Nuts and bolts: fitting out your garden office

Continuing our regularly irregular look at various bits and bobs of shedworking, today we're looking at the importance of garden office interior decor. While more and more people are embracing the shedworking lifestyle and using it to work from to set up their own businesses, staring at the same four walls day in day out can be rather boring so make sure you spruce the area up, just as you would do with your house.

How you decorate the interior is up to you (and we'd strongly recommend the book Shed Chic by Sally Coulthard as inspiration), but one possibility is to bring the greenery indoors. So consider co-ordinating your space with the outside environment, perhaps painting it green and bringing the vegetation inside with colourful plant pots and flowers. We've also seen nice examples of garden offices which have fairly straightforward traditional office furniture, but are then finished off with garden benches, patio chairs and indeed hammocks to add a bit of variety.

Obviously there are lots of places to buy these things but one that we like the look of is Trueshopping. Pictured above is an eDEN Garden Room which very much incorporates the horticultural ethic in its build. If you've got any decorating tips, please do leave a comment.

Nuts and bolts: bamboo flooring

We continue our irregular Nuts and Bolts column with a look at flooring, in particular bamboo flooring (the UK BambooFlooring Company is a good place to find more details). What's the appeal? Well it's strong and durable, but one of bamboo flooring's chief attractions is that it claims to be environmentally friendly. This post on Treehugger by Lloyd Alter is worth looking at, pointing out that it can be green but that the subject is quite complicated. See also this post on Core 77 on the same issue. It's certainly becoming popular in garden offices: pictured here is the Flexa Studio designed by Casper Mork-Ulnes who is the creative director of Modern Cabana. It has all kinds of tip top green elements such as recycled denim insulation, and features bamboo flooring. Of course if you really like bamboo, you could actually grow it into a garden office yourself...

Nuts and Bolts: cable ties

We're starting one of our new regularly irregular columns today, Nuts and Bolts - each week-ish we'll be looking at simple ways to improve the running of your garden office, starting today with cable ties. Chances are that while your shedlike atmosphere is generally tidy, there is a hideous tangle of ugly (and arguably slightly dangerous) cables in the background. One solution is cable ties. They're cheap (you can get 50 for less than a tenner), small enough to be easily stored, and easy to use. And the result is everything is a lot neater. Moreover, cables that are left kinked or bent degrade over time and in a worst case scenario, they can even spark or cause damage to the garden office. You can buy cable ties easily at places like Screwfix, the people who brought us the news that there are more sheds than households in the UK.
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