A place for your garden stuff!
garden-shedOne thing nearly every gardener can use is the storage space provided by a good garden or backyard shed. Tillers, lawn mowers, and snow blowers often get relegated to the back of an already overloaded garage. Hoes, shovels, and rakes get hemmed in by vehicles. Large containers like bushel baskets, half barrels, and wheelbarrows end up wherever there's space, and frequently hand tools and small pots are lost in the shuffle- and it's often near impossible to find a matching pair of gardener's gloves! Good garden and backyard shed designs can solve all of those problems and offer many other benefits besides a place to hang your hoe!
Garden Sheds
Wide doors provide easy access to tillers, mowers, and snow blowers. Many garden shed designs have cupolas and windows that open for ventilation. Shelves store pots and indoor potting benches give you an easy place to repot your transplants even when it's raining outside! Drawers store small hand tools, garden plans, and of course, pairs and pairs of gardener's gloves!
Some garden shed designs combine the utility of extra storage with the delight of every serious gardener, a hobby greenhouse. Windows and skylights give your plants a head start on the season. In addition, a hobby greenhouse is an excellent place to set up a hydroponics or aquaponics system for year round gardening. Many garden sheds also double as art or crafts studios or pool houses.
Many builders specialize in garden shed designs. Hundreds of plans are available on the Internet to download for the do-it-yourselfer or to examine before contacting a builder. Many garden shed builders offer customizable plans and/or totally custom designs. As well as including all the amenities you need inside of your garden shed, the exteriors of garden shed designs can be customized to be a focal point of your garden or subdued to blend in with the architecture of your home and landscape.
Backyard Sheds
The least expensive garden sheds are the prefab plastic or metal backyard sheds you can buy from home improvement centers or garden shops. While not as attractive as custom-designed wooden sheds, modern designs are stylish and the prices start low enough to fit anybody's budget. Backyard sheds are utilitarian and easy to assemble. What they lack in aesthetic appeal, they make up for in inexpensive, handy storage areas for garden tools and implements. A backyard shed can give you a place to store extra outdoor furniture and tools that would otherwise clutter up your yard or garage.
If you are handy with carpentry, building your own backyard shed can be a fun and interesting project. You can buy designs for backyard sheds from your local lumberyard, find them on the Internet, or simply get ideas from books in your public library. You can even design your own shed and build it from scratch - the most cost-effective way of getting a new shed.
If you lack the confidence to do everything yourself, backyard sheds are available as pre-cut kits from many lumberyards. These kits come with instructions on how to assemble the shed, and all that is needed are simple tools like hammers, screwdrivers and wrenches. You will get the satisfaction of building your own shed and saving money at the same time.
Backyard sheds should have a foundation. The foundation prevents the shed from shifting and protects it from excess exposure to moisture. Foundations for sheds could be a simple concrete slab, or cinder brick exterior wall foundation. Either way, the foundation will not add more than a couple of hundred dollars to the total price of your shed, and it will last much longer.
Once you have your shed in place, you will wonder how you ever managed without it. They are so convenient for storing all kinds of things, you may find it filling up more quickly than you had expected. Uh-oh - maybe you need two backyard sheds!