Garden room prices vary from around £1500 to £60,000+, which is frankly bonkers.
How on earth are you supposed to know how much a decent garden room costs, or whether the one you’re interested in represents value for money? When everyone and their granny seems to sell garden rooms, how do you know which firm to trust?
I’ll be perfectly honest – I’ve been DREADING writing this post. Garden rooms are complicated structures and the garden room market is huge. There are so many options available, and because of that, garden room prices vary hugely. This is a BIG TOPIC.
But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!
The short answer to this question is that there are lots of contributing variables and lots of different types of garden rooms. This post will explain some of these variables to help you with your garden room search.
What are garden rooms made of?
One factor that impacts the price of a garden room is the materials. Just like there’s no single consensus on what a garden room actually is, there’s no consensus on what it should be made from.
Let’s define a garden room as a self-contained, insulated structure with light and power suitable for year-round use in your garden. That’s the standard we’re going for. Without insulation, you can’t use it all year-round. This is one of the reasons why log cabins aren’t garden rooms.
Framing Options
So let’s look at some of the options, starting with the framing of the building.
Metal frame
Steel or aluminium framing forms the bones of the building. Insulation and cladding are fixed to this frame. You can buy entire metal skeletons of garden rooms and add your choice of insulation and cladding if you have the skills and time to build your own.
Timber frame
Timber framing forms the bones of the building. Insulation and cladding are fixed to this frame. As with metal frames, you can also buy timber skeletons to build your own garden room.
SIPs (Structural Insulated Panels)
Prefabricated OSB sandwiches with plastic insulation as their filling.
Cladding options
Then we move on to cladding. Here are some of the options available:
Metal cladding
Metal garden rooms like this one have coated steel walls.
Timber cladding
from whitewood to redwood to larch to cedar to ThermoWood, various timber cladding finishes are available for garden rooms.
Composite cladding
Formed from resins, plastics or cement mixed with processed wood fibre. There are as many different types of composite cladding as there are types of timber cladding, and I’ve written before about how difficult it is to make an informed choice about these materials.
Roofing options
Next up there’s roofing materials. Here are some examples of options you may have:
Steel
Coated sheets of corrugated or box profile steel.
Shingles
Bitumen or fibreglass mats arranged in a tiled pattern.
Slate
Tiles of fine-grained rock overlapped on the roof.
EDPM
Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer, if you want to be fancy! This synthetic rubber material is suitable for flat and low-pitched roofs.
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Which materials are best for a garden room?
There’s no single standout amazing building material – they all have their pros and cons.
Timber can be terrible and it can be excellent. SIPs can be ideal and can also be awful. Composite can be a low-maintenance dream or a plastic-wrapped nightmare.
Similarly, timber can be cheaper or more expensive – it depends on the variety and quality of the timber used. There are cheap SIPs and there are expensive SIPs. There’s quality composite and there’s crappy composite.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll look in detail at each of these materials to assist with your garden room decision-making. My mission is to help you choose your perfect garden building – whether you buy from Gillies & Mackay or not.
Why do garden room prices vary so much?
Any construction company has a tightrope to walk when they design their product. On the one hand, their products have to be safe and fit for purpose. On the other hand, they have to fit the economic profile of their market and customers. If every other garden room manufacturer charges £10,000 for a 3m x 4m garden room, and yours costs £100,000, it seems only fair to ask what the difference is between these two products.
That’s why you must do some research before buying a garden room. And it’s hard because every company website claims that they’re the best, that their buildings are the best, and that you should trust them simply because they say so.
The simple fact is that everyone can’t be the best. What you actually need is to find what’s best for you, and with so many different companies making so many different types of garden rooms, that can be tricky.
As long as you know what you’re getting for your money, how much you spend on a garden room is entirely up to you and your budget. If your expectations match the performance of your building, there’s no problem!
Your expectations are set by knowing exactly what your garden is made from, and how these materials affect the cost of the building.
And if you’d like some 1-1 dedicated time with an expert, book a no-obligation consultation with one of our team. They’ll help you decide what your garden room priorities are, even if you don’t buy from us.
