Buying a garden office is one of the quickest ways of adding an extra room to your house, in fact, you could have your new office installed and ready to use in a month from now.
While lead times on garden offices depend on the complexity of the design, whether you need to apply for Planning Permission and the time of year. Our research has found that the majority of garden office suppliers can start installing a building on-site within 4 to 6 weeks of the order being placed.
Bespoke garden offices tend to take longer
If you go down the bespoke design route for your garden office, you would need to allow a little longer between order and work starting on-site. Our research found that you are looking at lead times of 6 to 10 weeks when buying a bespoke garden office.
With bespoke design, you have input into each element, so you’ll have lots of design choices to make. These choices all take time and mean that there can be a few weeks between your initial contact with your chosen supplier and actually being in a position to place your firm order for your office. At the end of the day, the more decisive you are, the quicker this part of the project will be. On the flipside, though, designing a bespoke garden office is an enjoyable process so you don’t want to rush it!
The time between the placement of the order and starting work on-site tends to be longer with bespoke office designs because often key elements like the core structure and glazing need to be made to order.
If you require Planning Permission things will take longer
If you find that your garden office needs a Planning Permission application, you will need to add eight weeks to your lead time. Your garden office supplier will be able to advise you about your Planning Permission situation. In many cases they will process any application on your behalf; otherwise, they will provide you with drawings and specification details to submit it yourself – it’s really not a difficult process.
Normally you will place your order and pay a small deposit to secure a slot in the supplier’s order book, while the Planning process goes through. Once the Planning application has been approved work will start on manufacturing your office.
The time of year plays it’s part too
When you see lead time estimates such as 4 to 6 weeks, you will normally see them appended with the message ‘depending on the time of year’. As you might expect the garden office industry has a ‘peak season’ during the summer months.
Most people start thinking about buying a garden office in the Spring, and by the time they have decided on a supplier, finalised their choices and placed their order they end up having their office installed during the Summer months.
The bigger garden office suppliers have multiple installation teams, installing buildings across the country simultaneously, which means they can stick closely to their 4 to 6-week estimates during peak months.
The Summer might well be the most popular time for garden office installations; it’s not necessarily the best or only time of year to build. Because garden office buildings are largely manufactured off-site in factory conditions, they can be assembled on-site in just a few days. In addition, because of the modern foundation systems used, building a garden office is not overly affected by weather conditions. Of course, there is the odd exception to this rule, but your supplier will work to avoid any such issue.
So, explore this site further to learn more about buying a garden office, with the knowledge that you could be working in your new office in a month or so.