For the past three months or so, instead of writing this here blog [0] from the comfort of a well-appointed office – cork floors [1], solar shingles [2] powering the laptop – I’ve been needling the keyboard from our living room. I’ve set up temporary digs here because my real office – or at least the space I want to be my real office – is being eaten by ants. I speak, of course, of the 400-square-foot work studio that sits, forlorn and lonely, in our backyard.

It’s an incredible building – farmhouse siding, put up back when reclaimed wood [3] was still called “used”, big barn doors, cedar shake roof, a flagstone table right outside the entryway. It’s not just a simple shed, either – it’s got a sink, a toilet, a skylight and its own heating system.

Before we bought the house, a sculptor had been renting the space from the previous owner, Paul [3]. They had an extremely slow-moving arrangement that the sculptor would finish the studio – insulate it, put up the interior walls, generally make it into a nice place to be – but the sculptor, after God knows how long, only got as far as putting up a panel here or there of rigid foam insulation [4].

And that’s where the ants come in. Literally. The structure is built on a concrete slab that sits level with the surrounding ground, so when the ground gets wet – which this year has been habitually – that fashionably reclaimed siding soaks up a ton of moisture. And carpenter ants, of course, loves them some wet wood [5]. They don’t eat it; they dig tunnels and live in it. But dry wood is too hard for them to chew. So when the wood dries out, they move on to the closest, softest, warmest option: the rigid foam insulation.

Until recently, I’d ignored the, shall we say, roughness of the space – it looked like a broken-down chicken coop – in favor of having an office, separate from the house, to call my own. (I work at home, and the line between being at home and being at work is often difficult to draw.) Whenever I was working late, I’d hear the pitter-patter of a thousand little feet above my head and in the walls – the ants were on the move. I mean, at some points I could hear them chewing; it was like some bug version of The Tell-Tale Heart [6]. The Tell-Tale Carapace, perhaps? (Coming this fall from Pixar!)

So now I do my scrivening in the living room. Obviously, I need to figure out what to do with the studio. As it is, it sits unoccupied, getting quarterly sprayings of surely highly toxic pesticides. I'd rather tear it down, donate the siding to the local Resource Yard [7], repurpose the foam board as insulation for the house's crawlspace [7], and start all over again with a superinsulated straw bale [8] building. But all that dreamin' means nothing if it'll cost me an arm and a leg. I’ve got some local architects coming over next week to check the place out. I’ll keep you posted.

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A reminder for you New Yorkers: I’ll be speaking at the BKLYN DESIGNS [8] green remodeling panel this Saturday, May 12, at 4pm.