Design for a BIG shed

[Elsie Tanner]

Would like to build my own shed in lieu of a garage - about 4 by 2.5 m ish) - anyone know of any templates I could use online?

Else

[John Rumm]

At risk of sounding like Blue Peter, here is one I made earlier:

here:

did not stick to them rigidly, but they were a good enough starting point)

[[news]]

nice workshop. it certainly ought to last a while.

RT

[Cuprager]

Excellent walk through of your build John, I really enjoyed it. I am also *VERY* envious of the end product! Would you post a picture of how it looks now?

Gerry

[John Rumm]

Inside or out?

Outside looks pretty much the same as it does in the piccies. I only built it three to four years ago so it has not had chance to decompose too much ;-). It has had a respray of cuprinol since then.

At the end of last summer it looked like:

inside is now significantly fuller (a little too full in fact)! It has some shelves, drawers, and storage racks, another work bench in addition to the one shown (10cm taller, has drill press, engineering vice, and grinder on it - plus storage under for table saw and router table.

Once I get the last bits of my loft conversion finished I should be able to empty some of the stuff out though. I am toying with building a small "ad shed" to the rear of it to house a dust extractor - it takes up to much room inside and could be ducted in instead). Tho other thing I need to work on is some materials storage space.

[Grunff]

the strange circular feature on the roof?

[John Rumm]

Previous occupant was a keen astronomer, and built it as an observatory. The roof is approx a 1' thick concrete "donut" that used to carry a dome (which as you can imagine was big!). Inside there was a 1.2m high concrete plinth that carried his telescope. Impressive bit of kit - 5' to 6' long, with what must have been a 1.5' objective lens diameter.

When he left, he took the dome and scope, nailed some chipboard over the hole, and nailed on a single layer of felt! You can imagine what happened the first time that rained. I got a "friend of a friend" who was supposed to know about these things to fix it. He tried a more solid wood roof to avoid it turning into a huge bird bath, but that was only partly successful. He then bricked round the edge and rendered a slightly convex surface over it, better but it still leaked. In the end I got a real roofer to stick three layers of hot bonded felt onto it. That finally fixed it.

With 20/20 hindsight I should have DIYed it and built an apex roof over it, since the current building has too little headroom (only 6' under the rim). Hence it is not much use as a workshop (hence the one I built), but does have power and plenty of space, so makes for a handy storage facility / utility space.

[nightjar]

30 sq metre shed (to make a snooker room for a 9' x 4'6" snooker table), I used cut to length and pressure impregnated timber for the base and floor. In theory, pressure impregnated timber has a 15 year life expectancy, while timber painted with wood preservative, which we used for the shed itself, has a 10 year life expectancy. The snooker room went up in 1982. The floor is still in good condition, but the shed is showing its age in places and it will need its third roof if it is to survive much longer. The current owner of the house is having it fitted out as her office.

Colin Bignell

[Grunff]

I knew there'd be an interesting story there...

[John Rumm]

nightjar The only point I would make about the construction is that, when I built a

Yup good point - did not think of that at the time.

With anything under the floor (i.e. stuff I anticipated never getting at again) I did not so much "paint" as "soak" everything in preservative. I am hoping that along with it getting airflow under should keep it going for a while. I put a layer of DPC over every brick as well.

I don't know what life to expect from my one. It is three layer, first one nailed and the rest bonded. But it was cold bonded rather than hot tar.

[sploop]

any idea of total costings???

[John Rumm]

I guess it depends on what you include...

If you ignore the base which was part of a more elaborate garden makeover, then you have the materials listed here:

it was about a grand for the basic materials, and 200 for the electrics.

Depending on use you may save some on electrics since I typically tend to err on the side of over provisioning.

You may want to substitute foil backed PIR foam in place of the polystyrene that I used, that would add another 70 ish. However the insulation that is in there certainly seems to do a good job. (I have a room stat on the heater in there which is set to kick in a 5 degrees for frost protection - it hardly ever does)

You could certainly buy a shed for the same money, however the construction would be very lightweight and flimsy in comparison. The other issue I noted with every commercial offering I looked at was lack of height. Most were only 6' or less at the eves. Mine is 7'6" at the eves. In fact I think I should have built it 6" taller still to make rotating 8' long bits of stock or board a bit simpler.

[RichardS]

building my shed!

Initial plans should always be modified as you go along :-)

One question - when creating the base, how did you fix it all together? Nail-gun whacked right up and nailed at 45 degrees, or something involving lap joints?

[John Rumm]

Yup fixed goals, flexible plans... we will make a management consultant out of you yet ;-)

The base was a little "unorthodox", in that it uses 4x2" but with the short axis vertically. That was done to keep the internal floor height down a bit, and also to create a nice internal lip right round the perimeter at the base for the floor to sit on (the framing was 3x2"). The actual bearing of the floor is really done by the matrix of half bricks the 4x2" sits on.

It is lap jointed at each corner, and at the intersections of the floor bearers and the ends.

To create quick lap joints I used a hand held circular saw with the depth of cut set half way through the timber, and made repeated cuts every few mm across the width of the joint. The remaining "fingers" of wood are then easy to knock off with a chisel.

The joints were then held in place with 4 x 2" screws through the face of the joint. Fixing was probably not that critical since the whole lot is held in place by the weight of the shed.

So starting with this: _______________________________ | _______________________________|

Repeated cross cuts: ______________________ |||||||||| _______________________________|

After a quick clean-up: ______________________ |________ _______________________________|

(even quicker to do if you have a sliding mitre saw)

[nightjar]

The hurricane did for the first one, so the second hasn't done too badly, considering it was only nailed felt.

BTW, I read on to the the fitting out and saw the bit about cutting expanded polystyrene. When I lined a garage with that, I made a hot wire cutter - a thing looking like a large hacksaw frame, made from wood, with a bit of heating element from an electric fire element in place of the blade. That was fed from a variable supply, which was adjusted so that the wire was hot enough to cut the foam, without being so hot that it melted it away from the cut. IME well worth while doing if you have a lot of polysterene foam to cut.

Colin Bignell