Holy shed

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

I’ve been lucky in my life to pretty much always have my own “space.” My brother and I had separate bedrooms starting when we were in grade school, and my dad and one of his buddies built us a treefort. I had a roommate for a year in college, but we moved into an off-campus house, where I again got my own spot. When my then-girlfriend, now-wife and I moved into our first house in Sandpoint in 2004, I commandeered a back room for my “study.” Over the following 20 years and four subsequent houses, I always managed to carve out some secluded area to make “mine.”

That is, until the place where we currently live. We moved in a year ago and it’s a great house in a fantastic location in town. There are three bedrooms for the four of us, but otherwise it’s a wide open floor plan that pretty much means the entire place is one long room — from living area to kitchen, with a liminal area between the fridge and door to the garage. That’s where I’ve been holed up, and it’s not ideal.

Thanks to the job I have, I enjoy the luxury of being able to work from home almost whenever I want — and even when I don’t want to, such as the two or so pandemic years when almost everything I did for the Reader happened in a curtained-off alcove next to my former-living room. Today, my desk at home runs up against where we keep the coats and shoes, in full exposure to all passersby and equidistant to the fridge and laundry room. It’s been slowly driving me insane.

That’s why the most exciting thing in my life for the past year has been planning for the construction of a backyard writing shed, and it’s finally happening.

A builder-contractor friend of mine is volunteering his labor and emptying his garage of the lumber, fasteners, and other bits and bobs he’s accumulated from other jobs. His main payment will be getting a key to the finished product and license to use it when he doesn’t want to drive to his own home in the country.

Meanwhile, others have been offering to donate their efforts in what’s starting to feel like an Amish barn raising. Just the other day, one of my neighbors gave me a door, some spare rain flashing for the roof and a set of blinds. I know it’s corny, but “it takes a village,” and I’ve rarely felt so gratified to live in this particular village.  

The whole process has also got me thinking about why and how it’s so important for everybody to have a place to which they can retreat for solitude, contemplation, uninterrupted creativity or just to exist without external demands. The term “safe space” has gotten a bad rap — specifically from people who make spaces unsafe — but that’s exactly what we all need.

Virginia Woolf referred to it as “a room of one’s own,” both literally and figuratively somewhere that (especially women, during the time she was writing) “could feel safe and comfortable and write, if that’s what they wanted to do. Ideally, the place would offer a blanket of support, while at the same time be inspirational,” as Dr. Diana Raab wrote on psychologytoday.com.

I bristle at the notion of a “mancave,” because there is no gender stipulation on seeking peace and autonomy — indeed, the article “Mancaves and Masculinity,” in the October 2014 edition of the Journal of Consumer Culture, argued that rather than a rejection of “the feminine conception of home,” those spaces “represent therapeutic venues that help men in alleviating identity pressures created by work as well as domestic life and aid revitalization of men’s identities as fathers and husbands.” Again: I argue that goes for anyone of any gender.

Joseph Campbell had the best angle on the concept, quoted in A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living: “Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again. You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia — a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you — a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. I think everybody, whether they know it or not, is in need of such a place.”

Now more than ever, with the world being the way it is, I hope you all find your holy shed.