A Comprehensive Guide to Designing & Building Small Green Roofs

An Online ‘How To’ Guide by John Little & Dusty Gedge

This online guide is designed to meet the needs of DIY enthusiasts looking to build a small green roof on a garden shed, outhouse, bin shed, bike store, garage or house extension, as well as builders and landscaper contractors who want to gain insight into  building small green roofs.

This practical guide to small green roofs  has been developed to:

• Provide members with the confidence in initiating & taking a project forward,
• Set out the basic principles behind which things are needed (or not) and why,
• Provide simple detailed instructions (down to what nails and screws to use) in a step by step format,
• Supply construction illustrations that make the green roof building process easy.

In detail, how to build a green roof on a shed, extension, garage or other small building project

The DIY Guide aims to take the mystery out of how to build a small green roof. Whether you want to know how to safely build one for your garden shed, garage or house extension, we hope to provide a clear pathway to accomplishing it. This is in contrast to some other resources where the overly technical nature of the supplied information can easily confuse the beginner.

Have you ever asked yourself the question – ‘I want to build a green roof…but it all seems so complicated’? If you have, then this DIY Green Roof Guide may well be ideal for you, wherever in the world you are thinking of building and whatever type of small scale green roof you are considering.

The Small Scale Green Roof Online Guide has been designed to be user friendly on tablets and mobile phones.

The intention of the small scale green roof online guide is take some of the mystery out of how to build a green roof. Many sites that sell green roof products can confuse people. This is why the first edition was published. We were both getting many emails from people wanting to do a green roof. However it was evident that the main stumbling block was a lack of confidence and confusion on what layer went where and why?

This online edition features more multimedia features and useful insights including;

• Videos of the various stages giving in a detail visual guide to stages of the building of a small-scale green roof:
• Detailed plant lists for the UK and other countries, regions and biomes
• Updates on recent innovations particularly about substrates and edge detailing
• More detailed sketches and drawings to make the stages of the construction much clearer

Measurements are all metric but wherever possible we have converted into US Imperial to save time for purchasers from the US or other countries that use US Imperial.

This website based guide builds on the material and information in our original pdf – ‘The DIY Guide to Green & Living Roofs’ which we published in 2008. That original information has been taken and updated, new and redrawn diagrams made, and multimedia items added. These include short ‘to do’ videos on specific tasks. There are also publicly accessible videos on our youtube channel if you want a quick preview.

Finally we know that the majority of those who purchased the First Edition have gone on to build their own green roof and we know that if you purchase the guide it’s likely you will also. And we would love to hear from you when you have completed your project!