Small garden offices in new issue of Idler

In the first issue of the Idler magazine this year I use my regular column on microarchitecture to focus on small garden offices, both historical and present day (including an intriguing telephone box-sized idea that didn't really take off). For those readers who also like their snooker, I rigorously examine the ways other people can put you off your game. More at the Idler where you can also subscribe (highly recommended) and read a great article by fellow contributor Graham Burnett about fun with pallets.

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How to power your shed

This is a guest post from shedworker Stephen Waddington, MD at Speed Communications.

If you're going to spend any length of time working in your shed you'll need to kit it out with mains power and Internet access. Alternative energy systems are slowly becoming sufficiently gutsy to be worth considering particularly if your shed is remote from a mains electricity supply.

We're currently testing a solar lighting system in a remote building. It uses a solar cell to charge a car battery that is used to power 12V fluorescent spot lights. Graham Burnett has used gone further and used a series of solar cells to charge a 12V battery that uses an inverter to power his laptop.

The alternative is running mains power to your shed. This is a job for a qualified electrician as it will almost certainly require creating a separate circuit and laying armoured cable.

We've wired up the shed office and a workshop and each case have reduced costs by agreeing with the electrician upfront that we'd take on the grunt work of laying and fixing the cable.

Internet access is much more straightforward.

Wireless access may be sufficient if the distance between your shed and house is unobstructed and no further than 30 to 50m. It's worth experimenting with the location of you access point as this is a low cost solution. But even though my shed office is only 10m from the house wireless wouldn't work because the walls are 2m thick and absorb the signal.

When we renovated our house during the summer we ran armoured Ethernet cable between the house and the shed office. At £3 per metre this is an expensive solution necessitated by running the cables in a channel across a yard. But it is rock solid reliable.

Shedworking reader Shark Trager has another solution. He's running the internet to his shed office over the mains using Devolo Homeplug.

Image courtesy Powershed, "The first fully self-contained, homeowner-friendly, portable solar photovoltaic system!"
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Making it easier.

Solar powered shed

We've mentioned Graham Burnett's selfbuild before and knowing how keen he is on environmentally friendly solutions we were delighted to hear from him that he is now running his garden office using solar power (enough for lighting and laptop though not yet heating). Graham writes:

"One of the things that put me off getting it together with own system was nervousness about messing it up, I found most of the books on the subject quite intimidating and confusing, but in the end I just decided to go for it and it wasn’t that complicated at all."

You can read more about it at his Humble Designs blog where he shares lots more photos of how he put it all together - it's pictured above with the PV panels clearly visible - as well as details of his new shingle roof.
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Yet even more snowy garden offices

I suspect this will be the last installment of snowy shedworking situations but if we haven't featured you yet, please do send your photos in. First in line is Graham Burnett's garden office (pictured above - for more on the build which we followed on Shedworking, click here). Below is Garden Haze's 'Modern Igloo'.Here is Josie from Fraser & Parsley's garden office.And finally, Judith Morgan's brand new garden office.
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Wednesday posts are sponsored by The Garden Room Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here.

The Bothy/Humble Designs: build update

Two of Shedworking's current favourite builds are at very different stages of construction. Graham Burnett has pretty much finished his Humble Design (above) and is now at the point of making it all look homely. Meanwhile the Cedral Weather-board siding that will be used to finish the outside of John Ketch's Bothy is now up. Do nip along and take a look at both of the projects.

Humble Designs: up and posting

Graham Burnett who has been self-building his ecofriendly garden office is pretty much there now (see here for details). He has just made his first post from the office - pictured above - despite a poor wi-fi signal and has already heard his first fox. Do nip along to his site and read the whole story, especially if you're thinking of building your own shedworking atmosphere yourself.
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Wednesday's posts are sponsored by The Garden Room Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here.

Humble Designs

While the market for off the peg garden offices seems as strong as ever, lots of people have been contacting Shedworking recently with details of their plans to self-build their garden office (such as One Grand Designs), a task for which I have nothing but admiration since I would never attempt this myself. The latest I've seen is Humble Designs which describes itself as:

"A celebration of DIY reskilliing, handbuilt shelters, low impact structures, shed architecture and tiny houses, and a riposte to the disempowering idea that self-build projects need to be expensive or 'Grand'!"

Run by permaculture expert Graham Burnett, pictured above is his first design sketch for his new garden office. The design highlights another strong trend towards ecofriendliness - it features recycled windows, a rainwater harvesting system, photovoltaic panel to power a laptop, and waterbutt to feed the small garden pond.

Unsurprisingly, Graham - who works with adults with learning disabilities as well as running his small self-publishing and permaculture teaching and design business Spiralseed - was taken by the GardenARK project featured earlier today which he saw at this year's Grand Designs Live show, but it has actually inspired him to have a go himself. Read more at his site which also has a nice account of why he has decided to become a shedworker. This is a site we'll be watching closely as his vision develops.

Thanks to Martin Doyle for the alert