A summerhouse or log cabin is the perfect year-round garden building that can have multiple uses. This additional space can be used as a home gym, a place for band practice, a relaxation room, an entertainment room or even as a home office. With the right kind of building materials and proper installation, you can create an outdoor space that stays dry and secure all year round.

Getting Power to Your Garden Office

It is relatively easy to have electricity installed in your garden summerhouse. If you are a do-it-yourself type of person, you can easily accomplish this task on your own by reading a few good how-to books about installing electricity to outdoor buildings. However, it is understandable that many people do not wish to tinker around with electricity. When faced with issues like this, you should always enlist the help from a licensed professional electrician.

Advantages of a Garden Office

Having a garden office has numerous advantages to people who work from home. Being able to work anywhere else outside of the home for any number of hours can have a very positive impact on your business because it gives you a much-needed break from the everyday home life.

Provides a Distraction-Free Workspace

A log cabin office will help turn your home business into a more functional endeavor by providing you with a private space that is outside and away from your home. Since it is its own building, you can get relief from common distractions in the house. Rather than having customers walk through your house to visit your home office, it would seem a lot more professional to visitors if you had a separate building for your office.

The flexibility of having a summerhouse that can be used as a home office makes it easy to be able to pop into the office whenever you feel like it. Whether it be early mornings, late evenings or in the wee hours before dawn, a garden office can provide you with a place to go outside of the home where you don’t have to worry about any distractions. It is also great to have your own space so that you don’t interrupt anyone else’s activities in the home. For example, if someone in your home starts playing on their drums but is interrupted by you because would like them to stop making so much noise, having your own private place to retreat to can be an invaluable asset that benefits everyone in your home.

Add to the Aesthetic Value of Your Garden Office

• Add a stone pathway leading to your home office.
• Plant flowers and bushes around the exterior of the building.
• Add solar lights to your walkway.
• Put up a business name plate on your building.

Barn Design

Over at Decorated Shed we offer energy efficient garden buildings designed to your specification which can include under-floor heating, traditional heating or a wood burning stove. Our buildings are all green built and we greatly take in to consideration carbon offset and the effects certain factors can have on the environment.

Our holiday home annexes are increasingly popular at the moment with summer upon us. They are built with exactly the same insulation and materials as our garden buildings in the UK. With holiday homes abroad, air conditioning and even cold weather needs to be taken into consideration.

Our Barn design which has a ground floor with a mezzanine second level has been our most popular holiday home design, but as we design to your specification we can create whatever holiday home you have in mind as long as there is space and it meets planning permission needs. The Barn design is the most popular for granny annexes here in the UK – but because we design to your specific requirements we create different buildings for each client.

Decorated Shed will perform a site surveys, where ever you holiday home destination may be to acquire as much information about the area and environment as possible. Your Decorated Shed will be built to fit in and match the surroundings whatever they may be!
So if you are looking for an modern, contemporary and cost effective holiday home in this country or abroad, please do not hesitate to contact us for more information. Thanks!

Log cabin

With more and more people working longer hours and spending hours on the bus, train or in the car computing to and from work our time for leisure activities is rapidly decreasing. Even when you get home from a hard day’s work the last thing you want to do is get back in the car to go to a gym to work out. Doing activities outdoors closer to home are unfortunately heavily weather dependent and unfortunately in the UK the chances of you being enticed outdoors by the weather are pretty slim!

A simple solution for those of you wanting to get fit but struggle to find the time to go to the gym is to bring the gym to you instead. Why not consider using a summerhouse or log cabin at the bottom of your garden to workout in. Whether you are looking for a yoga room, a gym or simply a room to do aerobic workouts a log cabin can offer the perfect retreat that is literally on your doorstep.

Not only will you save time, you can work out to the music of your choice as well as never having to wait for a piece of equipment to become available. Most people who take a plunge and build their own garden gym find that they work out more often and feel far less pressured than if they were working out in a busy gym environment.

