Cheap DIY Shed

Cheap DIY Shed - Easy to Build

Not a week goes by that I don’t get an email or a question on my live streaming video segments about inflation. I’m by no means an economist but I’ve seen enough full moons to know that inflation is raging and it’s going to get much worse. I do the grocery shopping for my wife and I and food prices are up at least 35%. Gasoline is now up 85% where I live. Building material prices are going up faster than a bottle rocket on the 4th of July. The prices of used cars are up 40%.

I’m bewildered how the reported inflation rate I see in the news is so much lower than what I’m experiencing. I know for a fact the government administration is cooking the inflation number so it doesn't cast them in a bad light with voters. But many people can see through this sham.

One primary reason inflation is so high is because the current USA administration is printing money and spending it like a drunken sailor. Flooding the market with this paper is DILUTING the dollars you and I have in our wallets and bank accounts. Because the value of each dollar is going down, people who sell things want MORE of them. This reckless money-printing-and-spending policy spans the past five administrations.

The USA national debt is out of control and this spells doom for the value of the dollar.

Smart people are exchanging their dollars for assets that are not pieces of paper. This mad rush to buy assets like houses, cars, collectibles, etc. is causing prices of those items to rise in a simple real-time example of supply vs. demand economics. Nothing about this is hard to understand.

Simple Cheap DIY Shed

Years ago, I built a large 16x24-foot two-story shed that could be easily converted into a small house if I could no longer afford to live in my current house. Currently, it’s loaded with all sorts of accumulated stuff from fifty years of family life. Before I built the shed, much of this was in an offsite storage facility with sky-high monthly rent.

Last week, I picked up two bags of bird seed for my lovely wife at a local agriculture supply store. There in the parking lot were quite a few pre-assembled sheds ready to be delivered to homes. There were a multitude of designs. You may see these in your city or town at big box stores too. I’ve inspected these sheds and the construction quality is minimal in my opinion. The floors are flimsy and the wall studs are spaced at 24-inch centers when I’d build at 16 inches on center.

You should read my shed-building tips column.

My eye was drawn to the signs showing what these sheds cost. The prices took my breath away to be honest. A plain-vanilla shed was $7,783 and one with a little more pizzazz was $8,762.50. These were April 2022 prices. Both measured 10 x 20 feet. You may discover the same sheds in your city or town but they could be more because of a multitude of reasons.

Build a Cheap DIY Storage Shed

As I drove home I thought, “That’s insane. I’m sure one of my readers could build one of these simple sheds watching all my shed-building videos and save thousands of dollars.” I then decided to find out the current rate for off-site storage in my town. It’s a good thing I was sitting down looking at my monitor as the current price is $193 per month for a 10 x 20 storage space. That’s $2,316 per year and you know next year the price will jump ten percent, if not more. It’s possible you can build a 10x20 shed that will last for 40 years for what you’d spend in two years of rent!

Sell Your Crap to Get Shed Money

To save lots of money, and to get all or some of the money you need to build your own shed, you might want to do what I’ve been doing. I’ve been on this journey of selling or donating all the things I no longer use or need for the past two years. This year I intend to take it to the next level. My goal is to sell hundreds of things in the next four months. Whatever I can’t sell, I take to the Free Room at my town recycling center so others can benefit using them.

I’ve transformed countless dust-covered items I had forgotten about into thousands of dollars of cash by selling them to nearby residents using special garage and yard-sale groups that are on any number of social-media platforms. I’ve discovered you get top dollar if you take lots of great photographs showing the actual condition of the object and provide all the needed dimensions.

It also helps to write a creative story about the history of the object. Buyers tell me they love my stories, especially the one about the small silver bowl that I thought might have been on a sailing ship coming to the colonies back in the early 1700s.

Purging things you no longer need nor want serves another important purpose. You then don’t have to have such a large shed to store your things. Should you decide to stop paying the outrageous off-site storage fees, the first step is to determine the actual size of the shed you’ll need. Based on autopsies I’ve done countless times, folks like you almost always build a shed that’s too small.

DIY Storage Shed Size

It’s easy to determine the size of a shed. All you have to do is take all the things you plan to put in the shed and place them out on your lawn as you’d put them in the shed. You can use empty cardboard boxes to simulate things. If you’re skilled and can think in three dimensions, you can draw this out to scale on graph paper.

Once you place the items on the lawn, then surround them with string to make the outline of the shed. Try to create a shed size that’s a multiple of 2 feet in both directions. You’ll discover this will minimize material waste. It’s not happenstance that the sizes of pre-built sheds or shed kits conform to this standard.

Check Zoning Before Building

The next two steps are mission-critical. First and foremost you need to check with your city or town to see what the zoning regulations will allow you to build. These regulations can be strict or lax. It varies widely, trust me. The second step is to create a complete material list and price it out as soon as possible. Inflation is causing prices to go up monthly.

When I was driving back from getting the bird seed, I decided to prepare a complete material list for a simple cheap diy shed. It's a 10x20 shed, but you can use my material list to calculate the cost of a:

10 x 10 shed
10 x12 shed
10 x 14 shed
10 x 16 shed

My list saves you the time and trouble of trying to figure out what you need. I also included links to the top products I like to use as well as links to how you can get access to over 100 videos I shot showing how to build a shed. You get my 100-Percent Satisfaction Guarantee!

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