If you are a competent DIY’er then its perfectly possible to build your own garden office. There are a number of ways of doing this, and which you will choose will depend on how much you want to do yourself and how much control you want over the design of the building.
Garden office kits
A handful of garden office suppliers offer their designs in kit form for you the self builder to assemble.
Whats included in these kits and the specification of the building differs from supplier to supplier.
The most common style of garden office kit is the log cabin style building of interlocking timbers, which are relatively quick and easy to build – you tend to get a large building for a relatively small budget, but this style of building is not comparable with other styles of garden office when it comes to thermal performance because they are not as well insulated and and often not even double glazed.
Other styles of garden office kit come as just the basic framework, this forms the basis for you to work off and you source the materials and finish the exterior and interior of the garden office. This is quite a good option as you get a sturdy structure designed by professionals but have the flexibility to put your own mark on the building.
The final type of garden office kit is the complete package where you buy everything from the supplier you need to build and finish a garden office including the cladding, doors & windows and interior finish.
Its worth noting that the complete kits we’ve seen don’t include the foundation system because this is very site specific, but there are a number of foundation systems that would be ideal for the self builder such as the modern plinth foundation systems.
Design your own garden office
If you want more control over the appearance, shape and finish of the building than even a kit offers you could of course design your own garden office.
The Designing section of this website will give you an idea of the different materials used in garden office design, and would be a good starting point for learning how garden offices are built.
You could also read up on timber frame design, both in its traditional format of creating walls of vertical studs and the modern systems such as Structural Insulated Panels – there are lots of resources on the internet and there are some good books often written by the Americans who widely use timber frame building systems, this will give you an idea of the actual building principles.
When it comes to actually designing your building, you can do this like a professional creating 3D models and drawings to work from by using Sketchup. There is a free version of Sketchup which is more than suitable for you to design a garden office with, and it has a simple and quick to learn interface.