Home gym

When you think of how much gym membership costs each month you’ll more than likely end up financially better off in the long run!

If you are considering building a gym in your garden do spend time thinking about what equipment you will need to have space for as well as how much of your garden you can comfortably allocate to a timber building. For activities such as yoga or Pilates you need very little space and a small summerhouse or log cabin will sufficiently give you all the room you require. Do remember if you are planning to put a treadmill or cross trainer into your new garden building make sure that you allow plenty of additional headroom so that you can comfortably work out on raised pieces of equipment.

For a wide range of garden buildings including summerhouses, log cabins and workshops visit Jacks Garden Store.

Good luck

Gardener Jack!

Decorated Shed garden offices have phenomenal levels of insulation and energy efficiency, built with premium materials from sustainably-managed sources. However, perhaps the best way to demonstrate the eco-benefits of working from home is on the subject of travel.

Working from home, either in a garden office or home-based studio, means that you don’t need to travel to work.

Looking at the travel aspect, checking out the environmental impact of a hypothetical journey to and from work over the course of a year shows just how eco-friendly working from home can be.

Imagine you drive to and from work every day, working a typical five day week. You drive a relatively average car with carbon dioxide emissions of 150g/km, and your daily round trip is twenty miles. You work forty eight weeks a year.

Using these figures, which could account for millions of UK employees, you would emit the following amounts of CO2:

• 24kg over a week
• 96kg over a month
• 1056kg (more than a tonne) over a year

That’s on personal work travel alone, assuming that you don’t drive further, your car isn’t a gas-guzzler and that you don’t do any other forms of business trips throughout the year. Also, this example only takes CO2 into account, and doesn’t reference the many other harmful emissions that car travel produces.

Therefore cutting out this level of pollution by working from home will help you dramatically reduce your carbon footprint.

In order to enjoy your summerhouse throughout the whole year adding electricity is essential. Read through my guide on how to add electricity as well as some other home comforts which will enable you to enjoy endless hours in your new home from home.

Wessex Summerhouse

Electricity
You need to ensure that the connecting wiring from your home to your garden building is protected by an armoured cable. You can decide whether this cable is ran above ground and clearly marked or buried in a trench.  The latter is the safer but unfortunately more labour intensive and time consuming option.
Do get help from a qualified electrician who will run a separate supply cable from your consumer unit to your new summerhouse.

Now for the technical part…… Inside you are required to have a separate lighting and power socket ring both of which need to be protected by RCD’s. Get a qualified electrician who is NICEIC approved to put the master switches just inside of your buildings doorway so you can turn everything off when you exit the summerhouse. An NICEIC approved electrician will issue certificates for all work they have carried out in accordance with the national standard BS 7671.

The type of lighting you use in your summerhouse is completely dependent on how you intend to use the room. Florescent tube lights give even light which is great for a home gym or studio. If you are planning to spend time working at a desk I would recommend adding spot lighting around your work area.

Telecoms
If you are looking to use your summer house as an office or simply planning to spend a great deal of time in it is worth getting a telephone point added. This can be done either by a local telecom engineer installing telephone or internet connections into your garden building or alternatively you can simply purchase an extension kit yourself.  You can thread a piece of cork onto a fishing line and use water pressure to push it through a hosepipe. Next tie the end of the fishing line to the telephone cable and pull it through. This method allows you to protect the line.

Heating
If your summerhouse does not have adequate heating installed, come the winter months this room will become redundant and unusable. Small ceramic or portable electrical heaters are a great cost effective way of heating your summerhouse if it is used as an occasional hobby room but if its purpose is as a home office, a more permanent heating system will be required. One or two oil filled radiators are a great option fitted along with a thermostat and timer.
Double or triple glazed windows will also help to keep the heat in and insulate your garden building.

Visit Jacks Garden Store for a great range of summerhouses. Here you will also find a fantastic range of alternative timber garden buildings.

Good Luck!

Gardener Jack