Help make our local Studio Workshop watertight!

Hello, my name is Penny and together with my partner, Innes, we are on our way to creating an exciting new studio workshop where we can provide facilities and run all sorts of interesting and creative workshops from prints and collages to sequential art, animation to ceramics and stained glass (and pretty much anything else arty, we'll give it a go!) for the local people and visitors to our beautiful town, Newton Stewart, in Dumfries and Galloway.

I am a trained fine art printmaker and animator and have worked as a freelance artist for over 25 years, creating bespoke commissioned work alongside delivering a wide variety of workshops, classes, lectures and tutoring people from all walks of life and age groups. I love story-telling, trying new things and enabling others to foster their own skills and confidence.

Innes is a freelance writer and performer. As a twice BAFTA Nominated writer he has co-written 4 series of radio sketch comedy for the BBC & Channel 4; co-written for CBBC TV; and written and voiced over 120 short animated films for BBC Learning, BBC Scotland. Together we have created our own short animations and delivered public animation and comic workshops for children and adults and tutored media BA Honours students.

We moved to Newton Stewart from Glasgow last year and also had a wee baby. We hadn't reckoned on our new home needing all the floors replaced due to rot and the majority of the roof due to leaks - it wasn't in the home report! And we chose this particular house to buy because it had a unit attached to it that we thought was perfect for our future art workshop venture.

We weren't initially in any hurry to get the CIC set up as we had the local foodbank utilising the space, paying us a small rental fee. But suddenly, the food bank decided to move out to a bigger premises and we were left without an income and what turned out to be a very dilapidated building indeed! We weren't aware the building was in such a bad state until the food bank had moved out.

Trying hard to make our home safe and water-tight for the wee yin (and we still have a couple of rotten floors and awful cracked render that gathers water and makes the walls damp, but we'll get round to fixing that all some time in the future - as you do) swallowed up all of our savings and we realised we didn't have enough left to fix the studio workshop as well.

I had been gathering equipment for some time, including a Victorian letterpress, a huge glass and ceramic kiln, a 3D printer and 3D scanner - it's going to be absolutely amazing!

The main problem we need some help with is getting the studio workshop into a useable state.= and there's quite a lot needing fixed!

I got a quote for £20k at the start of July last year to strip the roof all back, replace the rotten beams and recover it (its a flat roof with several different stepped layers across it - quite a weird set-up!).

We also need to replace the gutters, quite a bit of the outside slatted wooden cladding which has rotted and then do lots of remedial work on the interior to fix all the leaked-on parts - phew! I reckoned we were looking at around £30,000 to get it all ship shape back in July '23.

At the start of this year we had a few more builders out to quote and we were a bit shocked when two of them suggested just knocking down the entire building and starting again for a cost of circa £50,000!!!

We decided to use the first £5000 we had raised through this campaign along with the remainder of our savings, some money begged and borrowed from family and a big loan and get the roof done ( the cost had gone up to £27400.03 from the first quote of £22000 in July '23 which turned out to be the cheapest! This puts us at £20000 in debt before we even get onto fixing the rest of the building - it's so scary that I have to not think about it too much or I might just spontaneously explode! Kaboom!

As the studio workshop is built between our house and our next door neighbours and extends out into our garden we have been advised multiple times to not gift the building to the CIC as it's basically on private land- but this means funding is not available to get it fixed.

I contacted Business Gateway, Creative Scotland and looked at Scottish Government grants, but there seems to be nothing available to help with fixing the building because it doesn't belong to the CIC. We can't even apply for funding towards rent which could then be used to fix the building, but funnily enough we could apply for rent if we were renting from another private landlord - go figure, them's the rules!

Here are some photos of the inside where the ceiling had fallen in and remedial work is needed to rectify the damage from the water ingress

If you are interested in seeing the progression of works I have set up an Instagram account @summittaecrawaboot where I post regular updates

So how can you help, I hear you ask!

If you would like to support us to get our venture off the ground it would be absolutely magic and we'd be so very grateful!

We've started this gofundme page where you can donate any amount at all that you can afford to give - every penny counts :)

I also will sell any of the larger art work from my Common Wealth collection on my website for a special discount 15% off the price if you message me with the code 'studioworkshop'

Fingers crossed, together we can make a wonderful thing happen x