A pal has offered to build a wooden shed for our allotment.
At some time in the future the shed will most likely need to be moved to a different plot. It seems a good and inexpensive floor for the shed would be a Cement one. But we have to rule that out in terms of it being difficult to move.
What might be a 'lowest' cost, but transportable floor for a wooden shed please ?
Phenolic coated formwork plywood on top of second hand railway sleepers will get you as good a damp-resistant floor as you can get short of concrete.
Mark Rand
- Rugby Warwickshire.
In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Mark Rand snipped-for-privacy@internettie.co.uk> writes
My awful, but cheap, Australian metal shed is on a base made of level soil, then a few plastic pallets, then a layer of plywood. The pallets came off ebay from someone who advertised them as ideal for a shed base, and they have been fine. The ply base is slightly larger than the shed, which has no provision for guttering, so water from the roof hits the ply and seeps into the floor inside.
Must look at that when I can!
Concrete floors are loathesome, for precisely that reason. There are a zillion such objects from WWII and even WWI causing trouble over the country.
I recommend cheap but solid paving slabs or engineering bricks (choose whichever is cheaper per square yard), with timber bearers on top. You don't need the expensive treatment for the latter that is intended to make them last in soil, but do need at least some treatment. I did that and my shed hasn't shifted in a fair number of decades.
Regards, Nick Maclaren.
Make the base strong enough so it can sit on, say, 6 off raised brick pillars. Instead of brick pillars stack some paving slabs on top of one another.
Decent base frame made of 4x2 if it's a small shed.
4 paving slabs set on the ground. 4 adjustable shed feet:You even need to worry about getting the 4 slabs level with each other.
john west explained :
Wood will be fine, but ensure it is raised above the ground so air can flow under it and well supported. Brick piers are fine for that, with or without cement. My untreated wooden 12x8, installed 30 years ago, was installed by me like that and it is absolutely fine.
paving slabs
there are various options. Lowest cost is probably pallets. Just brace your shed well enough to withstand moving & use free standing shelving units. And treat the pallets, they're untreated.
NT
Amen to the treatment! Directly on soil, softwood pallets have a very limited life.
There is a slight planning anomaly up thread. Buildings considered to be
*portable* on agricultural land (usually horse shelters on skids) are ignored from a planning POV. I doubt this extends to domestic gardens.How do you propose going about the planned move? Wheels? Log rollers? Tirfor winch? Your underpinnings need to be suitable. Perhaps strong, treated, timber skids?
In message snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes
Looking on ebay, it seems I was lucky to get the used plastic pallets I referred to earlier, as there seem to be none there now. The base area of the stands is large enough to support me and the junk in the shed, and they don't rot (yet anyway). For things like these, I paid pennies, and they nested to bring them home.
I put a previous shed on brick piers. Even with wire mesh around the base we had trouble with animals going underneath, including a neighbour's cat that had kittens there.
You haven?t indicated how big this shed is but as it going to be moved it cannot be too big unless you are using a crane.
We have a 10? x6? shed that has lived in two locations . Knowing it would need to be moved I made a base of plastic pallets obtained secondhand resting on level then compacted soil. Being plastic they haven?t rotted like wooden ones would have done, and added bonus is the construction of the particular design of plastic pallet we got is a lot less open than wooden ones. That means the apertures for the fork lift prongs and some other ones that just happen to be there are useful areas to store long things like canes and other plant supports etc which live in the dry but off the ground .
GH
Make a ladder base for the shed out of 3x2 (or similar) tanalised timber. Cut some slabs into 4" wide strips and use the strips as upright posts to attach the base to (i.e. dig holes and use postcrete to secure the strips vertically). Bolt base to slab strips and screw shed to base. When it's time to move the shed: unbolt the base from the concrete strips and drag it to new location and use new slab strips. I did this a while ago and it was very successful, cheap and does not require a concrete slab. Also, it allows air under the shed and there is nothing to rot.
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