The Concept

Me and my partner live in an ex-council maisonette on the outskirts of Bristol. It's a fairly small space, and we're cursed with multiple hobbies (mainly to do with bicycles, although sewing, music and joinery also get a look-in), but we're also blessed with a decent-sized garden.

We both have a long-term ambition to sidestep an increasingly ludicrous property market by building our own house. So far, opportunities to do so have been thin on the ground, but in the meantime we're trying to learn the basic skills you need to construct a functional dwelling.

Our garden joins on to the site of a former electricity substation. The electrical bits were long gone by the time we moved in, leaving just a patch of concrete with some rubbish scattered over it, and a couple of alarmingly large trees growing on it. At the suggestion of my folks, we tracked down the current owners (an electricity company, funnily enough) via the Land Registry, and surprisingly they agreed to sell it to us. Fast forward a couple of years and we were the proud owners of a concrete slab.

The plan is to use this base to construct a decent-sized garden room, which will give us some space to dabble with hobbies, fix bikes and act as the spare room that we don't currently have.

Do an online search for "garden room" and you'll be bombarded with images like this:

Yes, there are lots of ready made garden rooms out there, most of which feature variations on pine cladding and lots of glazing.The starter price for these seems to be around £10,000.

There's also the DIY option, which involves buying the biggest, fanciest shed that your local DIY megabunker sells, then hopping it up with insulation, lining and electricity.

For this project we decided to steer clear of both of these and build our own design from scratch. There are a few reasons for this. We had quite a specific idea of size and build, and we were also constrained on maximum height by planning regulations (2.5 metres if it's within 2 metres of a boundary). We wanted it to be well-insulated enough to be comfortable to work in over winter. And we also wanted it to be possible to dismantle and remove it if we move house. Not a tall order at all, then.

We started by picking a few people's brains on construction techniques and materials. Jackson from local social enterprise Ecomotive kindly met up with us and discuss their new concept of Snug Homes. These are small, demountable modular houses which are constructed to a very high standard. It's a good concept but they're too tall to be classed as permitted development, their footprint is actually smaller than our plot, and budget-wise they're nearer to a prefab garden room than a souped-up shed, so a Snug Home didn't fit the bill for us.

We also chatted to our friend Colesy who built his own house as part of the Yard development in St Werburghs. We picked up a number of good tips from him, including his suggestion to use sanded and varnished OSB (Sterling board) for the floor, which he said would give it "pop-up art gallery" feel.

We created a quick mock-up in Sketchup to get a feel for how it would look. Something like this:



 (Note how Sketchup nerds have created a ready-made model of a fatbike. This bodes well.)

The plans for the building were drawn up by Celia. These didn't change very much, except for the addition of noggings between the joists to stiffen up the structure and prevent it skewing under load.


Basically, we were building a box. But everyone's got to start somewhere, right?