Basket

A versatile garden room for gaming… built during lockdown.

Garden rooms are an increasingly popular way to utilise our self-build frame kit; they can provide great option as a home-office space, or just an extra room to escape to for a change of scenery.

We caught up with Rachel, who made her Harrogate Huts frame into a versatile garden room, that looks great and is well used by her whole family…

Garden Office Frame
Garden Room Frame

Harrogate Huts:
How was your experience of self-building your Garden room?

Rachel:
Generally, it was very easy… the frame was really comprehensive to put together, which saved us a lot of time, getting things under way.

Garden office - OSB materials
Garden Office - External membrane
Garden Room - External Cladding

HH:
What was your plan when setting out to build your hut?

Rachel:
We set out to build our hut as a garden office – as opposed to a shepherd hut – so we made the decision to use vertical lengths of cedar for our external cladding. This is also more in keeping with the exterior of our house.

Garden Room Interior
Garden Office Building

HH:
What were the biggest challenges in your project?

Rachel:
The overall project would have been easier if we hadn’t been in lockdown, which made it a little tricky to source some of the materials we needed along the way!

My husband and I did the majority of the work as a team of two, which was no problem – though we did need to lift our frame after cladding it; which isn’t typical, though it was necessary to build our hut in the space at the end of our garden.

HH:
How do you and your family use your garden room / shepherds hut?

Rachel:
It is used just about every day! We initially planned it as a gaming room for our boys, and they’ve had a lot of use out of it. We also use it for exercise, and it has also been used as an office space for working from home. It’s a really versatile space!

Garden Office - Self Build