Every man needs a shed.

The single most annoying thing about living in the house we do is the fact that out garage isn't directly next to the house, instead it's in a block at the far end of the row of houses. Most irritating about this is the fact that all our gardening equipment and tools are therefore just that little bit too far away to be truly handy.

The solution? Build a shed!

We don't have a huge back garden so we'd always thought having a shed as well as the greenhouse may be a bit much but finally the constant trekking back and forth to the garage wore us down so we picked a spot at the end of the garden, behind the greenhouse, and decided to go for it. We had a look around at the local garden centres to see what kind of shape and size would suit us and settled on something square and about 6foot by 6 foot. Then, as we so often do, it was back home to search online and check prices. You may not naturally think of Argos for garden sheds but in the end we plumped for one of their BillyOh models (mainly because it had a stable door seemed cute, if a little pointless).

First job was to clear the ground, easier said than done with a large well established bush taking up much of the corner we wanted to use. Eventually though, after much digging, sweating and yanking, we got it out and then only had the far easier task of clearing some turf before there was a nicely shed shaped hole at the bottom of the garden.

The next trick was to try and level off the ground enough that we'd have a flat surface to build on. As with the greenhouse a few years ago this was something of a pain as our garden is on a natural slope and the heavy clay soil makes fine tuning something of a pest. Eventually with the aid of a lot of sharp sand it was close enough and we finished it off with some paving slabs and gravel and prayed that the weight of the shed would kind of 'fine tune' the leveling process for us.

All that remained then was to actually build the thing. With the base laid down it was a relatively simple process of simply moving around attaching the side panels to each other before squaring it off on the base. As is often the way the instructions didn't quite match the reality but thankfully it was pretty obvious how it all fitted together so when in doubt common sense tended to get us through.

The roof went on last which was the moment of truth with regards how flat and square the structure was and it soon became apparent that despite our best efforts we'd not achieved perfection, thankfully it was close enough that the roof fitted on ok and we realised that the roofing felt would hide the slight irregularity and gaps anyway so we didn't feel too bad.

Lastly it was a case of fitting the windows and door then, hey presto, we had a great wooden shed!

Finally it was time to make that trip to the garage a few final times to move things into their new home and then we were done. Amazingly our on concern, about it taking up too much of the garden, proved completely unfounded as sat where it is behind the greenhouse and the apple tree it’s almost hidden from sight and seems to almost not be there at all until you look for it.

All in all it wasn't too hard to build either, it was defiantly a job for two people though (thanks Dad!) and we spread it across a couple of days as it took longer than I expected but really it all went up pretty easily. It's not perfectly square or flat but the roofing felt hides most of the ills and it feels ridged and secure. Fingers crossed it'll serve us well anyway, it'll certainly mean less trips to the bloomin garage...