Maintenance-free garden office & workshop
Published: 15 July 2023
Reading Time: 2 minutes 36 seconds
When adding a garden room to your home, one important thing you need to take into consideration is how much maintenance it will require to keep it looking good and protected. The most important material when considering maintenance needs is the exterior cladding. Luckily, there are a wide range of options you can choose from.
There is a range of timber cladding finishes such as Thermowood, Siberian Larch and Western Red Cedar that offer long, maintenance-free lifespans, but unless you treat them regularly with a UV oil, they will change colour as they weather. Losing their natural colour by turning to a silvery grey. While this change in colour does not affect the durability of the timber and offers a subtle weathered aesthetic, your garden room will look different to when it was originally built.
This is why composite cladding finishes have become so popular in garden room design. These engineered finishes are not susceptible to rot, fungal attack and warping, meaning they are highly durable finishes. Composite cladding is coloured during the manufacturing process and doesn’t require repainting to maintain its appearance. So, your garden room will look the same in 10 plus years' time as the day it is completed.
At most, composite claddings require nothing more than a soapy wash to stay looking good, so you can spend your time enjoying your garden space rather than maintaining it.
This two-roomed building by Garden2Office showcases how good a well-detailed composite wood-clad garden room can look.
Garden2Office offer a range of cladding finishes
Garden2Office are a long-established, experienced industry name. They specialise in well-insulated Swedish designs. Garden2Office offer a range of exterior cladding finishes, from low-maintenance timbers like Western Red Cedar to colour-coated metal finishes and composite wood options available in different profiles, creating distinct looks.
For this project, Garden2Office’s clients chose to mix two low-maintenance cladding finishes. They chose the option of Cladco composite wood cladding. This finish is engineered from 60% recycled FSC hardwood fibres and 40% recycled plastic. This combination creates a tough board that is dimensionally stable and resistant to rot and fungal attack. The Cladco cladding comes in eight different colours.
The composite wood has been used to detail the two most prominently viewed walls. The hidden elevations are finished in a dark grey coated corrugated metal cladding. This is also a maintenance-free choice and offers a smart aesthetic that is colour matched with the uPVC door and window frames.
Garden office & workshop
The two-roomed building sits on an overall footprint of 7m x 3m. Two-thirds of the space has been turned into a home office. Garden2Office finishes the interior of their rooms with a high-spec plastered and decorated finish mixed with durable wooden flooring. The electrical package can include data cabling, meaning you can connect with anywhere in the world from the end of your garden.
The smaller room will serve as a workshop and fishing tackle store. The workshop and office are accessed independently via external doors. As we can see, the door into the workshop blends into the composite clad wall. We are impressed with how the Garden2Office team have detailed the cladding on the door. Composite cladding is not as easy as timber to detail in such areas, but Garden2Office have mastered the skill.
A concrete slab overcomes a significant slope
Before work on the main garden room build could start, the Garden2Office team had to overcome the significantly sloping site, to create a level base for the building. After undertaking the groundworks to prepare the site, the Garden2Office team installed a concrete slab. This slab creates a solid foundation to support the large garden room.
As we have mentioned, Garden2Office are experienced hands. They will install the right foundation for your ground conditions rather than the one size fits all approach that some companies offer.
Learn more
To learn more about creating a maintenance-free garden room, chat with the Garden2Office team on 0800 612 4371 or email mark@garden2office.co.uk. Explore www.garden2office.co.uk and their Instagram, where they share details of their current projects.
