A Garden Room with storage is one of our most popular designs.
The building is constructed as any other , but to the side we add an integrated storage shed.
Again, and as with everything we do, it can be built to your specifications. Typically sheds will be 1.5m wide, as deep as the building, and 2.4m high so with shelves from top to bottom you really can stack a lot away!
Most commonly it is accessed from outside and will be used to store garden tools and equipment, family bikes and bulky household items.
But not always. You may prefer to have it accessed from inside, insulated and heated so that you can store more valuable and perishable items such as business files, clothes or books.
The interior of most sheds has a ‘functional’ finish. Uninsulated walls, a concrete floor, power point and electric light, but nothing too grand. The interior can be customised if needed with shelves and cupboards, hooks and rails, until you will be amazed at how much storage space you have. Without much effort there’s a place for everything, brooms, spades and forks even a hanging bike or two!
What frequently sets us apart from our competitors is the quality of our foundations, floors and roofs.
Foundations:
Everyone knows that strong foundations are an analogy for strength and security in many things, and garden rooms are no exception!
We view each site location individually when assessing the type of foundation a building will require. Sloping ground, major tree roots, soil type and flooding potential all effect our recommendations for the best for your garden room.
For the majority of buildings we can use our standard reinforced water proofed concrete slab foundation, as described in the sketch below:
Roof structure:
Roof and ceiling design and structure is all important for a strong, maintenance free well, insulated building that will last the test of time.
Again, we have a standard flat roof structure, but occasionally there are variations we might suggest when designing your building.
Insulation is by far the most important thing for your comfortable year-round use of your garden room. Often it is not the cold of winter, but the heat of a blazing summer sun that is important to insulate against. A heater can always be turned up, but it is difficult to turn the sun down! (But please ask us about our air conditioning units).
As standard we use a high quality, 100mm rigid silver backed insulation board in the roof, but if your building is to be built in an exposed part of your garden, we may suggest we increase this level of insulation to 150mm, or add an additional layer of rock wool insulation. Additional cost is relatively small, but long-term benefit large.
Floor and wall structure:
With a solid dampproofed concrete floor built as part of the buildings foundations your garden room is built on a strong and very solid base.
To give a warm comfortable floor we employ a ‘floating floor’ system with 50mm rigid insulation boards placed directly on top of the concrete. Over this we fix specialist 18mm thick tongue and groove chip wood floorboards, and the final layer is a laminate of your choice.
Walls are built in modular form to the design of your building in our workshop in Oxfordshire and transported direct to your garden for installation.
This method improves efficiency, reduces disruption at your home, and allows us to keep our prices as low as possible.
As the walls arrive prepared the building is very quickly installed and made weather proof in its basic form.
The sketch below describes the structure of our floor and walls.
Building systems we do not use.
“You pay for what you get” is as true for garden rooms as anything else.
There are construction systems used within the industry that are well recognised and perfectly acceptable in many situations, but don’t give the best long term, low maintenance life span you would expect from a quality-built structure. Though they can reduce initial building costs quite significantly.
The systems we employ, and as described above, are used in the wider house building sector and tried and tested to last not just decades, but generations.
They may be marginally more expensive in the short term, but decidedly cheaper in the long term, ensuring your garden room is a long-term asset to your property.
Well built timber framed structures exist today that were built centuries ago in both rural farmyard settings and urban towns and cities – and that was before the use of wood treatments and modern waterproofing membranes and insulation materials!
Foundations:
Many of companies bring to site pre-built garden room floors of either wood or metal.
This floor then sits on a series of concrete pads or piles that are built into the ground, under the corners and at various points under the walls of the building.
As most buildings have a maximum overall roof height of 2.5m the floor needs to be kept at, or as close to ground level as possible to maintain acceptable internal ceiling height. Inevitably this means the floor structure is at or below ground level.
To give a long term lifespan this type of floor must not be touching the soil and be very well ventilated to prevent damage from ground moisture. Once this is lost, or if rain water finds the low point beneath the building as a natural puddling area, the base structure of the garden room is compromised.
Another likely problem of this system is movement of the concrete blocks or piles the building stands on. Over time it is quite possible that one or more move independently of the others, causing subsidence and the well known associated problems it causes.
Which is why we always use a solid concrete foundation system.
Roof structure:
A quick and relatively cheap method to roof a garden room is the Composite Roof Panel.
These panels vary in quality and thickness, but at the cheap end of the scale are made of an insulation boards sandwiched between two thin sheets of tin. This is not always the case, some panels are very good, but it is worth checking.
There are several disadvantages to these over the more traditional timber roof we use.
- All panels slope at the same angle of pitch on the inside ceiling as they do on the outside roof. This has the effect of ceiling height reducing to as low as 1.8m at the back of the room, depending on the depth of the room.
- Tin panels can not have recessed spotlights installed into them as timber roofs can. This gives options of surface mounted lights which further reduces ceiling height, or wall mounted lights which do not give the same light distribution as regularly installed ceiling lights.
The interior ceiling face of the panel will usually be white painted tin which does not give the softness of emulsion painted plastered ceilings. These tin ceilings can be lined with plasterboard or a melamine type product, but this needs a fixing batten, which again reduces ceiling height.
For these reasons we always build ‘cold roof’ insulated roofs from solid joists.
