I am quite jealous of my neighbour for one particular reason: he has a dedicated workshop in his back garden! Mind you, he’s been retired for some time now, and he’s lived at his home for more years than I’ve been on this Earth, so he will have doubtless had some time spare to build his workshop.
My neighbour used to be in the motor trade in his salad days, fixing cars, commercial vehicles and motorbikes for a living. When he closed his business and retired, he wanted somewhere to store all of his tools and equipment so that he could carry on using them from home to maintain his own vehicles.
Photo Source: Flickr (credit: rileyporter)
Being a car enthusiast myself, I remember a time when he invited me around to his workshop so that he could show off his collection of welding equipment, various tools and other paraphernalia which he had amassed during his time in business.
Building my own garden workshop is on my to-do list (you might even call it my “bucket list”), and I am quite determined to build mine some day, especially after helping to build workshops for friends and family members at their homes over the years!
If you are considering building your own garden workshop, and you are lucky enough to have a lot of time on your hands, you can put those hands to good use by building your garden workshop using this handy guide!
Start from scratch or adapt an existing item?
To be honest, it’s usually cheaper and easier to buy a large garden shed and adapt it for your purposes.
But if you fancy a challenge, you can always construct your own garden workshop using materials from your local builders merchant!
Whatever approach you opt for, I recommend that you spend the time to build a decent concrete base. Some folks use concrete slabs, but the benefit of using a proper concrete based that is poured in is that it will be more stable if there are is any movement in the earth underneath.
Lighting
Being an eco-friendly person, I am obviously going to suggest that you make as much use of natural light as possible.
You can build your garden workshop with strategically placed roof windows so that it is flooded with natural light during the day, and for the hours of darkness you can use energy-efficient LED lighting.
Structural support
If you are building a large garden workshop, I highly recommend using steel to help support your structure.
You can buy steel tubes from small lengths to large shipments, so there’s no problem with obtaining enough steel to create a frame for your garden workshop!
Electricity
There are two ways of getting electricity to your garden workshop:
- Have an electrician wire up your workshop’s electricity from the main in your home.
- Use solar power.
If you are going to be operating heavy machinery, option one is your best bet. But for those mainly using manual tools, the eco-friendly solar power setup is better (and cheaper).