BEST MADE PROJECTS • Shed Dreams By Matthew Beaudin, Best Made Guide to...

Shed Dreams
By Matthew Beaudin, Best Made Guide to Colorado

Sheds represent history, but they also stand for something more important and more beautiful to a young person in Telluride: possibility. Even as the Telluride real-estate market exhaled and prices fell, people like me never thought we could own a piece of this place.

I saw it there, its barnwood curling at the corners and its tin nearly black, and I could imagine myself in it, drinking coffee and looking out my tiny front window as it snowed heavy and cold, my dog curled up at the far end of the room, chasing something in a dream.

I wondered what history I could add to it.

I didn’t think much more about it until a year later, when my friend said, “Heard of an alley shack for sale,” as we ski-toured on a cold monochrome morning.

I drifted away. I’d been looking for a little house—with a palatable price tag—for a year or so. No one like me ever wants to leave this place; we just can’t afford to scratch our way in. I recalled the little shed that could. I wanted something like that—something with years of imperfections and years of history on its boards. Something that was unlike anything else. Something that would welcome my old Schwinn town bike with open arms.

“Yeah,” he said, jarring me from my daydream. “And it’s really cheap.”

Cheap, in Telluride, is a mathematical expression in which price is relative to income and divided by long-term job prospects…

As excerpted from “Shed Dreams,” Best Made Guide to Colorado, Matthew C Beaudin’s tale of sprucing up an old miner’s shed he bought in Telluride, Colorado. Read the entire story here.