The placement of doors and windows in your new storage building has a large impact on how (and how well) you will use your space.

One of the easiest mistakes to make is not to allow enough access to the building from the outside. Picture this: it’s Saturday morning, and you just walked out to the shed to get your fishing rod before heading off to the lake. You walk in the (only) double door on the end of your shed, trip over the riding mower, and then realize that your fishing tackle is all the way in the back of the building…behind the Christmas tree, the tiller, the string trimmer, the chainsaw, and the stack of boxes left over from the last time you moved. You trudge back to the house and turn on the TV.

This type of scenario is avoidable with some proper planning. Obviously, you don’t want the entire wall space of your building covered with doors, but some strategically placed entrance points can eliminate a lot of frustration. For example, if you had a single door in the side of your building, you could completely skip the tripping over the riding mower, tiller, and string trimmer, and only have to contend with the chainsaw and stack of boxes before reaching your goal. Another entrance makes it possible to organize more effectively as well, and it is plausible that you may not have had to trip over anything to get your fishing rod.

Placement of doors also depends somewhat on the topography of your yard in the vicinity of the building. If you plan for your building to be leveled on blocks, and you have three feet of slope from one end to the other, you obviously don’t want your primary access point to be on the end that is three feet in the air. On the other hand, you also want to consider the primary direction from which you will be accessing your building, and provide some type of access without having to navigate all the way to the back.

Windows are often placed on the side of the building that will be the most visible. However, you may want to also consider such things as amount of shade and direction of sunlight when determining you window placement.