The Shed - My Shed

Where wood is king

15 August 2025

When Ross Vivian heads into his Stratford shed he has to pass through his wife Heather’s workshop. The Taranaki couple are both passionate about wood—Ross carves it and Heather turns it. Retirement is not a time for this couple to put their feet up. They are enjoying exploring their own creativity and are busier than ever.
Ross has been a hunter, farmer, logger, inventor and bushman. His mainly self-taught skills developed during 70 years have now come together in his carving and the days are not long enough to complete the projects he has in mind. Heather, a creative, award-winning woodturner, has been working her lathe for 30 years, winning national accolades in a field that has been the domain of men for aeons. Over time, she has finely developed her craft, whether working big, burr-wood platters more than 500 mm across or tiny turned pieces a few millimetres thick.
The couple’s spacious lounge is like another world. Trophy heads from Ross’s hunting days adorn the walls: deer, thar, chamois, a wild bull (he shot as it came out of the bush and charged him), wild boars, stuffed birds and even moose antlers.

Preserving the past – by the tonne

13 June 2025

What do you do when your passion for collecting means you are accumulating objects that can be measured by the tonne?
One answer is to buy a big building and open it up to the public – Mike’s Museum in Eltham displays the extraordinary results of Mike Coil’s collection mania.
Two upper stories and a huge basement of an historic building in the small Taranaki town are bulging with the strangest things. A big collection of antique chainsaws, World War II objects, including an anti-aircraft searchlight and US submarine generator engine, steam boilers of all sizes – you name it – Mike’s collected it.
There’s also a great collection of historic tools and objects from New Zealand’s past.
Mike began collecting when he was a young fella. One of a family of 12, he was raised on Taranaki farms and he recalls when aged eight his father coming home from a stint at sea with a handful of coins.

A man of many sheds

22 May 2025

Sitting on the edge of a little paddock in the river mouth settlement of Kakanui, ten minutes drive south of Oamaru, is a ramshackle shed where Lindsay Murray creates things of rustic beauty.
The shed has a long history. It was built in 1875 as the house and shop of a nurseryman, George Packwood, who came from Scotland to plant and tend trees around the mill manager’s house in Kakanui.
When Lindsay, an artisan wood worker and sometimes blacksmith took it over in 1993 the back wall had fallen off, half the roof was collapsing and the floors were rotted through in the living quarters. As far as Lindsay was concerned, it was perfect.
It had the remnants of the original dwelling: a kitchen with no running water but with a working coal range, and two other rooms which have served, over the years, as sleeping quarters and a sitting-cum-dining room. This is where Lindsay stays overnight when working on a major project. It also serves as temporary accommodation for visiting artisans and is currently home to Rolands Selis, a highly skilled leather worker.

My shed: Going bush in town

10 April 2025

Many guys like to retreat to a space they have created and feel comfortable in. For some, it’s a shed to tinker in and build things, for others it’s some sort of man cave where they can socialise with their mates.
Gary Were of Stratford, in Taranaki, has gone a step further. The 71-year-old year semi-retired builder and deer hunter has re-created a replica of his favourite bush hut under his urban house.
For 30 years Gary has been deer hunting in the Urewera ranges in the centre of the North Island. It’s an isolated place, where the boys get flown in by Heliseka Helicopter and spend a week each year hunting sika and sometimes red deer.

My car the barbecue

13 December 2024

A mobile barbecue built out of an abandoned Holden Statesman? Why not. This clever conversion by Scott Edwards, a former freezing-worker-turned-motor-mechanic, was the pin-up attraction at a car, bike, truck and boat Show Day held in Riverton, the popular coastal resort town about 32 km west of Invercargill.
Scott is currently completing an adult motor mechanic apprenticeship but has always had a flair for anything to do with engines. He began early. Scott’s partner, Nicola Swain, says his mother had told her that Scott pulled apart every toy he got as a child, then put them back together again to see how they worked, before he played with them.

Building a potting shed

15 November 2024

Among small buildings you can create without council building consent, a potting shed is very handy. The fact the builder agreed to put up this structure to get the gardening tools out of his shed is another story.
If you can possibly choose a flat site, do so. In this potting shed, the only site available was on a hill which meant a fair bit of work for the builder because of the extra labour and time.
Then in order to avoid the need for a building consent, measure the site up to ensure the 10 m2-or-less potting shed is no closer to the boundary or to a dwelling than its own height. In this case, the boundary is nearby but there are no dwellings close by to worry about. Here the original idea was a three-metre long building but it had to be shortened to 2.1 metres because the boundary was closer than first thought.

Making the cut

12 September 2024

Sentimentality and chainsaws don’t usually go hand in hand but Dave Neame uses the machines not to massacre but to preserve pieces of wood for posterity.
The long-time logger, who is based in North Canterbury, uses his prowess with a chainsaw to mill trees into slabs that can be turned into furniture, kitchen benches, or used as building features.
“I get approached by people who’ve got trees that have sentimental value and they want more than firewood or mulch out of them. I come and mill them up and they can get made into something that becomes a family heirloom.”

