Added Square Footage: Building Your Own Storage Shed

If you've discovered that you’re going to need more space for all your belongings, you don’t have to look for a bigger home. Instead, you can build a shed on your property if you have the right skills and materials.

For building your own storage shed, you’ll need a wide range of materials, including corrugated metal, eye and ear protection, a drill, measuring tape, a framing nail gun, screwdriver bits, a door lock, studs for wall and roof framing and plywood. Keep in mind that these are only some of the materials you’ll need for this project. You should be able to find everything at your local hardware store. Once you have what you need, you’ll need to check your local building codes to see if you’re going to need a permit. When that’s taken care of, you can start your project by measuring the shed dimensions and cutting the wood pieces ahead of time. After this, you’ll need to do the following:

• Build the floor. This involves using shank nails and studs to put the floor frame together.
• Build the frames for the back and side walls. The side walls should slope so that rain water will run off the shed roof. Just make sure that these walls don’t slope toward your home’s foundation.
• Build two front wall frames. Leave enough space between these two frames for the door.

Once you have these basic frames built, you’ll need to join the walls together, construct the roof, install exterior corrugated siding and add shelves inside the shed. The last step in building your own storage shed is hanging the door.

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