Garden Shed Plans

With spring approaching soon, it seemed time to start thinking about changes to the garden area. Since the garden is fairly far removed from the garage, I was thinking about investing in a garden shed. But the price of many of the sheds out there can take your breath away. So I started looking at other options.

One option is the possibility of building my own shed. The main choice there is deciding between buying a prefab garden shed kit, or simply getting starting with a set of large garden shed plans and buying the raw materials to build a shed on my own. Or one other approach is to buy one of the kits from someplace like Home Depot that has the hardware for the joints and you simply supply the lumber for the shed.

I thought the easiest (and cheapest) thing to do would be start with a book of shed plans. This is not only cheap, but would give me a quick look at a number of different types of sheds, and hopefully give some idea of the costs of the materials to build a garden shed.

Of course, you need to have some idea of the size of the shed and what you want to do with it. I was looking to mainly store simple tools like hoes and shovels, with shelves for fertilizer, composting, and pest control items, but it would be nice to store the tiller there, and it would be great to have a potting area, but that may be more than I can handle.

So after looking around Amazon, I settled on The Ultimate Guide to Yard and Garden Sheds: Plan, Design, Build. As I looked at the reviews on Amazon, it quickly became evident that the idea of buying a book with several complete plans to choose from was naive. Even the books that claimed in the title to have a large number of plans really only review the plans, and the complete plans have to be ordered. So I settled on a book about building backyard structures.

This book surprised me in that it has a lot of information that I wasn’t even thinking about. It has a section on picking a good site, and a lot of information on preparing a foundation. This is something I would have botched badly as I haven’t even been considering that. Much of this information applies more to larger building (say 8×8 or more) but it all is useful in the end.

All in all, this book covers 3 or 4 types of sheds, and is a good starter for the topic. I’m still undecided on what I’ll do, but first I need to see what the city building codes will allow.