Garden rooms

[StiffyByng]

We have bought a house which, while very lovely, is non-extendable! It has a side return extension already and a small utility room at the back and the garden is otherwise too sloped to build into, although it does have terraced levels. The ceilings upstairs mean we can't do a loft conversion. As it stands, we have enough room but it would be useful to have a back up plan, and I wondered if anyone has ever done one of those ready made insulated garden rooms? I thought it would be useful for a teenager's room in the future. They look quite reasonably priced for the space you get but are they too good to be true?

We're looking at using one for an office... awaits people who've done this already

We have just bought a place with a garden big enough to do this with but with all our money going on the house it will have to wait for a few years. However when the planning officer came round she said that restrictions had been relaxed and we could build on up to 50% of the plot size as long as a metre from boundary and not over 2.5m high. Check your local planning portal for local regs. The Google search "rightmove garden rooms and your area/postcode" to see if any currently on the market you could have a look at.

We've got one of these and it's absolutely brilliant. It hasn't worked out all that cheap though, once you factor in electrics, wiring, insulation, decoration, heating... I think the base price for the cabin was £11k, but then add on construction costs (it took two people seven or eight days to put it together) and all the other costs, extra for better roofing, extra for proper insulation, two coats of external sealant etc. It all adds up.

But it's like having an extra two rooms. We have used one room, the bigger of the two, as a children's play room and it has a big tv/dvd/playstation, two sofas, a computer, plenty of bookshelves and storage space. The other room we have used as a bedroom for our oldest teenager. We're not strictly speaking supposed to do that - under our local council's regs we can use it for 'occasional overnight use' but it's not meant to be proper living accommodation as it doesn't have any water or proper utilities. Anyway, he's moved out now so it's not really used at all.

We are seven people living in a three-bed terrace with only one downstairs room in addition to the kitchen, so the garden rooms have been extremely useful. Still can't wait to move though! But we love our cabin so much we're going to take it with us to the new house.

Do they end up full of spiders? I've always liked the idea of them but this puts me off [wuss].

That's interesting, as one idea we had for one was a teenager's bedroom, but weren't sure if it could be. Did your teenager find it comfortable?

Yes, he absolutely loved it, and I think he especially liked being away from the rest of the house. It doesn't seem to attract spiders particularly, Rhubarb! I suppose it's really a glorified shed, but a very comfortable one, more like a log cabin. We had it fully insulated (roof, floor, walls) and although it's pretty chilly in winter, once the plug-in radiator has been on for half an hour or so it's toasty, and holds the heat well. I love it - and we slept in it for a week while our bedroom was being decorated. The only thing I didn't like was not having a loo

When (if) we move to the new house we won't need the extra bedroom, so I'll have that part of it as my studio space (yay!!) and the kids can still have the other half as their play room.

Thanks, Daisy. I'm torn between using it conventionally as a study/adult space, freeing up our second reception to be a big playroom, or using it as the playroom and keeping the study inside, or using it as a bedroom for DSS, freeing up a bedroom inside.

My only worry is that our garden is terraced and the end of it, where we'd put a room, is decked, so I'm not sure how feasible the foundations will be. But I hope that's surmountable.

We chose a cabin that didn't need any proper foundations or a concrete base - it has a series of feet that are adjustable so they ground doesn't have to be properly level. I can't remember how many ours needed, it seemed like an awful lot (our cabin is 7m x 4m so fairly big).

I was just looking online to see if I could find ours and the exact one isn't on their website now (and prices seem to have gone down, grrrr!) but it wasn't dissimilar to this but with a veranda, internal wall with connecting door, extra windows, extra side door (so that both rooms have their own entrance). I seem to remember that the tolerance for variation in the ground level wasn't that great, so you would need to have a reasonably level base to start from. It did take our two lads a whole day to set up the foundation system before they could start putting the cabin together. I'm so glad I didn't let DH try to do it!

I just get the home page there although it could be because I'm on my mobile. I'll try later. It sounds great. I think we'd be looking at just one room though.

Hi

We have one of these - it's about 18 x 14 and we have it split into two rooms. The bigger of the two is used as an office and has two large desks plus book cases, filing cabinet etc and the smaller one is used as a spare room - this also has a loo and small wash basin.We had it done by a company called Homestead who were absolutely brilliant - I would strongly recommend them. They did everything - base, insulation, painting, plumbing, electrics etc. It was expensive but really worth it. We use it all the time - we have a small electric heater in each room and in the winter it's warmer than the house as it's much better insulated.
www.homesteadtimberbuildings.co.uk/
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