How To Design Your Outdoor Shed

What's the point to build a shed yourself?

Well, there are several points at least. First, it's cheaper. Then, it's fun. Sometimes it's faster. But that's not all. There is something a lot more important than the price, the speed and the fun. It's the fact that you can build exactly the shed you dream about instead of conforming to the designs available in your local store.

I'll go even further and tell you that you can design your shed yourself.

"But I'm not an engineer!"

So what? You won't be building a house here. It's just an outdoor shed. Of course, you need some basic knowledge how to do it - that's why I am writing this article. You also need some basic math skills, imagination and knowledge how to work with AutoCad or similar program - or at least CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator. Your school should have taken care for the first, you are hopefully born with the second, and the third is not that hard to learn - at least on a basic level.

So how do you go about designing your shed?

First, draw the floor. It's highly recommended that you keep it straight and easy shape - that means rectangle or square. Of course some sheds have more interesting shapes, but if this is your first design, better stick to four walls.

Then draw the walls considering that they should be high enough for a person to enter the shed. That means at least two meters high or more. Try to imagine how the walls will be built over the floor and how everything will assemble together.

On the top of the shed you need a roof. Most sheds can do just fine with a flat root but if you plan to build a larger shed (type summer house), then you may want to plan a triangle roof. Here you'll need the math knowledge about triangles from the school.

Plan the windows and the door and actually place them in the drawings. The windows should be placed in the second top half of the walls unless you are designing a very high shed.

Essentially floor, walls and roof is all you need to design - it's not that hard. At this point don't worry about being extremely precise and calculating the wall thickness. Your first exercise will not be with real materials... It will be with paper!

Scale down your plan 10 or 20 times and you'll be able to cut the parts from regular sheets of paper. That's a cheap and easy way to see if there are general mistakes in your plan and if you like the design when you see it assembled. Once you are happy with the result you can continue with more complex calculations which will include the wall thickness and the way the parts join each other.

You may need to invest between $5 and $25 and buy some shed plans just so you see what they include and what specifics you might have missed.

There is a lot more to learn about designing the shed and how to build the shed after that, so consider visiting my free e-course. You'll find loads of other useful information there like for example how to move a shed.

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