Chris Sheridan

Fifteen years in the workshop and the garden

Chris Sheridan has spent more than fifteen years designing and building garden structures, first on the tools as a time-served carpenter and joiner, and now as the person behind ShedBuilder. In that time he has put up hundreds of buildings, from a simple overlap tool store at the bottom of a terraced garden to fully insulated garden offices that get used every working day.

His work covers just about everything you can build in a back garden: apex and pent sheds, summerhouses, log cabins, workshops, greenhouses, outhouses, log and bin stores, and more than a few pub sheds and bar sheds for people who wanted somewhere proper to pull a pint at the weekend. That breadth matters, because the details that make a shed last are the same details that make a garden office or a cabin last. A true, level base. A frame that is square and braced. Cladding that sheds water. A roof that is fixed properly and allowed to breathe.

He started ShedBuilder for a simple reason. Too many people were buying flat-pack kits or following vague plans, then calling a builder in to put right the same handful of mistakes. The site puts his real-world method into plain English, backed by a free calculator that works out exactly what timber, fixings and sheet materials a build needs, so a capable DIYer can get it right the first time.

Areas of expertise

The knowledge behind the guides and the shed builder tool comes from doing the work, not reading about it.