Frog Bottom Garden Shed This page discusses how the garden shed was built for the Frog Bottom Preserve. Shovels and rakes. Fencing supplies. Sprayer parts. Feeders. Hand tools and small fasteners. Tractor parts. It all has to go somewhere. And if you out in the field when something breaks or you don't have a key component - well, so much for finishing that task today. You either make a run back to the house or reschedule. So a shed was needed to store parts on the Frog Bottom Preserve. Special thanks to the construction students at Sam Houston State University, in Huntsville Texas. The class does projects for local businesses and chareties. They did the cutting and assembly, and had a lot of great ideas on the design.
A shed with a "folly-like" theme was desired (why have a boring box shed?). The idea for a hexagonal/six-sided garden shed came from the Instructible website Hexagonal Garden Shed. It is a great site, has lots of pictures, construction tips and some dimensions. Using it as guide for the Frog Bottom shed was very helpful to identify areas of discussion, such as the design of the roof and center support cap. A key design difference is we wanted to avoid cutting sheets of plywood, so we increased the side dinemsions to 48 inches and sized the side height at 96 inches.
This is the base of the shed, the lowest level that will be sitting on blocks on the ground. Each side is 48 inches long. That results in about 7 feet from side to side and 8 feet from point to point. 2x4's treated for ground contact were used. The studs are offset so screws can be run in from the ends.
This is the floor of the shed, attached to the top of the frame. 3/4 inch treated plywood was used. It is screwed to the base frame.
This is one of the back walls. Untreated 2x4 pine studs were used, at 16 inch spacing.
This is the center block for the roof. The plan in the Instructionals website had a solid block with six sides cut into it. There are a number of advantages going with this type of block: Provides ventalation at the top of the roof. A drill driver fits inside of the block, so screws can be run into the end face of the rafters Note the idea for this type of center block came from the Copper-By-Design website. It is a really helpful website with a lot of good ideas. They supplied the Derby Cap used on the top of the shed.