Back in April, we had a family of squirrels trying to make a home in the roof the outbuilding in our garden, which just so happens to be our home studio. We managed to remove the squirrels (humanely, I’ll add), but at the time I was starting to get pretty paranoid about the studio burning down if they started to chew the wires, so I figured it’d be a good time to take some photos of the space as an insurance precaution — but also because it was finally ‘finished’; i.e. we’d got it looking pretty much the way we wanted it after a few years of gradually refining the room.

Some of these photos appeared in the interview I did for Components.ai, but for the sake of posterity, I thought it’d be nice to do an actual blog post with the photos here on my personal site. And hey, I even got a little lightbox gallery thing going just for it — just click or tap any of the photos.

My main inspiration for renovating the studio came from a single Pinterest pin, where someone had created several shelves, running the length of one wall, with the bottom one being deeper to act as a desk. The idea is that the whole desk space would be big enough for me at one end, Sam at the other, and with spare space in the middle for the kids or a guest.

I commissioned a firm called Urban Grain to do just that — ensuring that the additional length required would be stabilised to support all of the extra weight — and we ended up with a wonderful solution made from reclaimed scaffolding boards.

Behind my ‘work’ desk is the fun stuff: all of my music hardware! So this is what most people see on Zoom calls. More old scaffolding boards put to use here, with each one resting on a two-tier keyboard stand.

Yep, that’s one of Erik’s prints. And yeah, I have a lot of conference lanyards.

Frustratingly, in the time it’s taken me to post this, we’ve since got some more house plants and some nicer pots, so I should probably take some new photos, and get some of the water feature we’ve made outside, too. Oh well, you know how it goes.

If anyone wants to nerd out about any of the gear in the photos, feel free to get in touch.