I designed and built a simple 4’ x 8’ shed for our yard. It was necessary to add more storage space to our home and has already proven extremely useful. It’s amazing how much you can fit in such a seemingly small space!

I was inspired by many DIY shed projects I found online, and although this is a type of shed you can buy prebuilt or as a kit, I loved the idea of planning and building the shed from scratch. For most projects, I typically design and build with precision, often starting with a lot of CAD design before beginning the fabrication process. Building a shed from only a few simple sketches and not focusing heavily on precision was a welcome change for me.

Once the main structure of the shed was complete, I added a small roof off to the side to protect my wife’s bike from the rain. Scroll through the below images to see the build process.

I used many bags of crushed stone as the foundation, which will prevent the shed from sinking over time by allowing rainwater to drain. Once they were in place and leveled, two 8’ pressure-treated 4 x 4s were used to act as a solid base.

The frame of the floor was built with pressure-treated 2 x 4s. To protect the plywood floor from the elements, I attached a plastic drop cloth to the underside of the 4 x 8 sheet before setting it in place.

Beginning wall construction.

Walls are up! Here I’m marking out the birds-mouth cut in the first roof rafter.

Once the roof rafters were installed, we could begin work on the siding. Attaching two uncut 4 x 8 sheets on the sides ended up working well, since they assisted in guiding the roof plywood into place.

Attaching the OSB plywood roof sheeting.

I had some leftover 1 x 4s from another project that worked well as trim around the roof.

The fiberglass roof panels were easy to install with gasket screws.

At this point I had the front corner trim installed. Also note the door, which was built from scrap: two sheets of OSB plywood attached to a simple 2 x 4 frame.

Once the rest of the shed was complete, I built a small roof out of scrap to protect my wife’s bike from the rain.

Once the outside was complete and painted, I moved onto the inside, where I added shelves and hooks for storage.

I decided to leave these gaps between the roof and walls to promote airflow, but stapled in door screen material to prevent critters from getting inside.

All done! The color was waaay more yellow than we anticipated.. I’d highly recommend testing with paint samples outdoors before selecting a color.