State of the Farm: The New Shed, July 2026

I haven’t posted much about woodworking for a while here. 

 

The truth is, the shop has been a bit restrictive of late. I have some interesting ideas but when I get started, I find just getting it organized a problem. 

 

I started with the main shop on one end side of the garage. Originally, it was just a workbench space open to the garage space. Then, after we’d lived there for a few years, I put up a ceiling, walls, and a various workbenches. But the place is still quite small. 

 

I came up with what I call the trolley system: I put equipment such as a bandsaw, lathes, etc., on wheeled trollies and dedicated a portion of the shop to house them. Then, when I needed, say, the drill press, I wheeled it out and did what I needed, took it down, and put it back. It worked quite well.

 

But, as time went on, I found I needed more equipment stations than I had space for. I have multiple sanders for different jobs. For example, I store the spindle sander under a table. When I need to use it, I have to put up a work table, bring it out, set it up, do the sanding, then break everything down and put it back. There’s not enough room to have more than two stations open at once. If I need the spindle sander and the belt sander and the drill press on the same job... well, you get the idea.

 

Some time back, I was given permission to repurpose the left bay of the garage. We weren’t using it for a car—one of our two cars wouldn’t fit, anyway—and I needed space. But I had to share that space with other equipment like the snow blowers, the shredder, gasoline, etc. I had a miter saw stand, router table, and table saw and could not figure out how to fit them into the garage space with those other items. Not to mention the idea of generating a lot of sawdust next to explosive fuel made me a little queasy.

 

The solution was to get a shed to move all of that stuff out of the garage and then make it into a real shop.

 

But first, I needed said shed.

 

I could have built it myself—I’ve built other structures—but I wanted the shed done. I didn’t want to wait on it. So I researched shed manufacturers, sellers, etc. Up here in the north east, there are a lot of vendors to choose from.

 

I had some requirements: 

1. I wanted no particle board or other “fake” wood in the construction. The interior would get wet—it was, after all, going to house the snowblowers. Fake wood can be made waterproof but it doesn’t last forever and when it does fail, it’s not pretty.
2. It had to be big and tall enough to fit everything I wanted.
3. I had a location in mind and whoever was going to sell me a shed had to fit to that location. There was a hill and other obstacles.
4. That suggested this requirement: the shed was to be built on premises. I’d dealt with delivered sheds before and 1) they were almost always made of fake wood and 2) they had to be maneuvered into place. The location got in the way.
5. I needed some help and guidance in site preparation.

These requirements narrowed things down considerably. No Home Depot or Lowe’s sheds need apply.

 

It finally came to three shed manufactures: Eastern Shed, Reeds Ferry Sheds, and Parker Sheds. They were all comparably priced. All of the sheds looked like quality work. 

 

We went with Eastern Shed for a single reason. While all three were quite detailed about the site preparation, Eastern was the vendor that was most committed to helping. They, in fact, gave me two excavators they had worked with before that knew what Eastern wanted. 

 

For excavation, we went with Mike Tuttle. Not only was it a good price, he also was able to schedule within a week. Getting that done quickly gave me a leg up on the ordering process with Eastern. When I could tell Eastern that the site prep was completely done and ready, they could take advantage of that and work me into the schedule sooner.

 

Here is the site as they were figuring out how to proceed.

 

 

Here is the site after they’d done the initial clearing.

 

 

 

This is the site after it had been graveled in.

 

 

 

This is the site finished. Note how they built out the slope up to the front edge of where the shed would be.

 

  

I planted grass on the slope where I knew there would be heavy traffic.

 

 

 

Sure enough, about three weeks after I’d made the order, Eastern contacted me about installation and we set a date. 

 

I had already cleared most of the way into where I knew the truck must enter. Now, I scrambled to finish making sure everything was ready.

 

On the appointed day, they showed up at 7:00 AM with their truck. I was quite glad I had overcompensated in my clearing because they needed it. 

 

 

Eastern Shed (and, I suspect all of the others) prebuild as much as is humanly possible. 

 

 

 

So, construction on site was more assembly than actual building. This was fine with me.

 

 

 

 

Here is the finished product.

 

 

 

 

 

From start to finish, the process took three hours and twenty minutes. Part of that efficiency was pure factory prebuild. A lot of it was building to suit the assembly process. There were a lot of little bits here and there that made what could have been a tough job easy. I’m sure all three of the vendors I examined have a similar if not identical approach: 1) build as much in the factory as possible, 2) engineer the product for easy assembly, 3) train the installers within an inch of their lives.

 

 

Here, I’ve started putting garage material into the shed. I expect to fill it.

 

 

 

My point here is not to be an advertisement for Eastern Sheds or Mike Tuttle, though I am very pleased with their work. My point, instead, is to show how these sorts of exercises ought to work. 

 

I took a year to figure out who the vendors should be, marshal up the funds, figure out the site, and decide what would be the best shed for the money. That work, on my part, paid off because I ended up finding the right people. 

 

The right people are out there. The right companies are out there. 

 

All we have to do is find them.