Wood fan by name and by nature

6 September 2024

Brian Woodlands is semi-retired now but in his shed in south Australia he can proudly show off the samples from his joinery trade, the machines that supported his livelihood, the dozens of wood samples he collects, his antique hand tools and the rustic shed where “I have done some big stuff in this small workshop over the years.”
While the wind can come visiting through the spaces in the walls and open door, there is a cosy fire in an inner-room of the old-style country building and yarns aplenty to warm up the shed with an animated atmosphere.
“I was born here in the Adelaide Hills. My grandparents lived here in this district pre-war [World War Two] and my mother and father lived in the wattle-and-daub cottage over the road,” Brian says.
“In 1968, I took up an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner when I was 14 years old. I was not that rapt in school. As an apprentice you had to sacrifice wages to train but by time you were 18 or 19 it was good money. Today, apprentices start too late because they turn to the money first and it’s better early to be working at McDonald’s.”

Along for the ride

16 August 2024

Every Wednesday and Saturday morning about 20 retired tradesmen leave their lunch boxes in the Oamaru Steam and Rail smoko room, shrug themselves into their overalls, and head for the old railway workshop to get on with the day’s tasks.
They might be restoring turn-of-the-20th century railway carriages, stripping down a locomotive or installing wiring systems. Each man brings a lifetime’s worth of skills and the willingness to learn something new.
They work out of the old New Zealand Rail wagon workshop, or lifting shop as it was called, at the back of Oamaru’s historic precinct. The Oamaru Steam and Rail Society Inc took over the building in 1989. Most of the tools and equipment needed to complete the volunteers’ first major project were on hand so they rebuilt the 60mx12m workshop which had been partially demolished by NZ Rail when they decamped.

Preserving the past

25 July 2024

It started with a teddy bear, then an American Greyhound bus, a wind-up Sherman tank and an aeroplane. Alastair Allan held on to his toys long after others would have put them aside. He’s still got them, along with several thousand other items that he has bought or acquired over the past 70 years or so. He declares he is holding on to the past for the future to tell the story of how people lived in North Otago as far back as 150 years ago.

Frozen in time

7 June 2024

I just love nosing around other people’s workshops to see what they are making and what gear they have, and I’ve just had the special opportunity to look at a manufacturing workshop that was about to be sold up and, as a bonus, learn about its history.
Macdonald Refrigeration surely has a place in Auckland’s heritage as a pioneer in its field. The factory has been closed for some time now and it has been hard for the family to let go of all the gear, but it is filling a lot of valuable space.

A dream shed that came true

9 May 2024

Gary Wells has a shed that isn’t quite your normal sheddie bloke’s shed. It is still a place of work but a recent extension, after a quick clean-out, now doubles as a well-appointed entertainment area complete with bar and luxurious sofas which Gary made from the backs of two Ford cars. It could also be the old 1950s petrol station at Makarewa, once a small township and now incorporated into Invercargill to the north. A quick glance around Gary’s shed at the old-style petrol bowsers, the weather-beaten, corrugated iron wall, advertising placards and oil dispenser puts you back in the days when petrol was actually served to customers.

Mr Fix it

21 March 2024

Ian Chamberlain’s shed is upstairs in the second storey of his double garage in Whanganui. Ian certainly needs all the room on the ground floor to park just a few of the vintage and classic cars he has restored over the past 30-odd years. And while the styles of car evoke a walk down memory lane, the vehicles look brand-spanking new.
There’s a fire-engine red Mark 1 Zephyr convertible, a more staid looking green and black 1917 Buick, the red and brassy 1906 Reo, and its miniature look-alike.

His worship – the shed and vintage cars

25 October 2023

The morning we visited this particular sheddie, the bloke was under fire. In The Press, he was being slagged off on the front page. Inside the paper, a swag of writers was pinging him this way and that in letters to the editor. Christchurch is a hotbed of political discontent these days and the buckshot stops with the mayor Garry Moore.
So he’d be in no mood to spend a lovely spring Saturday morning talking to a complete stranger about something as mundane as his not-quite-finished shed? Wrong.

Size matters

21 September 2023

Back in the carefree/careless days we took a drive up to the Hokianga harbour, mainly for a fish and chip meal at the legendary Omapere pub, and promptly fell in love with the place. It’s New Zealand 50 years ago: clean, uncluttered with houses and people and just plain beautiful on any given day.
The harbour simply sparkles on a sunny day and the dunes on the north head are nothing short of spectacular. The views coming over the ridge from Waimamaku and the Waipoua forest are breath-taking. We still stop and try to take it all in.
Everything moves at a leisurely pace up at the “Hoki”. It is still a hidden gem, but not for long I feel. We have a few celebs up there now and there are more and more serious homes going up, but it still has that laid back feel to it. Opo the dolphin is the only thing that has happened to the area and that was 60 years ago.

My Shed