Our vision, when deciding to build garden rooms for people like you was to create an “extension quality”, high performing, long lasting structure that makes life easy for you – not just creating a new garden room, garden gym, garden studio, garden office or annexe for you to enjoy, but ensuring that your experience with us during the build process is as unintrusive as possible.
We do that with the building technologies that we use. Everything we use is engineered to be of the highest quality, supremely strong and durable, yet lightweight, manageable in size and quickly installed. We want to make your life easier by minimising build times, disruption and mess. Our system is particularly ideal for terraced homes or houses in places with access issues, like London.
You will have a building that feels indistinguishable from a traditionally constructed building once complete.
Heavy Duty Ground Screw Foundations
It is essential that the foundations of your building are based on a solid layer of ground, which is why builders ordinarily dig down at least a metre to find a suitable load-bearing layer to build foundations off. The top layer of ground under our feet moves slowly, but constantly, and is an unreliable base for a permanent building.
Ground screws are developed by experienced civil and structural engineers. Screws come in varying widths and lengths and can be loaded with up to 150kn per foundation, making them suitable as foundations for anything from a garden room up to a modular built house. They are extremely stable but are easily and quickly installed in any kind of soil using a lightweight but extremely powerful machine.
Even in areas where load-bearing layers lie deep underground, ground screws can be used to build a deep foundation.
“Any good build starts with good foundations”
Richard de Souza
As part of our process, we will carry out a fully calibrated, credible ground test for you to calculate which ground screws are best for your site conditions. One size does not fit all, but you can expect a typical installation to be at least of 76mm diameter and 1000mm deep.
Ground screws contain significantly less embedded carbon than concrete and can be removed, reused and recycled, making them hugely more eco-friendly than concrete foundations.
Floor, Ceiling and Walls in Structural Insulated Panels (SIPS)
“A garden room built with SIPs is highly insulated, very strong, quick to build, creates very little mess and comes from highly sustainable product.”
Richard de Sousa
We built our own home from Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) because it is such a strong and sustainable build route that has been tried and tested over many years. SIPs featured on Grand Designs back in 2001 and these days most of the self-build houses on the program are constructed with SIPs.
The panels consist of an insulating foam core sandwiched between two structural facings of oriented strand board (OSB). They are 7 times stronger than timber frame and 3 times stronger than block and brick.
Their airtight and highly insulative properties result in much lower heating costs; particularly helpful when most people will use expensive electricity to heat their garden rooms.
Manufactured to your exact measurements in the UK, the building fits quickly together like a 3-dimensional Jigsaw puzzle. They are also environmentally friendly. Traditional masonry construction has high energy consumption and causes severe pollution, whereas SIPs are a low impact building method with virtually no carbon footprint. They use less timber than timber framing.
Roof
RubberCover EDPM membrane has a life expectancy of more than 50 years. It comes in large sheets which can cover roofs in one piece, resulting in a leak proof roof. It has excellent resistance to UV and severe weather conditions and is highly flexible, making it able to withstand fluctuations in temperature and the movement of buildings. It is able to maintain its physical properties over several decades and requires little to no maintenance.
Because of its durability and suitability for recycling, it is one of the most eco-friendly roofing products and it can be compatible with green roofs and solar panels, helping to contribute to a more sustainable planet.
Windows & BiFold Doors
We prefer to use high quality Aluminium framed glazing because sliding and bi-fold doors need to be strong enough to support large and heavy panes of glass along with a high number of moving parts. Aluminium is so strong that the thickness of your frames can be kept to a minimum, meeting your demand for a light-filled room, but still maintain structural integrity.
Aluminium is less likely to distort than wood or uPVC as a result of temperature fluctuations, making your doors essentially maintenance free – keeping the bottom track clear is your only job.
Thermally broken aluminium ensures that the overall U value of your doors and windows is kept as low as possible, keeping your room warm all year round. Aluminium can also be easily recycled, making it a sustainable choice.
Electrics
The Building Regulations (Part P) require you to notify the Building Control Authorities if you intend to have electrical work done in the garden, or the work must be carried out and certified by a Part P qualified electrician. Correctly sized armoured cable, safely routed to your room is essential.
Everything installed needs to be protected by an RCD that instantly cuts off the power if it detects electricity flowing somewhere that it isn’t planned to – whether that’s through a faulty device or a person to the earth.
A new RCD for your garden room at your main consumer unit for your home is the recognised method of creating a safe installation. Every home is unique in this respect so before finalising your quote we will assess your consumer unit for compatibility with the current Building Regulations and make a plan to route new cables safely out to your garden room, causing as little disruption within your home as possible.
At the end of your project, you will receive a certificate to prove that the installation is totally safe.