Made a good start on the man sized shed over the weekend.
Its laying on its front at the moment while i fix the panelling onto the back. then i’ll flip it up the right way.
I am a little worried that it may look quite tall because I have made the walls 2m high to suit my 6’3″ head in. but the pitched roof then takes it another 400mm higher. If it looks too high when lifted up I may change the roof to a simple gentle slope from front to back.

I have chosen to site it on a platform of paving slabs and have run these further forward so that the shed has a bit of a patio area.

Also planning to put a couple of polycarbonate windows in.

April 13th – Finished cladding the back wall of the shed – and lifted it upright. It was slightly wobbly – but I’ll add some more bracing at the weekend hopefully.

Once the sides and front are all clad properly it should feel a bit more stable too.

Got some timber bits today that may go some way towards making a shed structure.

I saw on freegle (my local version of freecycle) that someone was having some work done on their garden and had taken lots of old fencing down. This was all being thrown in a skip unless anyone wanted it – so I went along this morning (luckily I had the day off of work) and there was quite a lot of fencing posts which were still fairly chunky and robust, lots of fairly good quality gravel boarding which should be fine to clad my future shed (if not – it will make excellent side panels for a compost heap), and lots of fairly crumbly old trellis.

I have used the one intact bit of the trellis in my own garden as we had recently bought a Honeysuckle that needed support – and I have taken lots of the gravel boarding down to the allotment for use at the weekend (today was really not an outdoors day).

I have also recently found a couple of old sash windows – that I will probably strip the paint off of. I think a homemade shed is fine – but the parts should all probably be the same material (not a white window with a green door in a new pine structure with old weatherboard). That’s the plan anyway.

I’d like to strip the paint off of any old bits that I find in skips. Also – I know the allotment society frown upon home-made sheds made out of old doors etc.

Mine will not just be made out of old doors – but it will be made out of old, found and donated parts as I cannot afford a new £300 shed from a DIY store – I do not want one of these either. I’d much rather make my own and enjoy learning something as I do it. Not sure my girlfriend would agree though.

The gardener that I met this morning (Pete the Pond his name was) told me he is always taking timber and paving slabs to the dump – so I gave him my number and am looking forward to a delivery of old paving slabs soon. I could probably do with another 30 or so slabs to replace the path that my neighbouring allotment holder has borrowed to re-create some sort of gravestone art installation.

So – get looking on freecycle if you need to stretch your budget for such things. Gumtree and Friday ad are 2 other places where free stuff can be found.

Home-made shed updates (including pictures) will follow soon – once we get some pleasant weekend weather.