Garden shed vs tool store vs log shelter: which one do you actually want?

Most quote requests I get start with "I need a shed" — and most of the time, what someone actually needs is one of three quite different things.

Three things wearing the same name

People use "shed" to mean everything from a lean-to that holds a lawnmower to a proper workshop with a workbench, insulation, and an electricity supply. They're not the same thing — and building the wrong one for your situation is the most common waste of money I see in this category.

A tool store — abri à outils — is a compact structure, typically 1–4 m², designed to stay dry inside and hold a padlock. Lawnmower, spades, compost bags, a few seasonal items. The key requirement is a dry floor and a door that closes properly. Nothing more exotic than that.

A garden shed — cabanon, in the Geneva usage that sounds natural — is a real room outdoors: 5–15 m², a proper timber frame, often a window, a floor you can stand on comfortably. You can put a workbench in a garden shed. You can insulate it, run a cable to it, store furniture cushions through the winter. It's as much a workspace as a storage unit.

A log shelter — range-bûches — is built around airflow. The front is open by design, and often the sides partly too. Sealing it would defeat the purpose: logs need to breathe to dry down from 30–40% moisture to the 15–20% at which they burn cleanly. The structure holds the stack off the ground, keeps rain off the top, and lets wind do the rest.

Five questions to work out which one you need

Rather than guessing, I'd run through these:

• What's going in it, exactly? Not roughly — exactly. Bikes live differently from tools, and furniture cushions need a real door and a raised floor. If your contents list covers more than two categories, a tool store is probably already too small.
• Do you need a lock? Tool stores and sheds take padlocks easily. A log shelter doesn't — and if security matters, you're already in shed territory.
• Would electricity be useful? For a shed used as a workshop, a single circuit makes a real difference — a light, a charger, a radio. Tool stores rarely justify it. Log shelters never.
• How long are you staying? If you're renting, a modular kit you can disassemble later makes sense. If this is your permanent garden, a properly framed structure with a treated substructure pays itself back over 15–20 years.
• Where will it sit? A log shelter placed 20 metres from the door you use most becomes a nuisance by December. Siting matters more than most people expect — for any of the three structures, it's worth thinking through before anything is built.

The sizing mistake

"The question I always ask is: what are you storing in five years, not just today?"

The most consistent error I see is undersizing. Someone builds the smallest structure that covers today's needs, fills it inside a year, and then comes back wanting something bigger — at which point building twice costs substantially more than building right the first time. My rule of thumb: take what you think you need and add 30%. That extra space fills up faster than you'd expect.

The second mistake — less common but harder to fix — is confusing categories. A log shelter used for tools stays damp inside and the tools rust. A sealed shed used for firewood traps moisture and the wood stays wet. The structure has to match what you're storing, and converting one type into another after the fact is rarely worth the effort. Better to be clear at the start.