For the past couple of weeks I’ve been renovating an old garage with one of my best friends and favourite partners in crime, Matt Clarke of, among other things, Penguin Pool Theatre. The space is going to be a joint rehearsal room and photography studio – a shared workshop for general creativity and a venue for activities that require more space than our little apartments can accomodate. Designing it has been an invigorating exploration of co-working and cooperation, as every piece of furniture must have two functions (backdrop/projector screen; chair/prop box). More interesting than our unqualified crack at interior design is the history of the space: as well as a favourite high school hangout for myself and many, the garage was also rehearsal home to various early incarnations of recent Juno Award winners Said The Whale. Its rafters are adorned with the reminders of our distant adolescence and its walls are impregnated with pellets of neglect: rat shit we have found lots of, buried treasure, not so much.