Garden rooms and garden offices have experienced significant growth over the past decade, particularly due to covid and changes in the workplace that now allow people to work from home. Unfortunately, most people don’t have the space for an office in the home so many are turning to a garden room of one kind or another to create a flexible work space.
If you research garden studios, garden offices or garden rooms, you will soon come to realise that the average price tag is £25k / £35k for a decent build. These prices usually reflect a readymade room craned in or a quick assembly on a prepared site with utilities.
What a lot of homeowners don’t realise is that you can create a garden room or garden studio for much less if you have the plans drawn up and hire a carpenter to do most of the build. In most cases, a garden office is nothing more than a timber framed structure with loads of insulation packed in to make it cosy to use all year. Everything else is just trim and how you want the building to look.
For this project we started with a 30 / 40 year brick built garden shed that had come to the end of it life so much of it was useless.
I set aside the aluminium corrugated roof panels for later use, salvaged usable bricks to create mini piers for the new building and got to work clearing out everything else.
Walls were constructed with 100x50mm sawn timber and filled in with 100mm Celotex to provide good insulation in the winter and to create a sun barrier in the summer. The exterior of the walls was covered with osb and salvaged corrugated aluminium which made the room look more like a big steel container.
Roof design was flat, and the structure was made up of 150x50mm. This was covered with 18mm osb, 100mm Celotex, another layer of 18mm osb and finished with 2 layers of felt.
I wanted full height floor to ceiling double glazed sliding doors to the front and those I found on Gumtree for £250. These I sprayed satin black and they came up like new.
To fit out the interior I opted for standard plasterboard, drylined the walls and ceilings, added low voltage lights and added a vertical panelled background for the tv area.
I also installed a panelled dado for the bottom of the walls, installed a double-glazed clerestory window to the rear, added IKEA units, a wall mounted tv, and a laminated floor. Outside I created the illusion of a much larger studio by adding vertical panelling and treated all the timber with a dark green wood preservative.
Adding the clerestory window was a great idea as the studio backs onto a park and I get loads of light and greenery all year.
To furnish the studio I used IKEA units as a backdrop for my desk. These accommodated a few thousand vinyl records, all my office bits, and a retro Pioneer music system with Cerwin Vega speakers. My desk and computers I had already, the sofa, armchair, and table came from Gumtree.
Fow wi-fi, I ran a network cable from my house router and created a new wi-fi network in the studio with a cheap router which is used for my office work, streaming movies and music and online gaming.
Cost wise, I spent less than £5k and carried out the work over a six week period with most of the work done on weekends.
My garden studio has been a huge success and gets used by all the family. If you are thinking about building a studio or garden room I suggest you start by taking a look at my garden room website for ideas and inspiration.
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