Adventures In Shed Building Part I

Let the 2021 reno projects begin!! Let me tell you, we are not linear, organised renovators. I follow lots of people for inspiration who are all totally dedicated to either a) speed or b) doing things room by room. We are haphazard at best, but you know what? It works perfectly for us.

Having spent so much time at home in 2020 and the traditional work space maybe never looking the same again, it’s prompted us to rethink how we use space in our home. A really, really long time ago I wrote this post about what we’d love to do our outbuilding one day. That one day is still a long way off to get the room we dream of, but we’ve decided to throw everything at an interim renovation project which will still have a really big impact on how we live and how we use the space.

Our garden building is split in to two areas – the main outbuilding accessed through a door at the bottom of the garden where we keep everything – tools, garden equipment, gym gear, Christmas decorations, a million things that we no longer need. Then there’s the shed, technically built onto the back of the outbuilding but with no proper access apart from outside the garden and even then it’s divided into 5 separate sections, each with its own door and neither accessible or sensible.

We’d love to have a shed we can store things in, that doesn’t require some kind of magic trick to get into it and that in turn will then free up more space in the outbuilding to space out our gym, add a chest freezer and even a little vegetable prep space for me! This is like the ultimate version of shopping our home.

It’s exciting to talk about a project we’re all ready underway with and although I’m writing this at Christmas by the time it goes live we may have made even more progress. The first stage has been to block up the back access outside the garden (definitely a job for the professionals!) which involved sealing with a waterproof membrane before adding a feathered edge fencing. This matches the rest of our garden fence and then we’ll paint it the same colour next spring once the weather gets better.

Once the back access was sealed up, a new doorway was created inside the garden to create one long 4.5m x 1.5m space. It matches the door we have for the outbuilding so it looks as though it was always meant to be there and has created a much more secure access point to a shed we can now use to keep things in.

The next phase was bringing the electrician in – there used to be lighting in there but it had long since stopped working and we didn’t have any plug sockets. We’ve now got two bright modern strip lights and two double plug sockets so we can use it to charge tools and depending on the size of the project, a mini workshop.

Now though the rest is up to us. We’ve discovered with a lot of rain recently that it’s not water tight so the leaks need to be found and fixed, it needs insulating then an internal layer of boarding where the old doors used to be and across the ceiling as well. There is some masonry that needs filling before it can all be painted and shelves and hooks put up so that we can hopefully be organised.

This isn’t the most glamorous renovation project in the world by any means, but sometimes they just have to be practical and useful. I’m hoping by the spring the shed will be ready and we can finish off work on the outbuilding so watch this space for a Part II.

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