Garden sheds are one of those things that are are often neglected, but they require at least some minimal maintenance or you will soon be faced with a falling down garden shed that you will have to decide whether it is worth repairing or not. I would guess that a good shed should last a minimum of 10 years, maybe even double before requiring a major fix-up. Poorly built structures could start deteriorating much quicker than that.
Many factors are involved in deciding whether to fix or replace your old garden shed, including your budget, how much you like your current shed (in good shape that is), whether it suits your purposes, and whether it suits your house style.
I was faced with this very question twice this past summer. My own garden shed was a crooked disaster and my mothers much larger garden shed leaked like a sieve. With my mothers shed the answer was simple. She had a very large shed with a loft. The walls seemed straight enough. It would be too much work and expense to tear it down and rebuild. Furthermore, it would have been a lot of work and it was too pretty to replace. We decided to tear off the roof and tear out the flooring over the joists and replace both. The total repair cost was $550.00
Our shed was a different story. Our shed was hidden around the side of our house and really out of view of the house or the back deck. It was approximately 3 feet by 8 feet and about 6 feet tall. Like my mother’s shed it had board and batten siding made out of wide planks. We knew both the roof and floor including the joists and sills were rotten. We thought we had a complete rebuild on our hands.
We started to figure out the material cost for a complete replacement. We both agreed that it needed to keep the character and charm of our old one, so the material costs ended up to be a little higher than the bare minimum. The first price was over $500. It seemed a bit too expensive to replace such a small shed, so we started to look for alternatives. That didn’t go so well, and we found that for the size we wanted, anything new was at the very least $500, plus they were either ugly or ugly and small, and made out of resin or lightweight metal, neither of which lends itself to decent shelving.
So we went back to our original price list, and decided that if we were building a replacement, maybe we could salvage the cute siding of the old one, and totally rebuild everything else. In fact, this ended up cutting our rebuild cost in half, since I saved some of the better studs from the old one as well. So we dismantled the old shed saving the board siding, framed in a new floor, set it up on bricks, built a new frame and roof, and re-sided with the original already antiqued board and batten siding. It turned out perfectly because we still have the character of the old shed we loved, but it is now square and watertight and will probably be with the house for another 10-20 years.
Both of these sheds repairs required some hard decisions about whether we should replace or repair the sheds, and in both cases it made much more sense to repair, albeit for slightly different reasons. One simply was in great shape but for the roof and sub-floor, the other would have cost more than we considered it was worth to replace, plus we didn’t want to lose the old character. If your shed has seen better days, I hope I’ve given you some insights to help you decide whether it is due for a repair or replacement.
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