What Is A Men's Shed and Our Open Day

I just thought I would give you an update on what we've been doing. We've been quite busy over the past few weeks renovating what's known as a shed. If you imagine a garden shed, it's nothing like that. It's part of the UK Men's Sheds Association, and we're setting up a shed for members in the local area. So we acquired a building, and it needed a lot of work doing to it. There was some damp, so we've had to put, and I don't know all the technical terms, some sort of membrane. Then we've got plasterboard, then it's all been plastered. We've been painting, Chris and I, so I don't know how many coats we've done. We did a couple of white coats just to cover the plaster, and then we've done a couple of sage green coats. I often do the cutting in. Chris can use a roller, so he sort of rollers the big expanses, and then I do the more finicky stuff and do the cutting in.

So, yeah, the team has been working really hard. We've got some tradespeople who are directors, ambassadors, and volunteers. So we've been really lucky to have those skill sets. We've got a couple of plumbers who've been doing all the plumbing and the electrics. We've had one of the guys who is a plasterer, so he's done all the plastering. We've got someone coming tomorrow who's going to lay the carpets. What else have we had? We've got one guy who's one of the ambassadors, and he's a really talented woodworker. So he's been making different things for the shed: shelves, doing a lot of joinery work. He's made a really nice sign for the shed that says "Welcome to the Shed." We got another guy who is making the front door because the current one is in quite bad shape. This guy is in his 80s, but he has always been a joiner, so he made this door for us.

So we're hoping that might arrive by Saturday, which is our open day, so we've invited lots of people to come and see the work that we've been doing. The upper floor, which is going to be the creative area, is ready to open. We've still got a lot of work to do downstairs, which is going to be woodturning, metalwork, woodworking. We've got a lot of lathes, loads and loads of tools, an absolute pile of wood. We've been very lucky to have had so many amazing donations, sadly, from men who have died, and their workshop has been donated to us. One particular donation, the gentleman who died, he was another very talented woodworker and cabinet maker. His donation has pretty much equipped the shed, and if that was all we had, we would be able to just operate with that.

So we got all sorts of things. I'm not sure how many lathes we've got, at least two, maybe three. We've got bandsaws and sharpening tools, pillar drills, just vast, vast quantities of really, really top-end wood. So for woodturning, they like to have seasoned wood, and you can get all sorts of different species. You can get all the UK hardwoods, but you can also get more exotic woods. Chris uses a lot of those in his woodturning. So, yeah, we've just got a lot of it. A piece of wood for a bowl, we probably pay £20 to £30 for the blank. So I don't know how much we've got. We've got hundreds and hundreds of pounds worth of wood, which is quite phenomenal.

So on Saturday, we're going to have a barbecue. We're going to have demonstrations of sort of craft skills like painting, sewing, I can't remember what else we've got. Just sort of making things, what I call the clean making, not the ones that make lots of shavings. We're going to be doing some journaling. I want to do some mobile phone photography, some writing, some art journaling. We have another member who's a really good watercolour painter. So, yeah, we're going to have lots of different things that people can come and explore. We're going to have some examples of woodturning so people can see the sort of things that they might be able to make and just really talk about the plans we could do with recruiting some more volunteers, as it's been a core team of about probably five or six of us who've done Muffin Tana prior to that as well.

So, yeah, the team could do with a bit of a break now, and if we can find some other people who can help us with some of the stuff, that would be really great. So we're also asking for volunteers on Saturday. But yeah, it's a massive milestone just to be able to open the shed and invite people to come and see what's available and what's going to be possible. A lot of the members typically are from a men's shed, and we're open to both men and women. It's just that the association historically was called Men's Sheds. Typically, they're people at the older end of the scale, 70s, 80s, a man perhaps whose wife has died, somebody who's lonely, a bit isolated, people who have mental health challenges. So they come to the shed, and they find that doing something tactile, some sort of making and creating, is very therapeutic.

One of the things that men's sheds say is if you put a bunch of men in a room together, they won't talk about their feelings. But if you put a bunch of men in a room with a broken lawnmower, they'll start talking about how to fix it. And as they have those conversations, they'll start finding out about each other, and people start opening up about difficulties they might have at home or that their wife has died or they're lonely, and that's how it works. So, yeah, we're very excited about Saturday. I've been doing a lot of stuff in Canva, creating posters to put up around the place. We've got some food for the weekend; we're doing a barbecue. We've just ordered some really nice looking almond tarts from somebody that we know who does Spanish food, so those are coming on Thursday.

We're going to be at the shed not tonight because Chris is out tonight, but Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, getting set up and getting everything ready for Saturday. So, yeah, massive milestone. And, yeah, we're really looking forward to it and hoping that we'll have a really good turnout. So I shall let you know how it goes, but if you want to know more about Sheds, if you look up UK Men's Sheds Association, that will tell you more about Sheds. It is a worldwide organisation; it began in Australia, and in the UK, Chris, my husband, is patron of UK Men's Sheds. So we are quite involved in sheds across the UK, and we'll be going to Shedfest in a couple of weeks, which is the big annual event.

So, yeah, thanks for listening. I hope that was illuminating, and I shall let you know how the open day goes.

https://menssheds.org.uk/