A couple saved £23,000 by building a garden office shed from scratch, using recycled materials they’d saved from a skip.
Graham Anderson, 35, and his wife, Rachel, 34, were working from their spare bedroom – but decided they needed more space with their two children running around.
‘We realised we had a growing family of two infant boys – a one-year-old and a four-year-old – and we were working from home in one bedroom. So wanted to free up at that bedroom and have other space.’ said Graham.
The couple – who are both architects – set about designing and transforming an unused patch of land at the bottom of their garden to use as a workspace.
‘It’s a completely new build from scratch’ said Graham, an architectural technologist, from Eastleigh, Hampshire, ‘We just worked with the amount of garden we wanted to use and we wanted it to also be a sunroom as well.’
Graham, alongside his father-in-law, also called Graham, then spent a year constructing and building their new hub.
The two Grahams spent their weekends putting together the shed for over a year. Graham Anderson said said: ‘The main interesting component is that we used a lot of recycled materials to be as economical as possible.’
They made an effort to source their materials from free online ads.
‘It was quite arduous – spending a lot of time collecting stuff, keeping an eye out for the right types of insulation, working with unknown quantities and we just managed to make it work without much wastage really.’ said Graham.
They found the insulation for the roof in a skip using Gumtree, the front window they got from an unwanted window re-seller, and the timber was reclaimed with help from the Southampton Wood Recycling Project.
‘It’s a low energy building as there are lots of layers of membranes which are all taped up and super well-insulated so it’s relatively warm in the winter.’ Graham said
Next to the office, they designed and built a shaded patio area with a bench for social functions.
Their frugal decision making meant they were able to build their summer cabin for just £12k in total – £23k less than the £35k Graham estimates the build would have cost them had they got someone to do it for them.
‘Building the garden office as a self-build project was greatly satisfying but also financially essential, we would not have been able to afford to do it otherwise.’ said Graham ‘It’s lucky we had the knowledge and skills to get hands on make it a reality’.
Graham and Rachel now use the space at least three times a week to work from home. Their children also like to use the space to play with their lego.
‘Because we’re both architects we didn’t want to just buy an old shed so we were always going to design it ourselves and save as much money as possible.’
Graham entered his shed into the Cuprinol Shed of the Year 2024 competition for a ‘bit of fun’ but says it’s a ‘nice feeling’ to be shortlisted in the ‘Cabin/Summerhouse’ category.
‘I’m not thinking too far ahead about winning the whole thing though.’ He said.
You can vote for Graham’s build here.
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