Studio build - Part 1
With home working becoming the norm over the pandemic, this blog post series explores the highs and lows I went through when designing and building my own garden studio.
Building my own studio was never part of the plan. What I intended to build was a garden shed. Soon after moving into my house in 2017 I cleared the garden of bamboo bushes, sky high weeds and a couple of tired old sheds which took no persuading to come down – now I thought, I’m ready to start planning my shed.
Being a born procrastinator it took another couple of years to get around to starting it and then I came across a book by Joel Bird called, The Book of Shed. It featured man cave after man cave and made me think, am I thinking a bit small for my humble shed?
Once the pandemic hit and I was forced to work from my spare bedroom it made me rethink my idea of the kind of shed I needed. Over the next 4 blog posts I aim to walk you through how my plan for a humble shed evolved into a shed-come graphic design studio!
Early ideas
I started to dream. Sensing the pandemic was going to last for a while I began sketching up concepts for my ideal home studio/garden shed. I wrote lists of my wants and needs – what did I want from a studio? It needed to be a space filled with natural light, home comforts, warm and dry and a space which allowed me to pursue hobbies like sign painting without the fear of getting paint on the carpets!
With my ideas all down on paper and the decision made, the idea of building my own office space was a pretty exciting step. Although having these ideas were all well and good, I lacked the knowledge to know where to begin. It was pretty frustrating so I called my dad and told him my plan.
Refinement
Luckily for me, my dad is a pretty handy guy to know, having worked in carpentry and mechanics - he’s very practical. So before meeting up I had a very good idea of what I wanted and had sketched out the front, side and back of my build and knew exactly what I wanted to achieve. Being a designer I actually gave myself a brief! It listed all of the features I wanted, worked on the scale and proportions of every last detail I could think of - from internal ceiling height and internal footprint to the roof and water drainage. I spent a lot of time thinking about how the structure would fill the space in the garden, after all, I didn’t want it to be an eyesore and not fit in with the rest of the garden!
Once I spoke at length with my dad about my ideas suddenly the reality of budget and material costs became real. Immediately I had to scale back some of my ideas – the floor to ceiling Instagramable sliding glass doors would have to wait for another time!
All the way through I tried to be honest with myself with regards to my budget and what I really needed – the space first and foremost needed to be practical and comfortable enough to work from. My only non-negotiable was that it had to be a bright and open space for the studio side – the shed should be as traditional as possible. Anything else was nice to have.
Budget
Estimating the cost of the build was challenging. Where possible I looked around Gumtree and Facebook for off cuts and over orders from other people’s finished builds in my local area – this is where I found a lot of the insulation and also the door to the studio.
Luckily for me, labour was free courtesy of my dad so that helped free up an untold amount of money. It also doubled up as free tuition – I’ve lost count of the amount of new practical skills I have picked up since working alongside my dad on these weekends together.
Build
Now the initial planning was done, it was time to move on to start the build. It’s crazy thinking back now, but this all happened just as we were coming out of the first lockdown, so not only was I able to meet up with my dad in person, it was actually the first time I had seen him in person in months! It felt awkward if I’m honest, cause we still had to keep 2 metres apart!
Having the first lot of materials delivered really felt like a moment for me. It was close to the feeling I get once I get a design back from the printer. For so long it’s been something that has lived in my head and then transferred to a screen. It’s not until it comes back from the printer that it's a physical thing. The moment I started unloading the wood into my back garden and started seeing it pile up was the moment it became real!
Next time: The Build
