The closest so far to ‘detailed plans’ for the garden office, sketched on the back of a bit of scrap paper the other day, but good enough for my purposes of getting down the basic structural ideas.

Ideally all the building materials would be recycled, but the logistics involved in arranging to pick up scrap timber from Freecycle donors is just too challenging as a non-car owner (plus I’m finding that despite there being some 3000 members of Westcliff Freecycle, people just don’t seem to respond much to ‘wanted’ posts these days…), so the next best thing will be to use FSC certified timber and have it delivered, but at least what I obtain will be exactly the spec I’m after rather than bodging and ‘making do’ (which i’ll probably be doing enough of anyway…).

I’ve set myself a budget of £500 which is fairly notional, and looking at what I think I need is probably too high for basically a series of timber uprights and quite a bit of cladding plus insulation materials, but thought better to overestimate rather than under, and if anything is left over it gives me permission to buy a rather expensive CD box set I’ve got my eye on (well I’ll need to listen to something on the stereo once its all built and up and running won’t I??)

What I’m going for is basically going to be a free standing structure, using a large pallette scavenged from a skip as the base (it was almost too big to go out of the back door so we had great fun trying to manuevere it outside) which will rest on top of 8 old car tyres (a trick I saw at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire a couple of weeks ago - they have constructed a number of yurts on platforms resting on top of car tyres filled with rammed chalk) which in turn are resting on top of a base of paving slabs, so plenty of distance and protection from the ground and its dampness.

I’ve also done another little sketch in order to work out the angle of the roof and how the solar panel might be mounted.

One Response to “More design sketches”

1. Dom says:

   July 14, 2009 at 4:12 pm

   Intrigued to watch it take shape mate - good luck with freecycle - I have to say I’ve had very little show up in my area which I could actually use - especially given my rather compressed build time(!) I admire the whole stance you’re taking with the project and would have loved to do something similar - unfortunately my small yard and requirement to keep the house in some kind of order entailed me getting my stuff together in a quick and orderly fashion (which meant B&Q in most cases!) - Any design though, no matter how grand or humble … watch the bottom line - it’s scary how quickly the figure creeps up!