Creating a thrifty ‘she-shed’ this summer…

This spring we have a fantastic garden project we are involved in.  Together with Waltons we have been creating a garden room with a thrifty twist. We have wanted a room, shed or summer house in the garden ever since we moved in the house nearly 8 years ago, so this is a project we couldn’t wait to get started on.

Garden room as shown on the Waltons website.

Here is the space in the garden before.  There wasn’t much there, just some bushes, a really ugly tree (which we took down) and the compost bin. It was a dead area really, and it had been earmarked for a wooden structure of some kind in the future.

We levelled the area, building it up with gravel, so that it had a good base to begin with.  Our ground is quite boggy, and doesn’t drain well at all, so we decided to invest in a few bags of pea gravel to help keep the garden room base dry.

The 12 x 8 contemporary garden room (£1249.99) was delivered, ready to build.  It’s strange how you can never quite envisage the size of something, even though we measured it out.  I was a little shocked when I saw all of the parts being delivered, and I worried it wouldn’t fit.  It did though…phew! We opted for Waltons home installation service, costing £379.99 for this size room. They completely built it all for us, taking all of the hassle out of it.  It took two of the professional fitters around three hours to build. As I would have had to do this part myself, it worked out perfectly and stress free most importantly.

You can see the wood has had a very light treatment so it needed painting as soon as possible to get it water tight and so the wood wasn’t spoilt by the spring showers we were expecting. The glazing in the windows is actually covered in a green sticky plastic sheeting, which made painting the doors so much easier.  The bi-fold doors were one of the features I was most excited about, and I was really impressed with the fact there was catches and bolts making it secure, as well as shatterproof styrene glazing. I will show you this in more detail when I do the big reveal.

There was also locks to the main door, including the store-room door you can see on the right hand side.  I think that room we may use for the lawn mower, and maybe some extra seating for outside.  The door furniture was all sorted by the fitters, and we were given a couple of sets of keys. The summer-house comes with a 10 year anti rot guarantee and 12 mm tongue & groove walls, roof and floor.

So I thought I would share my plans for the room, and then next week reveal the garden room completed. I’m so excited to show it to you, as it looks amazing!

My parents have been amazing, and we’ve spent hours painting the room inside and out, infact the floor has just had another coat of Cuprinol paint this morning.

I wanted to make it into a room for all of us to enjoy in the summer but also I wanted it to be room that I can use for work in the summer.  Especially for photography, as I think the light will be great for that.  I’m going to keep the project under wraps until next week, but wanted to give you all a feel for how the room will look.  I’m keen for the room to have a retro feel, and use one of the hot colours for spring summer 2016 in interiors, orange.   It’s a colour I haven’t used before in my home, I thought the warmth and spice of it would work well.

I’ve just spotted this interesting review of my Summer house on What Shed?, and its also ranked #2 in their Top 20 Wooden Summer houses list in the UK, cool huh.

Can’t wait to reveal all!