A few years after the kids had flown the coop my wife and I decided that we would move into a smaller house. Over the years we had accumulated quite a lot of bits and pieces which all ended up in the spare bedroom of our new home with the rest into the garage.

When we had finally got ourselves settled in it became obvious that this situation was not going to work. My wife's sister was coming to stay for a few days in the summer and so something needed to be done with all the boxes in the spare bedroom.

We decided that a backyard storage shed would be the best way solution to our problem. It would clear the spare room, make more space in the garage and we'd have somewhere to store the gardening equipment I intended to buy.

The first thing I did was to get hold of a good set of plans. You can buy whole sets which include not only plans for backyard storage sheds but for all kinds of outdoor buildings from a dog kennel to a large garden shed or covered patio.

The design I settled on had doors at either end, this was ideal as one half could store household goods with gardening bits and pieces at the other. At first I thought this double door approach might be a problem but after checking my plans and with a bit of measuring I realised that all I had to do was turn the whole thing side on to my boundary fence.

After deciding on the site and shed design my next job was to prepare the foundations. Not too much to do in this case as the area I had chosen was already level so I used a brick footing.

All the information I needed was included in my building plans and with a little help from my new next door neighbour my backyard storage shed was put up and painted in a just two weekends.