One of the biggest hurdles the young matulevicz lad faces in attempting to return to the world of gainful Self-Employment and/or Lancing-of-the-Free-variety, is that his house is like a fucking tip. The gaff isn’t that big to start with and every room is pretty much utilised to the full, as far as cramming the available space full of junk goes. You couldn’t swing a hamster in here, much less a cat!

So, if I’m to start churning out animations and graphics so sublime they make the collective internet weep, I’m going to have to get me some space to work in. The ideal thing to do would be to rent some studio space somewhere. But until I start earning money again, I can’t afford to take on the financial burden of paying out extra money every week. So I was forced to fall back on the nearest to a "next best thing" I could think of. I decided to convert my attic into a working space.

Actually, even to call it an "attic" is a bit of an exggeration. It’s more like a small triangular crawl-space inside the wall of the spare bedroom, where the roof juts out over my balcony. But it’s all I’ve got, so here goes:

First off, I enlarged the small hatchway leading into the crawl-space. Annoyingly there is huge metal girder just behind the wall here, so I wasn’t able to make my new "door" the full height of the wall

Next [and major] challenge was to clean out the accumulated crud of a couple of decades from inside the crawl-space. Over the years I’ve tended to use it as the dumping ground for all the stuff that was too big and bulky to carry down to the bin --or stuff that I thought 'Might Come in Handy Some Day'. It was fullof old broken tellys, stereos, vaccuum cleaners and rolls of carpet, as well as lots of smaller crap. It took me two days to clear it all out.

Now the dog could see the rabbit, it was time for the Itch-fest which was putting down the insulation. Whoever built the house didn’t bother with doing the 'floor' bit in here. They just did the underside of the roof.

Next up, flooring time. Luckily I had four big pieces of MDF which I rescued from the skip at work a few weeks past. They were nearly enough to do all the floor --I just had to buy one more sheet from B&Q

Then another trip to B&Q to score some hardboard for panelling the roof. We happened to go on one of the windiest days of the year so far. So much merriment was had as the missus got blown all round the car-park like a sail-boarder, while trying to hand me the big 2 1/2m x 1 1/2m sheets of hardboard in through the side door of the van. Panelling the roof was a complete bastard of a job as there were a couple of annoying joists cutting across, which I had to cut holes for and work round

A couple more minor jobs: Adding some padding to the joists to try and minimise the potential for banging of noggin [the space is just annoyingly not high enough for me to stand up in] and wiring in some plug sockets [out of sight on the left-hand side].

And there you have it --my wee garden shed in the roof. Since this pic was taken, I’ve also put down a bit of carpet to make it a bit cosier. Now I’m just waiting to get some kind of a rostrum for my camera, so I can get set up for stop-frame and I’ll be ready to go.

Coincidentally, I also happened to have an old domain name lying around doing nothing that’s perfect for my new nano-studio. I registered it a while back, coz me and Alex were planning to do some online stuff which never materialised. So I’ll recycle it for this: