DIY Solo Garden office build: video series

If you are thinking of building your own garden office, then YouTube is a great place to take a look at what other people are doing/have done. We've covered a lot of these builds on Shedworking over the years, but this series by Do It Yourself Dave is one of the most detailed. At the moment he is up to his 12th installment, putting in the doors and windows, but it's well worth going back to the first one to see how it all began. One of the additional beauties of these videos is that they are short - you could watch all of them during a coffee break. He is also on instagram.

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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

Ultimate Space Company: How to lease a garden office

The Hove and Bath-based Ultimate Space Company offer this rather attractive and compact hexagonal garden office pod, coming in at 2.1m x 1.85m x 2.5m, with a circular roof light and full-length double-glazed door and window.

It's fully insulated (Soundhush acoustic panels and Kingspan Quadcore wall panels), claims to need no ongoing maintenance (it's made of aluminium, glass and steel), and arrives ready to go with an adjustable desk and shelving, LED lights, plus a wifi router and fuse board. There's a choice of five colours for the internal panels so you can go all the same colour or mix and match - the panels have a simple interchangeable hanging system. The solid steel chassis sits on six large adjustable feet.

What's particularly interesting is that they are also targeting employers as well as employees, emphasising that shedworking is "The most cost effective, tax efficient and sustainable benefit for every business to attract and maintain staff." While you can buy them outright, they also offer a range of lease options starting from £319 + vat per month (plus £750 initial installation cost).

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Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master: garden offices and studios to fit any size garden. Top quality contemporary or traditional buildings.

John Masefield: shedworker

Probably best known today for his marvellous Christmassy children's story The Box of Delights, the former Poet Laureate John Masefield (1878- 1967) was also a shedworker. No images of the garden office in which he worked at his home in Oxford exist and very few mentions are made of it anywhere. 

One person who does remember it well was the poet and memoirist Robert Graves. Masefield rented it to him to write in the 1920s and this is how Graves remembers it in probably his autobiography, Goodbye To All That:

He wrote in a hut in his garden, surrounded by tall gorse-bushes, and only appeared at meal-times. 

Graves mentioned it again in his memorial address for Masefield, a keen fan of the sea and all that sailed on it, in which he also pointed out that the garden office was not used entirely for writing...:

“I used to trudge up from my cottage and pass his garden work-shed half-hidden among gorse trees. Though assumed by his energetic Ulster wife to be working hard on Right Royal, for the family’s support, he was, as often as not, idly engrossed in a favourite fo’c’sle occupation: carving and rigging model sailing ships”. 

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Wednesday’s posts are sponsored by Norwegian Log Buildings  - Log cabins and garden buildings for a better quality of life. Click here for more details.

 

Entries open for Shed of the Year 2023

It's that time of the year already, folks. You can now enter your shedlike structure into the annual Shed of the Year competition, once again sponsored by Cuprinol. Click the link for full details, but essentially anybody can take part. Key points to remember:

- submit a minimum of six images of your build, plus some details about its origins, price, etc (entries without images won't be eligible for the main prizes)

- only resident in the UK and Ireland are eligible to win the official Shed of the Year title and prizes ( £1,000 in cash and £100 of Cuprinol products), but the title of 'International Shed of the Year' is up for grabs for those living elsewhere on the planet

- an official judging panel will whittle down all the entries to a shortlist of sheds on which the public will vote to find the category winners. Judges then select the overall winner of Shed of the Year 2023 from these results

Good luck!

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Malvern Garden Buildings offer a premium collection of garden buildings, displayed at 11 UK showsites.

Merry Christmas to all our readers

“Yo ho, my boys,” said Fezziwig. “No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer. Let’s have the shutters up,” cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, “before a man can say Jack Robinson.”

Shutters open again on January 3.

Greg Jenner's garden office soundproofing tips

Historian and broadcaster Greg Jenner has been hard at work recently soundproofing his garden office. He's very kindly written an excellent thread about it on Twitter, complete with images, for anybody considering going down this route, particularly those who are podcasters. Greg's top tip:

Soundproofing is mostly about three things: 

1) adding dense mass (acoustic plasterboard) 

2) isolating internal walls from ext. walls, so sound energy dissipates in the between space - you wanna stop ‘Drum Effect’ (hence metal clips on the rafters) 

3) sealing all air gaps

THREAD 🧵

Since covid, I’ve been 100% broadcasting from my timber garden studio. It was great to keep working during lockdown, but flimsy timber buildings are SO NOISY when it rains/windy/car alarms/lawnmowers etc

It was stressing me out, so I decided to soundproof it pic.twitter.com/Shm3s5hIT9

— Greg Jenner (@greg_jenner) December 22, 2022

 Strong recommend.  

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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

Christmas shed decorations

A few inspirational garden shed Christmas decoration ideas as we hurtle towards the 25th. Here's Neil's yuletided hut from Arctic Cabins. "We absolutely love seeing how our wonderful owners decorate their grill huts ready for Xmas," say the specialist BBQ cabin supplier, "and Neil hasn't disappointed! He's all prepped & ready to go...how inviting does it look!"

Every year, shedworker Joanne Harris provides a daily stream of excellent #shedvent tweets. This year's has inspired Lynne Nicholson to share her homemade Christmas shed, complete with Christmas lights and cotton wool ball snow, in an old flour caddy.

And finally here's Laura's Allotment Christmas shed ornament on her tree. 

If you've Christmassed up your garden office or studio, we'd love to feature you on Shedworking so please get in touch.

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Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master: garden offices and studios to fit any size garden. Top quality contemporary or traditional buildings.