Shed Designs and Plans – Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing Your Shed Plans

Before you decide on a particular shed blueprint, I would like to share with you some of the mistakes that can occur when choosing shed designs and plans.

Choosing a plan that is too large for your property. This happens all the time. You buy some shed blueprints that you fall in love with only to find out that the building is way too big for the area that you have available. You think that maybe you can just scale down the storage shed to make it fit. This is where you can get into big trouble. By modifying the shed design plans, you run the risk of building it incorrectly, causing a loss of your time and money.
 
You should find out first just how much room you have and whether or not you are going to need a permit to construct the garden shed. Your local building department can give you the information you need about property setbacks and variances if you need to get one approved. Knowing ahead of time what size shed you can build on your property will save you this huge headache. Bring your shed designs and plans along with you to speed up the process.
 
Not buying shed designs and plans that do not suit your needs. This also happens alot. If you are planning to use the storage shed for your gardening tools alone, then do you really need a 16 by 20 foot shed? However, the opposite holds true as well. If you are going to use the shed for a place to store your lawn equipment such as a lawn tractor and push mower, you need to make sure that the storage shed is going to be large enough to accommodate everything that you expect to be placing inside. You would be surprised at how many homeowners build a shed and find out they do not have enough room for everything they wanted to put in it.
 
Choosing shed designs and plans that are too complicated for the average homeowner. If you have some experience with woodworking and following shed blueprints or plans of any kind, then this should not be a problem. However, if you are not experienced at all, a do it yourself shed can be a very intimidating drawn out job. Most garden shed designs are easy to follow, but there are some that take some experience to follow along with. Just make sure that you feel comfortable with the blueprints that you choose. I have seen many times before where a homeowner will start the building of the shed only to let it stand there until he can contact a professional to finish the job. This defeats the whole purpose of doing it yourself. The homeowner winds up spending more money on the storage shed than he wanted to.
 
Falling in love with one particular design or plan. Again, this goes back to the first mistake that we talked about. If you absolutely adore a storage shed, but there is no way that it will work on your property, you are going to be hard pressed to choose another one. Remember, there are thousands of shed designs and plans out there today, so keep looking and more than likely you will find one that is very similar that will fit in your backyard.