painting the doors, and all the trim. The doors were one shade darker than the toilet walls and for the trim I created a pearly/gold colour so that it would kindov’ blend in with the plywood walls:

Beginning of September: the finish plumbing happened. Oooh boy the composting toilet was installed and I had running water in the baby sink!

Also in September? The three coats of interior varnish on the plywood walls so that they had a smooth finish.

For the rest of September we slowly moved all of my Pilates s**t in. There was a bunch of stuff in the guest bedroom which has been my Zoom studio for the past two years.

The garage housed the rest of my studio supplies where they’d been stored for those two years - unpacking things was like Christmas and we also moved a big ole heavy piece of furniture which was quite the schemozzle but we got it done:

At the beginning of October I started filming content from the Schtudio, we finally hung the springboards, and the hubby used his head to help me  position some art.

Oh, I also started to build the in real life business!!!

In mid October I headed back to the US for a Pilates conference (& to see my family) which finally brings me to the present and the very last piece of the Schtudio puzzle.

The internet's finally connected up there and I've I officially move out of my ‘studio’ of the last two years. I’ve been teaching from our second bedroom but now it can actually be the guest bedroom! Yay, freaking, yay!

My hubby is excited that I can now "go to work" (by literally walking up the garden path) and get out of his hair.

Everyone's happy!

Now that the Schtudio build is finally, finally, finally done, I’m thinking of Joe’s wise words:

As well as that epic advice from the tv series, Kung Fu, which aired from 1972-75:

I know this was the world’s longest blog post so if you’ve made it all the way to here, thank you.

Be Well, xBec

The information contained above is for informational purposes only. The contents of this blog are not intended to amount to advice and Rebecca Forde disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this post.