Total Sheds
Buying Guides · 6 min read
A shed you work in all day is a different brief from one you fetch things from. A maker's guide to workshop shed size, layout and spec — bench space, elbow room, light, power and security.
For the Makers
A storage shed holds things; a workshop holds you. From people who spend every working day inside one: how to size, lay out and spec a building for making things.
We'll declare an interest: we've spent every working day since 1995 inside a workshop, building sheds in the West Midlands. So when a customer wants a building to make things in — woodwork, bike repairs, pottery, mending what others throw away — we pay close attention. This is the brief we know from the inside.
A workshop is not a storage shed with a bench in it. A storage shed is judged in the two seconds it takes to grab the mower; a workshop is judged over the four hours you stand in it on a Saturday. Get that brief right and the building disappears — you just make things.
A workshop is sized around three things: the bench, your body and your materials. The bench comes first. Put one along a wall and you need room to stand at it, step back from it and walk past it without turning sideways — in practice that makes around 8ft of depth the sensible minimum for a building you work in rather than fetch from. Any narrower and the bench becomes a shelf you stand outside of.
Then think about the longest thing you'll handle, because materials don't bend round corners. An 8ft board has to come through the door, turn and swing onto the bench — if full-length boards are part of your making, the building wants to be longer than they are. Bike repair and pottery are gentler on length but greedier on clear floor: a stand or a wheel needs walk-around space.
None of this is a formula. Our shed size guide covers the string-on-the-lawn method — do it holding a broom at bench height and you'll learn more in ten minutes than any chart.
Where three things go — the bench, the tall storage and the door — decides whether a footprint is a joy or a daily irritation.
Natural light across the workpiece is worth more than any single tool you own. Put the bench under the glazing so daylight lands on the work, not on your back — you'll mark out truer and spot a wandering cut sooner.
Tip: Glazing that faces away from the midday sun gives steady, glare-free light for fine work.
The wall with the least light needs it least. That's where the timber rack, the tall cupboard and the deep shelving belong — stored things don't care about daylight.
You walk in once; materials come in with every project. Place the door so your longest stock comes in straight and lands in line with the bench — for sheet material, a double door on that line turns a two-person shuffle into a one-person carry.
Careful: A door in the wrong wall costs a full panel of tool wall for the life of the building.
The clear middle is where assembly happens, where the bike goes on the stand, where a glue-up sprawls. If a machine must live there, put it on castors.
None of it has to be imagined on paper: in the Build Studio you place doors and windows panel by panel as you set the size — designing the workflow, not just the box. And whatever size you land on, delivery is free across the UK mainland.
Workshop walls are structural furniture — cleat rails, shelf brackets, clamp racks. Tongue-and-groove cladding interlocks board into board so the wall works as one stiff panel; the difference shows once you hang serious weight.
A loaded bench, a vice taking hammer blows, a pottery wheel: a working floor carries more than a storing floor, and carries it moving. For heavier use we build a Heavy Duty specification — a stiffer, stronger version of the same building.
A window set high gives daylight without spending the wall beneath it, and stops a passer-by window-shopping your kit. Light comes in; prying eyes don't.
A workshop earns its keep in February as much as June. Every building we make stands on tanalised, pressure-treated timber framing with a 15-year anti-rot guarantee.
Cladding is the spec question we're asked most, and for a workshop we're unambiguous — the full reasoning is in our tongue-and-groove vs overlap guide, and the tanalised explainer covers what the treatment actually does to the timber.
Mains power — sockets over the bench, proper lighting, a heater for winter glue-ups — is a job for a qualified electrician, with armoured cable run properly and a certificate at the end. An extension lead across the lawn is not a power supply; it's a habit waiting for a wet day.
The honest alternative is better than ever: a cordless platform runs a day's making on a couple of batteries, a power station recharges them and runs the task lighting, and a small solar panel tops the lot up between weekends. Plenty of the workshops we deliver run happily like this for years.
Some making is dusty and some making hates dust — sanding and finishing, grinding and glazing don't share a room politely. In a bigger building the answer is a partition wall: a machine room at one end, a clean room at the other for finishing, glazing or sitting with a mug of tea while the paint dries. We build these as combination buildings — one roofline, two rooms, each with its own door if you like — and you place the partition in the Build Studio as you design.
Add up what hangs on the walls of a working shed and it's often worth more than anything else in the garden — thieves know that too. So: a solid door with proper locking, windows set high or kept off the visible faces, and no habit of letting the building advertise its contents. The rest — locks, hinges, alarms — is in our security shed guide; read it while the building is still a drawing.
Ten minutes here saves years of working around the wrong decision.
Start from the bench and the boards, not a chart. A bench along one wall plus room to stand and walk past points to around 8ft of depth as a minimum; if you handle full-length boards, the building wants to be longer than they are. Our apex buildings run deep and our pents run wide, so one shape usually suits both the work and the garden.
Yes — and in a workshop they should. Tongue-and-groove cladding interlocks into a stiff panel, and fixing into the framing behind it will carry serious weight. Plan the tool walls early: the more you hang, the more floor you keep.
Not necessarily. Hand-tool woodwork and bike repairs need nothing at all, and cordless tools with a power station cover most of the rest. For fixed sockets, lighting circuits or heating, bring in a qualified electrician — garden electrics are regulated work.
Set the size, put the window over the bench, place the door for the longest board, drop in a partition if the work needs one — panel by panel in the Build Studio, hand-built in our West Midlands workshop and delivered free across the UK mainland.
Open the Build StudioReady to put it into practice? Every building is made in our West Midlands workshop with free mainland delivery.
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