Garden Shed Build in Wimbledon

The brief

The owners needed proper storage, tools, bikes, garden equipment, and had reached the point where the side return and the hallway were doing a job the garden should. What they specifically didn't want was the familiar failure: a flat-pack shed dropped onto bare ground or a few slabs, which racks out of square within a couple of seasons, whose door stops closing, and whose floor goes soft from below. The instruction was simple: do it once and do it right, a shed on a genuine level base, positioned sensibly, built to stay square and dry.

How we approached it

Almost everything that goes wrong with sheds goes wrong underneath them. Timber buildings need a firm, level, well-drained base, get that right and the structure above stays true; get it wrong and no quality of shed survives it. So the majority of the thinking, and a good share of the labour, went into the ground: clearing and excavating the site, building a base that won't settle unevenly, and making sure rainwater sheds away from the structure rather than pooling around its feet.

Position mattered too. A shed placed thoughtlessly dominates a garden and shades the wrong things; placed well, it tucks into the layout and makes the whole space tidier. We looked at access (you want to reach it with a wheelbarrow in wet weather without crossing the lawn), light, and what the shed would do to the outlook from the house before settling the spot.

What we did

• ✓Advised on the shed's position for access, light and its effect on the rest of the garden
• ✓Cleared and excavated the site ready for the base
• ✓Constructed a firm, level, well-drained base, the component that decides how long any shed lasts
• ✓Built and fitted the shed square and true on the prepared base, checking the frame as it went up
• ✓Ensured rainwater sheds away from the structure rather than collecting around it
• ✓Checked the door and any openings operated properly on completion, the quickest test of a square build
• ✓Cleared the site and removed all packaging and waste

The result

A shed that opens, closes and stays dry the way it should, and will keep doing so, because it sits on a base built for the job. The garden gained genuinely useful storage, the house got its hallway back, and the building tucks into its corner without dominating the space. It's an unglamorous truth of garden buildings that the base is the difference between a few years and a few decades of service; this one was built for the decades.