Alas, it’s time to build!

You’ve created a design in part 1 and you’ve determined the location in part 2 of The Garden Room Blueprint.

To help you through the 3rd and final part, I’ve created my most detailed video to date: a 12-step tutorial on how to build a custom garden room.

12 Steps to Building a Garden Room

1. Determine what to build

2. Determine where to build

3. Create the foundation

   There are many different kinds of foundations that work. The primary thing is to ensure you avoid annual shifting of your structure due to the ground freezing in the winter. I recommend using concrete piers dug 6” past your local frost line.
   

4. Frame the build
   Here I walk you through how to frame your garden room using light-wood framing. That’s fancy talk for studs (or 2 by 4s) that you can find at Home Depot. It’s pretty easy to follow and only gets slightly tricky when framing doors and windows. See the video and plan set for a detailed breakdown.
   

5. Put on a baselayer
   If you think about your building’s enclosure as layers of clothes, the first layer is how you trap the heat close to your body. For a garden room, this is your air barrier. I show how to ensure a continuous air barrier using Tyvek housewrap, which also acts as our water barrier.
   
   It should be noted that it does not act as our vapour barrier as well. It’s a common misconception that a vapour barrier is always needed. Most of the time, given that you’ve insulated properly, you actually would prefer that your enclosure can “breathe”. This allows moisture to escape instead of becoming trapped in your wall, leading to mold.

6. Seal the openings
   This is where you install your doors and windows. The main thing to focus on here is continuity of the air and water barriers that you created in step 5. You want to ensure that water doesn’t get in at the top, sides, and bottom of your doors and windows by properly overlapping and taping the Tyvek. Essentially, don’t tuck your pants into your boots!
   

7. Put on a sweater

   Here we add on the exterior insulation, placing a giant sweater over the entire enclosure. This step mitigates what’s called thermal bridging — a term used to describe when heat has a non-insulated path to leave or enter the building. If we didn’t add this sweater, every stud would act as a thermal bridge.
   

8. Put on a raincoat
   Even though our true water barrier is underneath our sweater, we want to shed the bulk of the water with our roofing and siding. These exterior finishes will also protect our sweater and baselayer from direct impacts such as hail or a hockey puck, absorb damaging UV light from the sun, and look pretty in the process (until the UV light has done its thing… then we slap on a new coat of paint).
   

9. Connect services

   To heat and cool the space, I recommend an air-source electrical heat pump. Air-source meaning it exchanges heat from the inside air with the outside air, and electrical meaning it’s powered by solar or grid electricity.
   
   In the video, we choose to hook it up to grid electricity by digging an 18” deep trench to the house and connecting the garden room’s sub panel with the house’s main panel. It’s a good idea to hire an electrician for this step and pull an electrical permit if needed.
   
   This is also the step where we add interior and exterior lights and outlets, strategically placed based on our garden room’s floor plan.
   

10. Insulate the space
    While we’ve wrapped the enclosure in a sweater, we still have the gaps between studs to insulate. The cheapest and most commonly available insulation for this step is fibreglass insulation (the pink fluffy stuff). Be sure to cover up your skin and ensure that the insulation is not compressed when installed — it gets it’s insulative quality from trapping air, so let it expand!
    

11. Make it livable
    Our garden room is now warm, has electricity, is protected from the elements, and is structurally sound. The only thing is, at this stage, it looks like you’re inside a giant’s stomach.
    
    Next we install, mud, and paint drywall (also known as sheetrock) then add interior trims. There’s a bit of an art to mudding drywall, so check out the video tutorial for help on this step.
    

12. Make it beautiful
    The finish line is in sight. All that’s left now are the final touches that take your garden room from good to great. Some ideas for this stage are:

    • a wooden step up to the door

    • a wooden cover for the outdoor component of the heat pump (that doesn’t block its airflow)

    • landscaping around the perimeter of your garden room

    • furnishing the interior

    • naming your garden room with a custom sign

    • celebrating being done by inviting over your 3 closest friends

The Plan Set

While these steps can be followed to create your own custom design, I’ve created a plan set for the office shown in this video, available for free here.

You can also use this guide to remodel an existing structure on your property! Here’s an example of how Kayla, a fellow backyard architect, is using the plan set & video tutorial as a reference tool to upgrade her shed.

If you found value in this guide, I would greatly appreciate it if you shared the publication with friends and family that would also benefit from my writing.