It's always intriguing to see before and after shots of garden offices. Here's one from Garden Retreat for a shedworker in Earlsfield, London, a 3.8m x 2.4m x 2.5m high model with black windows and doors inkeeping with our current focus on black as the colour of the year.
The space is used as a garden office but also as a storage base for the owner to store equipment related to their businesses. Access problems meant that a kindly neighbour allowed the build team to pass the sections over the boundary into the garden. And before even that happened, an old shed and based had to be cleared to make room for the new structure which is cedar clad with an inuslated metal Rolaclad roof covering.
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Saturday posts are sponsored by iHUS Projects, specialists in the design and build of granny annexes for elderly and disabled care.
3rdSpace have just produced a really lovely new booklet which showcases some of their most interesting builds and the shedworkers who work inside them. It's so nice that I'm actually filing it with my other books about sheds and garden offices. If you'd like a copy, get in touch with them via the link above or perhaps on Twitter.
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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.
Garden Affairs has just launched an excellent new video gallery on their website with lots of excellent 'how to build' videos about roofs, double doors, floors, windows, and ceilings if you're going down the self-assembly route. They are also building up their video case studies including this excellent one featuring artist Susannah Lisle and her art studio.
They are also offering 10% off the price of all their hardwood summerhouses by Scotts but you'll need to be speedy as the offer ends at the end of September.
There's a nice offer on at the moment from Booths Garden Studios - if you order a studio from them which is installed in October, they will knock £100 off each blind which goes with it. So this means that on their biggest selling 16' x 8' QCB (pictured above), this would save customers £500.
Specialist handcrafted rum producers Burning Barn suffered a major fire four years ago when the Warwickshire-based family's barn burned down. More happily, they have recently built a shepherd's hut-style garden office on a WWII US Air Force bomb trailer chassis
which they found lying around on the farm.
The main structure is ash and much of the build, which took five months, used recycled materials. The video at the bottom is an excellent look at how it was all put together and here's what they say about it:
"The most interesting part has been how
absorbing the process has been. 12 - 14 hr days and exhausting physical
labour but with tangible results has given me a new found respect for
anyone who grafts for a living. Working on the hut I found hours passing
without looking at my phone or checking emails and I finished the day
hungry and with a sense of deep satisfaction that contrasts starkly with
the feeling of having sat at a desk all day"
Writing on instagram they add: "Things we have learnt; manual labour is hard, things take 5x
longer than planned, measure twice cut once, poly filler is not a
solution, you only get one set of fingers, building stuff is very
rewarding. Respect to all those in the trade."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning
"Politics may have been stuck in the Brexit rut since Dave bought his bolthole, but there has been a transformation in the market for shepherds' huts... DC probably considered a woodburner quite the luxury in 2017 but hutters now aspire to hot tubs, ensuites, stargazer glass roofs and hand-printed wallpaper. There's also a trend for rolltop baths."
------------------------------------------------- Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.
Topical as ever, my latest shed column in the Idler magazine takes a look at the Shed of the Year competition and in particular what actually is a shed. Here's the opening section:
One of
the delights of the Shed of the Year competition is the occasional virtual squeal
of dismay on Twitter or Facebook of, “But that’s not a shed!”. When the contest
was running on television, it was tremendous fun imagining all the angry shouts
at the screen that so-and-so wasn’t a shed because it was too large or too
small or too complex or too circular or simply too not somebody’s idea of a
shed.
This is
organiser Uncle Wilco’s masterstroke. It would be wrong to say that his
competition has no rules, but he has kept them to the absolute bare minimum.
What it boils down to is this - if you think your beloved piece of architecture
is a shed, then so it is. My feeling is that most people care little about shed
semantics and are happier using the expression rather than the rather less
romantic ‘garden building’. Perhaps you could argue that the term doesn’t apply
if people are living in them permanently, or they are attached to the main
house in any way (thus making them an extension) or they’re built out of
something more permanent, such as bricks, rather than wood, but even here there
could be some disagreement – we covered a converted London Black Cab conversion
on my site Shedworking earlier this year because it just felt sheddish.
You can subscribe to the excellent Idler magazine here (let me know if you're thinking of doing so and I'll see if I can get you a deal on the subscription price).
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Sunday posts are sponsored by eDEN Garden Rooms. Stunning, bespoke high quality garden rooms, to suit your unique space and style
