Andy Tullis / The BulletinNancy Edeline, left, and her husband, David Edeline, of Old Hickory Buildings & Sheds in Redmond, stand in front of a 10x 20 foot shed called the playhouse package, on sale with other sheds at their business Thursday. Customers are coming in with many ideas for using the sheds for other purposes besides storage.

When David and Nancy Edeline moved to Redmond from Arizona last year, they thought they were getting into the shed business. With storage units in the area hard to come by, and not much competition in the local prefabricated shed and outbuilding industry, David Edeline said he figured the business would be a winning bet.

“It’s not brain surgery so I learned the ins and outs of the business in a short time and we were up and running,” said David Edeline, who runs Old Hickory Buildings & Sheds in Redmond.

But when customers started coming in with ideas to use the Edelines’ buildings for purposes other than storage, David Edeline said he realized he’d tapped into something that went beyond sheds. People wanted to use the structures, which Edeline sells through a contract with Tennessee-based Old Hickory Buildings & Sheds, for all sorts of reasons, he said.

“They want work shops, offices, man caves, studios, granny flats — one guy came in to get one as somewhere he could reload bullets — it’s all over the place,” he said. “There’s a bunch of people who come in wanting to live in these things.”

And it’s not just the Edelines who guessed that about half of their customers intend to buy a shed for reasons other than storage. Drew Jones, who owns Deschutes County Sheds south of Bend, said he’s noticed the same.

“We do see people who purchase our sheds with plans to live in them, or that’s at least the gist we get,” he said on Thursday.

“They say they want to sheet rock it, wire it, put plumbing — that sort of thing. But we don’t really get involved behind the scenes after the sales. We tell our customers that if they have any code or use questions to get in touch with the county or the city.”

Shed living

To some, living or hanging out in a shed might not sound appealing. Sharing a small, dark space with a lawn mower, boxes of junk, and a spider nest isn’t typically considered the ideal roommate situation, even in an area where the rental vacancy hovers around 1 percent and the median home price clocks in at more than $300,000.

But the buildings that the Edelines, Jones, and a few other businesses in Central Oregon offer aren’t dirty or filled with clutter.

They come in a variety of sizes, and they’re typically pre-made and ready to deliver to a buyer’s property on a truck. According to the Old Hickory website, there are plain rectangular models without lofts, larger rectangular models with lofts and a 560-square-foot polygonal “deluxe” model that include a porch, windows and an even larger loft.

Considering the size and variety of the products available, David Edeline said he’s not surprised that people have gotten creative with how to use them.

“With all the interest in tiny houses that’s been going on lately, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about doing stuff with (the sheds),” he said. “And the prices of rentals around here are skyrocketing — a one-bedroom anything is a ton of money. It makes sense people are looking for other options.”

And even though the biggest shed the site lists is described as a “deluxe playhouse,” for some in Central Oregon it’s real life.

“We bought the 14-by-40-foot model — the biggest they had, with a beautiful front porch,” said Mo Caster, who’s renovating the Old Hickory she and her husband, Jerry, bought to live in. “We’re making it into a pretty, not-so-tiny-house and redoing the whole thing. It’s sturdy and wonderful, we’re putting 11 windows in it.”

The Casters own property near Prineville, where they had the prefabricated building delivered. Mo Caster said they’d been looking at building a traditional house on the land but eventually settled on the fact that they wouldn’t be able to beat the price of a shed, between $700 and $1,300 and often could be purchased through a rent-to-own payment plan.

“The price was fabulous,” Mo said. “It was delivered totally finished and the whole thing was set up in the property in a very short time. The price didn’t compare anything else on the market.”

According to a June 2016 Central Oregon Rental Owners Association survey, Central Oregon’s residential rental vacancy is currently at about 1.04 percent. Real estate website zillow.com, which draws data from current home listings, found that the median home price in Bend is $348,500.

Mo Caster said they got all the necessary building permits from Crook County to have plumbing installed in their “home,” get it wired for electricity, and modify the interior with drywall to fit their needs. The price of permits for doing all that — more than $1,500 — was OK with the Casters, but for others who are attracted to the price of living in a prefabricated building, the permitting costs can encourage a more off-the-books sort of existence.

None of the people living in an unpermitted shed The Bulletin contacted wanted to be quoted for this article, but according to Chris Garcia, assistant building official for Deschutes County, the county’s code enforcement division gets “a lot” of complaints about people living in unpermitted structures. Neighbors irritated by the traffic and noise that come with a lot of people living on a single piece of property are quick to file a complaint with code enforcement, he said.

“We get (complaints) quite a bit actually,” Garcia said on Tuesday, adding that he couldn’t speak to the matter of prefabricated sheds specifically. “Typically it’s a neighbor that will turn them in — they’ll call in and let us know that multiple people are living in an RV or a tiny home or workshop, and so the code enforcement guys will open up a case and the property owner will receive a notice of a violation. Zoning laws are pretty strict, so if they’re not allowed to have it and can’t qualify for a limited use permit, then unfortunately they’re evicted from the property.”

‘We’re not in the tiny house business’

The allegiances of the companies that manufacture the sheds lie with local government. John Turner, a district manager for Old Hickory Buildings & Sheds, said the company’s structures are not intended for “human occupancy,” nor does the company encourage this use.

“Here’s what we do — we manufacture and sell portable storage buildings, that’s what we’re building,” Turner said on Thursday, adding that the porches on some models are simply to make the product “look good.” “We don’t try to encourage people to try and use them for human habitation. But we’re not a big enough company to go around and check how people use the building once they’re purchased. We tell people up front if it’s above a certain size to go through the permitting process, and we tell them we have engineering plans available if they’re trying to get a permit. We’re not in the tiny house business.”

The Old Hickory website states that “… buildings are classified as Minor Storage Facilities and not intended for any other use.”

According to Martha Shields, a Deschutes County permit technician, the permitting costs for a 400-square-foot home — that’s on the larger end of the Edelines’ Old Hickory shed selection — can run anywhere from $1,500 to $6,500, depending on variables such as where the home is located and if there’s an existing septic system.

“It can be expensive,” Shields said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7829,

awest@bendbulletin.com