This Leyton project started with a garden that had been left to nature for years — a collapsing shed and weeds well over five feet tall meant the client couldn't even see the end of their own garden. Three weeks later it was a fully cleared, landscaped space with a bespoke cedar garden office and two new decks.
The Starting Point
There are no "before" photos for this one — by the time we arrived, the priority was clearing the site, not photographing it. What we found:
- An old timber shed that had rotted through and was falling apart
- A garden completely overtaken by weeds over five feet tall
- No visible sightline to the rear of the plot
- Ground that hadn't been worked in years
Getting Materials In: The Real Challenge
With no side access, every material — timber, insulation, cladding, plasterboard, all of it — had to go through the house. That meant navigating tight internal turns with sheet materials that don't bend. Full-size boards of OSB and plasterboard simply wouldn't make the corners, so we cut every sheet down to 2.1m lengths before they went anywhere near the front door. It added time and care to every delivery, but it's the only way the job gets done when there's no other route into the garden.
The Build
A Garden Room Built for Year-Round Work
The finished room measures 3.6m x 2.5m, clad in cedar with a durable EPDM roof. High-quality aluminium bi-fold doors open the entire front elevation onto the new decking, flooding the room with light and blurring the line between inside and out. Inside, it's fully wired with three double sockets, a dedicated consumer unit, and six ceiling downlights — everything needed for a proper, comfortable home office.
Two New Decks
Alongside the garden room, we built two separate decked areas as part of the same project, giving the client usable outdoor space to match the new room rather than just a strip of hard standing outside the doors.
The Transformation
Three weeks covered everything — full site clearance, removal of the old shed, two decks, and a complete insulated garden room, in the region of £18,000. The client now has a proper year-round office at the end of a garden that, a month earlier, they couldn't even see across.
