Shed and home, built as one: how Shed Living NZ Ltd uses X-CALIBR™

For Jamie Hunt, the key to a successful habitable shed is simple: do not make the shed and the home compete for space.

In many hybrid builds, one space is compromised by the other. Either the shed loses room to fit the dwelling or the dwelling is squeezed in awkwardly to protect the shed footprint.

As a qualified Carpenter and Licensed Building Practitioner, Jamie chose a different approach when he started Shed Living NZ Ltd. Here, he designs and builds the shed and dwelling together, but as two distinct and compliant structures, using our X-CALIBR™ system for the shed portal construction.

This recent South Auckland project shows what that looks like on the ground.

Designed to work as one

The brief called for a 12m x 9m three-bay shed with a 92sqm attached dwelling on the same footprint.

The shed was built with X-CALIBR™ portal frames, purlins, and girts. The dwelling used timber frame and truss, delivering two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and an open living area. Polished concrete runs throughout both the dwelling and the workshop, with the workshop connecting directly into the three-bay shed.

As Jamie explains, keeping those two structural systems distinct is the key to making the layout work:

"We use X-CALIBR™ for the shed component, and an attached timber frame and truss for the habitable component. This means we do not need to use valuable shed space for the habitable area."

The shed interior stays clear and unobstructed. The habitable space does not borrow from the shed’s footprint.

Portal construction without hot-rolled steel

X-CALIBR™ is a roll-formed structural system that achieves wide span portals without the cost and complexity of traditional hot-rolled structural steel, developed  by CSF and Howick Ltd, our parent company.

Where traditional structural steel involves 21 manufacturing steps, X-CALIBR™ involves six. Steel members are precision-formed, pre-drilled, and connected using our proprietary rivet system. The result is a portal frame that is equal in structural strength to hot rolled steel, but significantly lighter and faster to produce and install.

For Shed Living NZ, that combination of portal construction and kitset simplicity was exactly what the model required. In Jamie's words:

"[It was] the ease of erecting the structure with everything coming as kitset, and the ability to achieve large clear spans [without] having to use structural steel portals."

The interface between the steel shed frame and the timber dwelling is managed with plywood backing fixed to the timber frame. Clean, well-defined, and repeatable across projects. 

Up faster, with nothing to cut onsite

For the builders, the shed framing went up faster than anything they had worked with before. Because every bracket arrives pre-installed, the crew moved straight from portal erection to fixing purlins and girts. No cutting. No drilling. No measuring on site.

"X-CALIBR™ was great to use, looks great, and the builders were very impressed with the ease of installation. There was no need to cut anything, with all brackets pre-installed, resulting in builders only having to screw purlins and girts to brackets after portals had been fixed in place."

For a design and build business managing tight programmes, that efficiency matters. Less time on the shed frame means more time and margin elsewhere on the job.

One consented build, two jobs done well

The Shed Living model works because the structural systems are chosen to work together from the beginning. X-CALIBR™ handles the shed. Timber handles the dwelling. One consented building, delivered as a single build.

If you are looking at a hybrid shed and dwelling project, talk to Central Steel Framing about how X-CALIBR™ can work for your build.