I’ve had an eye out for a garden shed for some time. Although I’m fortunate to have a big garage, by the time you squeeze in a car, a bike, a barbecue, a lawn mower, a wheelbarrow and … well, you get the idea.

Wooden sheds are expensive, if you don’t want something which falls apart after five minutes. And then you have to keep up with painting/staining them every few years to avoid them rotting away eventually.

So I decided to take a punt on an all-plastic shed from Keter. I set up a watch on CamelCamelCamel and when Amazon dropped the price over the last Bank Holiday weekend, I went for it.

Here’s the finished result:

My new garden shed in situ

The instructions say it’s a two person job to put it up. I’m a veteran of scoffing at such strictures but on this occasion, I had two people to help me and I don’t think you’d have a chance of doing it single-handed - the structure won’t self-support until you’ve built all four walls and corners.

You really, really need some sort of powered screwdriver for this, otherwise it will take you all day - lots of the screws go through a guide hole and then you’re driving them into plastic underneath which they need to bite into from scratch.

Before you build it, you will of course need some sort of base for it to sit on. I went for plastic grids filled with gravel, which worked well. Getting the ground perfectly level in both directions was a huge faff and power tools to cut out old tree roots were involved, but at least the soil to be dug out was soft and could be consumed by my new flower beds (more on that in another post soon).

I’m not sure I’d make a driveway (or anything vehicles were driving over) out of the grids, but for this kind of application they’re great and a lot less faff than pouring cement. They also keep up the “no wood to rot away” theme of the project.

End result? I’m pleased with it, and it has swallowed everything I wanted out of the garage.

The instructions about not leaning stuff against the walls are a minor irritant but I had some old free-standing racking which has addressed that.

It’s probably easier to break into with less noise than a wooden one, but by the time you’ve screwed it all together, it’s not trivial to make a human sized hole in it, so put a decent padlock on the front and hope for the best. Naturally, if you have ABS locks for your house, you’ll want an ABS padlock so the same key does everything.

It has withstood non-trivial rain showers just fine, but the weather is being un-characteristically lovely for Britain at the moment, so I can’t tell you how it holds up in a thunderstorm. It looks pretty water-tight to me though.