Meet my Shedquarters.

Why I quit co-working and built this, instead.

Cookie Monster isn’t welcomed on most business calls. Neither is my toddler son Truman, who alternates between giggling and screaming and talking very loudly about his poop. Or my yippy dog, Tony Toni Toné, who violates my lap and molts his entire coat daily. Tony Toni Toné has, indeed, done it again.

So when I entered the realm of self employment in 2013, I knew I needed a place to work from. Any place. Just not home.

I found one, and it was (and still is) awesome. Link Coworking was exactly 0.7 miles from my house—5 minutes in traffic, 3 otherwise—and offered quiet phone rooms, clean bathrooms, and mostly reliable wi-fi access.

Other pluses: They have poo-pourri (“Spritz the bowl before you go, and no one else will ever know.) There are two cool bars within 100 feet, for those 4 p.m. bourbon days. Cute girls walk by the window.

I signed up. A month in, I upgraded, opting for the dedicated desk. I schlepped in my Apple Thunderbolt monitor. I brought some baubles and tchotchkes to make the desk feel like my own. I settled in, made friends, and racked up a lot of AmEx points paying my monthly rent.

In all, I co-worked for close to a year-and-a-half. I co-worked the bejeezus out of that place. And then I needed a change.

Why? There’s no one prominent reason — just a whole slew of small reasons, followed by a fewer bigger ones. Let’s start with the tiny fries:

I planned (and still plan) to start recording podcasts — and a co-working facility isn’t a great place for that.
I also regularly moderate webinars for some of my clients. Also, not optimally done in a shared office space.
I hate when people look at my screen. I spend an hour or two every day designing really weird t-shirts for my online store, The Joshist.
My creative process requires that I try lots of strange ideas — some of which aren’t ready for the public eye.
I can be really noisy. I have a loud voice. And I was always worried that I was bothering people. Sometimes I was, sometimes I wasn’t.
Other people can be noisy, too. And they were always worried they were bothering me. Mostly, they weren’t. But every now and then . . .
I make a lot of poop jokes. Like, a lot. And I’m comfortable with that. But other people probably aren’t.
I started feeling lonely, believe it or not. Friends who used to come to the office a lot stopped coming as often. I could be lonely at home for much cheaper.
I never drank the free coffee, which was one of the great perks. Sadly, there was no free oolong tea.
There was no ventilation in the phone rooms. So if you spent more than an hour in one, you came out looking and smelling a bit like steamed cabbage.
You can’t microwave fish there. Or anything, for that matter. There is no microwave. I wouldn’t microwave fish anyway — but it bothered me that I couldn’t.
I like the excitement of change, simple as that.

The bigger reasons? The first one is financial. My business is thriving, and the rent was affordable, all things considered, so it wasn’t a question of whether I could afford it. I paid somewhere around $450 a month for my dedicated space—reasonable, given the rents in Central Austin where I live and work.

But I couldn’t help but annualize that number. $5400 dollars a year for a desk. In three years, assuming no rate increases, I would spend $16,200—and still never drink a single cup of the free coffee.

The second reason: I really wanted to build something tiny. And buy a bunch of badass tiny furniture and tiny gear for it. In a hot real estate market like Austin, a well-built back yard studio office is definitely a selling point. So why not take two or three years worth of co-working rent, and invest it in building a place I can work from forever — with hot tea, to boot?

Hence, the Shedquarters was born.

I’ll skip the arduous R&D phase, where I stalked Pinterest boards and drew really crappy sketches and even bought a set of DIY plans, convinced that my clients and family wouldn’t notice if I dropped off the planet for a few months to sweat it out in my backyard with a hammer and some 2 x 6’s.

I finally settled on a hybrid approach: I hired a very reputable, highly recommended company here in Austin — Sheds & More— to build me a slightly modified version of one of their popular shed plans. Then, I did most of the interior finish out work myself, to save a few bucks along the way and enjoy the satisfaction of a hands-on creative project.

I’m not kidding when I say they built the shell in a day. At 8 a.m., my yard looked like this:

Less than an hour later, the foundation was built and leveled, and walls were starting to take shape:

By lunchtime, you could sit on top of it, and maybe even look over the neighbor’s fence to see if he is growing pot like I’ve always half suspected:

By mid-afternoon, two more walls, a roof, and some windows:

And finally, before dinner was even in the oven, it had a fresh coat of paint, doors, and air conditioning:

I’m also not kidding when I say it took me three more months of my own (on again, off again, on again) evening and weekend labor to finish my end of the job — insulation, drywall, paint, trim work, flooring, installing electrical fixtures (but not the main service line and outlet drops, which I left to a qualified electrician), and half-finishing a walkway that will eventually extend all the way from the shedquarters to my back porch.

But enough of my yammering. Let’s look inside. If you’re on the Skype / GoToMeeting / GoToWebinar / Bluejeans / Facetime / the telephone with me, I’m probably sitting cross-legged on this sofa, nursing a large Diet Coke:

If I’m designing / producing / recording, you’ll find me on the opposite end of the office, at my desk.

All in all, I love the place. Would I change anything? Of course. A few small things I would do differently, if I had to start over:

I would install a more powerful window a/c unit. Even though the unit is technically sized properly for the room, it does not keep up with August in Texas. The tiny space heater, on the other hand, is brilliant. This summer, I’ll either upgrade the window unit — which is mounted directly into the wall—or more likely, go for one of those quiet, efficient, and more expensive mini-split systems.
I would pay someone else to do the drywall work. That sucked. I only called for one estimate, and it came in way above what I wanted to pay. Instead of calling for more estimates, I did the work myself. I may be a better man for it, but my lungs are also perma-caked in a protective coating of drywall dust.
I would use the highest r-rating of insulation known to man. Does R-1 billion exist? Because if so, I would use that. On a whole, this place is well insulated, and stays comfortable. But again, those late afternoons in August . . .
I would never have rented that trench digger machine. THe elctrician needed a trench dug from the new shedquarters to the service panel on my house. I decided to do it myself, with a gas-powered trenceher. Never again. Next time, I’ll rent a person — and they can rent the machine, use a shovel, unleash a small pack of prairie dogs — or do anything except make me push that ghastly beast.
I would install a few more power outlets — particularly a desk height. I built this to code, so it already has a good number. But I like minimum cable clutter, which means sometimes I have to get creative about how to hide wires. Shorter runs would make for fewer visible wall warts, etc.

That’s pretty much it, though. Oh, and one more thing, should you consider building a shedquarters yourself: Knoweth thy tax implications. In my simple mind, I would be able to write off the entire cost of building this thing in one swoop. Not so, grasshopper. Unless your CPA is smarter than mine, this sucker gets depreciated over a useful life of something like 27 years.

At an estimated cost to build (materials, labor, etc — but not furniture, of course) of around $15k, that means an annual tax savings of a paltry $555.
But I didn’t build it for the tax savings. I built it to have my own fortress of solitude, creativity, loneliness, and doo doo jokes.

Mission accomplished.

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Joshua Merritt sells the craziest t-shirts ever at TheJoshist.com. To give him a tiny little internet hug, just click the heart button below.