Building a farm shed around Warragul and Drouin: slab, site and council checks

A hay shed on a Drouin lifestyle block, or a machinery shed out past Warragul, is often the biggest thing a landholder builds after the house. Most of the cost, and most of the grief later on, comes down to two questions: where the slab sits, and what council needs to see before work starts.

Why the shed comes first

Nobody buys a few acres near Drouin planning to own a tractor. Then the ride-on can't keep up with the back paddock and a compact tractor arrives. The few round bales for the horses become a winter's supply, and they lose feed value sitting under a tarp through a wet Gippsland winter.

That's usually when people go looking for a shed, and most start with a brochure. Look at the ground and the council rules before you settle on a size. It's cheaper that way.

Check the ground before the steel

On low-lying West Gippsland ground, the site and the slab matter as much as the steel. The easiest test costs nothing: walk the block after a few days of heavy rain, when the pooling's obvious, and note which way the water runs and where it stops.

Earthworks next door can change that picture. One Longwarry resident told the Gazette his front lawn, firm for years, went soft after a neighbouring development raised its ground level. Pour a slab at the wrong height on a block like that and it'll sit in water.

Fair Dinkum Builds, which supplies steel sheds across Melbourne and its fringe, starts its process with a site visit. Take whoever comes out to the wet patches you found and ask where they'd put the slab.

Much of the district sits on clay, and reactive clay swells when it's wet and shrinks as it dries out. So an engineer designing the slab will usually ask for a soil test first. The test classifies the site under AS 2870, the Australian Standard for slabs and footings, and the slab design follows from that class.

If the site's wet, the pad may need building up. Compact the fill in layers rather than in one go, and shape the ground so it falls away from the shed on every side.

Stormwater needs its own plan. A big shed roof collects a lot of water in one storm, and if it all pours out at a corner of the slab, it'll undo the work you've just paid for on the pad. Council can issue a legal point of discharge report showing where stormwater from the property is allowed to go. A rainwater tank takes some of the load, and the stock trough gets a supply out of it.

Then there's access, which people tend to forget until the concrete truck is at the gate. It needs a firm track to the door, as does a hay delivery, and a soft paddock in July will bog both.

Council approval and overlays

In Baw Baw Shire, as across Victoria, two separate approvals can apply to a shed, and they're easy to mix up. A planning permit, where one's needed, is about whether a shed that size is allowed in that position at all, while the building permit comes from a registered building surveyor and covers whether the thing is designed and built safely.

Start with a free planning property report from the State Government's VicPlan website. It lists the zone and any overlays on the land, and it takes a few minutes to download.

Overlays are where West Gippsland blocks catch people out. Land under a Land Subject to Inundation Overlay usually needs a planning permit for new buildings, and council refers those applications to the West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority. The authority can set a minimum floor level. That sends you straight back to the slab height.

A Bushfire Management Overlay adds conditions of its own, covering where the shed sits and how a fire truck gets to a water supply.

Zone schedules set minimum setbacks from roads and boundaries too. The Farming Zone and the Rural Living Zone differ here, so a shed position that suits one block might not suit the one over the fence.

Plenty of people out here will tell you a farm shed doesn't need a permit. Sometimes they're right. Ask a building surveyor before you order any concrete, because removing or altering an unapproved building costs far more than the permit would have.

Your supplier may offer to check what applies to the property and prepare the council paperwork, which saves a lot of time. The application still goes in under your signature, though, and any permit conditions are yours to meet after the shed's up.

Choosing a size that lasts

Measure the biggest machine with its attachments on, then add room to walk around it and swing the doors open.

Door height is the one people miss. Check it against your tallest load, whether that's the tractor with its loader up or a trailer coming in loaded.

For hay, count bales instead of guessing at floor area. Work out a winter's supply plus a buffer for a late spring, then convert it to stacked floor space.

Open-fronted bays keep air moving through a stack. If you want somewhere lockable for the tractor or a workbench, close in the bay at one end.

Where the block allows, keep hay away from machinery and fuel. The CFA's advice is to store hay dry and check new stacks for heat in the weeks after baling. Hay that self-heats is a common cause of the shed fires reported each summer.

Steel shed sizes run from a 6 x 3 m garden shed up to multi-bay rural sheds.

If the budget stretches, build one bay bigger than you need today. Adding a bay later usually means another permit and another concrete pour, and few people on a lifestyle block ever wish they'd built smaller.

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