Out the back of my house is a sort of shared open space, suitably gated off from the unwashed masses of the general public. This is woefully underused by my fellow street dwellers, so for many years my family has basically been the only users of the space – for growing plants, exercising, playing ball games and as somewhat of a dumping ground for bikes, ride on toys and timber.
It’s good to get bikes out of the house, but in the event that it ever decides to rain again in the UK (something that appears to be increasingly unlikely), we don’t want to risk gradual rusting and flaking paint finishes. Recently, I’ve solved this with a very ugly makeshift “bike garage” made from palettes and old plywood sheets. This was always intended as a temporary measure, as it’s quite an eyesore.
The impetus to get the permanent shed done came from an excellent palette find – made of quite pretty wood (by the standards of palettes), and reasonably easy to pull and bash apart.
Four palettes yielded a decent amount of timber which I intended to use to panel the sides of the bike shed. On top of this, after completing the design, I ordered a couple of sheets of 11mm OSB (for the roof and one wall), eleven 2.4m lengths of pressure treated 70 x 45mm timber (for the frame) and some shed roof felt. I already had screws and nails, and the palettes were obviously free, so the total cost of the build including delivery was under £150.
I had my eye on a corner plot and started by measuring the space, sketching out a rough idea for a bike shed and then moved to Powerpoint to firm up the dimensions. Following a method I also used to create scale drawings when building the man cave, 1cm on the Powerpoint canvass = 10cm in real life.
The main constraints, other than the space available, was how well three bikes would fit in, and the fact that the majority of the palette wood was 80-100cm long. I started with the idea of a roughly 1m x 1.7m shed, but the drawings pushed me to increase this to 1.2m x 1.8m to comfortably fit the bikes. As you can see, the original smaller plan looked a bit of a squeeze:
The larger option below has room to move. The thick blue line represents the extant brick wall I’d be building against, by the way.
The short panelled wall next to the entrance ended up being planned at 1m, utilising the 100cm palette wood, and the longer panelled wall would be 1.2m and made up of 80cm and 40cm pieces. For the back wall I just intended to use the brick wall already in place, and the last side would be OSB/plywood panelling, for speed, as it would not be visible from the outside.
With these dimensions in mind, I knocked up a simple spreadsheet – nothing over the top, but enough to know how much framing wood and OSB to order. I’ve learnt from building the man cave that over-planning this sort of timber structure is foolish, because the build plan won’t survive totally intact.
In the next post I’ll talk about framing the building.