Now that winter is setting in around the world in many places, you might suddenly find yourself thinking “I have way too much stuff to fit it in the garage!”, or “I have nowhere to store this past summer’s toys, bits and bobs!”. Never fear – building a quick DIY shed on the cheap is easier than you think. Sheds can add quite a bit of pizazz to the garden and free up more space in the garage, allowing you more room to work on your car or utilise your tool bench this winter!
Pallets are all the rage
You might have already heard about the magic of pallets. Pallets are those wooden pre-built platforms on which many kilograms of products are moved around by forklifts – with the forks of the machine sliding under the pallet, and the pallet keeping the products off the floor to keep them dry/clean. The best part about pallets is that a lot of the time you can get them for free. Entirely free! Well, depending on the place you ask for them from. Some places will have absolute stockpiles of pallets out back, just collecting dust that they’re dying to get rid of. Why not take a chance asking if they have any they’re looking to get rid of? Worst case scenario is that they will ask you to pay a small fee for the pallets – which will undoubtedly be a fraction of the cost of what new lumber for a shed will cost you brand new at a hardware store.
Size matters
Of course the size of the shed matters in terms of price and length of construction. A shed that works for you is the best idea, but if you’re short of cash, opting for something smaller with an option to expand later can be beneficial and allow you to build something now for relatively less than you would spend if you were going to go for the entire thing at once. The benefit to working with pallets is that they can slide together almost like Lego in some instances to allow for easy set up and take down, making the overall build much faster and easier than traditional lumber sheds – and allows for easy amendments/expansions later.
Pricing
There are a number of ways to build your own shed, and some places offer fantastic deals on “pre-fab” type sheds, giving you essentially a flat pack shed – or shed-in-a-box, coming with everything you need to build your own shed within a day or two yourself with minimal support. These can run from anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on what you’re looking for, but budget options are almost always available from your local retailer.
So there you have a couple of great ideas and suggestions for how to build a shed yourself for less – especially taking advantage of all the great ideas they have online these days surrounding things like pallet sheds – and some people even take it one step further and build entire small homes out of pallets. So get your thinking cap on, head down to your local business that might have some pallets for cheap, and get building before the snow sets in!
