Garden Room for Small Business

[KillTheTurkey]

I am expanding my teaching business and will be running it from a garden office (not yet built).

A builder has quoted c.12K to build from scratch but I want a nice finish with bifold doors so am prepared to pay more. What I don’t want is a glorified shed, it has to be warm and insulated.

Has anyone built a garden office from scratch? Any top tips?

Bumping as I am interested too. Want a garden room so we can have a warm and inviting gym for health reasons.

Not exactly the same but we are having a garden room built as an extension to our house. It’s probably a bit bigger than what your are planning but the final cost looks about £70k.
so what you are talking about sounds like a bargain. I know with garden offices you can sort of buy them ready made which surely brings costs down. For a bespoke build £12k sounds impossibly cheap to me but it depends what it’s made of.

@ClearinguptheclutterI'm worried that we’re going too cheap. My preference is actually for a pre-build which our builder can then ‘make nice’.

@Advocodo Similar - it’s going to be a music room 🎶

My neighbour got one from Olympian garden rooms in Cheshire. They have a decent website with transparent pricing if you want a reference point. Hers is quite nice and she had it insulated so suitable for year round. She had cedar cladding for the roof as our gardens are very small and we didn’t want to be looking out at a horrible roof.

DH and I built ours (progress photos attached.) There are plans you can buy from e.g. Etsy which are pretty good if you’re not confident about self-design from scratch. It’s not difficult, exactly, if you’re reasonably handy and know your way around power tools. You can do a lot single-handedly but there are several aspects you’ll probably want someone to give you a hand with, and other bits you’ll definitely need them for (getting the door and windows in was definitely a two-person job, as was the roof cladding.

Ours is incredibly well-insulated: one or the other of us uses it as a home office most days and over the winter it’s only needed the electric radiator on a couple of hours a day. DH is from the US (a part which gets very cold in winter) and familiar with wooden-frame construction for houses, which he incorporated into the office, so when looking at plans I’d pay attention to what the frame dimensions are able to accommodate insulation wise, and do plenty of research into insulation types.

Also to note, there are dimensions and roof / gable heights which fall into permitted development and won’t require planning permission, so make sure to check guidance and on your LA’s planning portal for these.

Thanks everyone.

Builder has offered to do it under permitted development. We won’t do any ourselves, no way but very impressed @ComtesseDeSpair

We insulated an old shed with very thick Kingspan board and plywood on top. It’s amazing how well it works tbh.

So I can see how the £12k figures is possible.

We’ve just had a brick outbuilding built (about 8m x 3.5m) for an office and gym, and it was about £80k total including bifolds
(possibly a bit extra because we had to have insanely deep foundations 🙄)

Ah, sorry, when you said “from scratch” I thought you might be wanting to do it yourself :) Other things to think about which your builder may not: you’ll need armoured cable buried at quite significant depth to get the electricity supply out there, and it’s a good idea to have an independent consumer unit and circuit breaker installed. Pick an electrician who’s experienced in doing this: those who are more familiar with just internal house electrics may not know exactly what’s required for sign-off (this was the most challenging part for us.) Depending on the distance from your house, your home WiFi might not have a strong enough signal to get good connectivity in the office, if so an outdoor rated Ethernet cable would also need to go underground, and depending on your home set-up, may need a bit of tinkering.

I have a purpose built garden room with a flyover and herringbone brick patio for my hot tub my dh built me for my sewing and crafting room. It's fully insulated with heating and Aircon bifold doors etc etc. My son has a company DH works for that builds garden rooms and the materials were close to 10k it would have cost about 25k if Id had to pay for it. The electrics did cost a fair chunk of that as it has a separate fuse box to the house. It's basically another room and wS worth every penny. We've just had the house valued and it's added between 30 and 40k to the price. We have an open plan L shape lounge kitchen diner so this gives us a second living room

I built our one from scratch 3 years ago for a shade over £10k. 3 x 5 meters and high spec with 100mm PIR, cedar cladding to front, bifold doors, smart lighting, composite decking and all the expected such as power, internet etc. Took me 4 months on my own. Electrics were the only thing I didn’t do secondary to needing regs, so sparkies did that. There are a few really detailed instructional videos online but you say you aren’t interested in doing yourself, so depending on size and spec 12k sounds like a bargain from the builder.

I also think £12K sounds like a bargain, so do get a firm quote from your builder beforehand, including the materials specced, research the materials, and make sure you’re happy with it all. Particularly cladding and insulation - that shit gets spendy for the really good stuff and you don’t want basic stuff installed if this is going to be a usable space with minimal ongoing maintenance, heating and cooling costs. We spent a bit over £4K all in (though I think smaller in size than what you’re planning, and without bifolds, and before material prices really rocketed) for the self-build and most of that was high grade insulation, cladding, and the electrics.

If you are using it for business purposes it could well require planning permission regardless of size.

Looks amazing! Is it just used as a home office? What are the measurements please?

It’s 3.7m by 2.6m. We were constrained in width by the giant century-old tree in the corner we didn’t want to fell, so it’s much smaller than permitted development but fine for our needs - yes, just a home office space, not for clients or teaching. It has a computer desk under the main front window, and a workbench to the right of the door for crafting: next to that in the back corner is DH’s enormous pro 3D printer. We built in shelving and drawers along the back wall.