Insulated Garden Rooms With Electrics, Built to Order

Three things, and together they explain the price gap.

Electrics. A garden room includes them: the wiring, a fuse board, sockets and lights. On a pod they are an upgrade. Connection to your home’s supply is not included as standard on either.

Glazing and security. Garden rooms come with A-rated double-glazed doors and windows on multi-point locks, so the thermal performance and the security arrive together. A pod has good glazing; it is not the same specification.

How much you can change. A pod is a compact building where you choose the cladding and where the doors and windows go. A garden room is designed from scratch: size, internal layout, partitioned or open, cedar, slatted and brick effect as well as timber, Thermowood and composite, cladding colour, door and window frame colour, laminate floor colour and the inside wall finish. Then bi-folds, an L-shape or acoustic panels if you want them.

Pods start at £6,976 and garden rooms at £9,321. Both are 8 × 6ft buildings in their standard specification, each with its cheapest door, and the garden room price includes the electrics a pod adds as an upgrade. A pod also tops out at 200 square feet where a garden room reaches 420. What does not change is who builds it: same workshop, same panels, same installers, same ten-year guarantee.

If budget is the deciding factor, a pod does a great deal. If this is a room you will use every working day, the step up usually pays for itself.

Compare the Garden Pods range

Yes. The wiring, a fuse board, sockets and spotlights are included as standard on every garden room, not offered as an extra.

Connection of the garden room to the main property electrical supply is not included unless expressly stated within the quotation. This work can be quoted separately if required, subject to a site survey and the requirements of our electrical contractor.

Spotlights come as standard. Extra sockets and switches are quoted on the call, so it is worth thinking about properly at design stage: where your desk will go, where a TV might sit, whether you want a switch by the door and another by the far wall.

Two upgrades are worth raising early. Heating can be a wall panel heater supplied with your order, or you can install your own air conditioning afterwards for cooling as well as warmth. Heavier electrical loads change the specification: a golf simulator, gym equipment, a hot tub or a workshop full of power tools all need more than a standard supply, and building the right cable in costs far less than upgrading it later.

If you are unsure, tell us the equipment. We will specify from that rather than from an average.

More on electrics and lighting

Garden rooms start at £9,321, and the configurator gives you the itemised price for your exact size and specification. Four things move the number.

Size is the biggest lever, but not as people expect. A bigger building costs less per square metre, and a squarer plan costs less than a long, narrow one of the same floor area, because there is less wall. Between two footprints, the larger one usually buys more usable space per pound.

Cladding is next and the gap is real. Softwood timber is the most affordable. Composite costs more up front and then asks nothing of you: no painting, no sealing, and it holds its colour. Canadian Western Red Cedar is the premium choice and ages beautifully if you let it silver, or wants occasional attention if you would rather it did not.

Upgrades. An L-shaped footprint and a pitched roof add the most, because both change the structure rather than the fittings. Side canopies, acoustic panels, bi-folds, cedar and decking all add too, and heating and air conditioning are quoted on the call.

The base. A level, load-bearing base is not optional and on a sloping or soft garden it can be a meaningful share of the total. It is also the item most often missing from a comparison quote, so check what a rival price includes before judging it.

Rather than a guessed figure, use the configurator: every option shows its price as you choose it. Finance over 10, 12 or 24 months is available.

Almost everything, and this is the part most people underestimate.

We do not work from bulk kits or pre-set units. Every panel is made to your order in Shropshire, which means there is no fixed framework to design around. You choose the footprint and the internal layout: one open space, or partitioned into separate areas, which plenty of people do to keep an office and a storage end apart. You choose where every door and window sits, which matters more than it sounds: it decides where the light falls, where your desk can go, and how private the room feels from the house.

Externally you choose the cladding material and its colour, the door and window frame colour and the trims. Internally you choose the laminate floor colour and the wall finish: smooth, lined, melamine or acoustic panels.

Then the upgrades: bi-folds or sliders, an L-shaped footprint, side canopies, decking and acoustic panels. Heating, air conditioning, extra sockets and outside lighting are quoted on the call.

One piece of advice. Build in the flexibility you might need rather than the flexibility you need today. People start with a gym and end up with a home business. Extra sockets are trivial during the build and disruptive afterwards, and SIP panels can only be chosen at the start.

Usually not. Most garden rooms are covered by permitted development, which means no application at all.

As a general guide, a garden room under 30 square metres, sited in your rear garden, and no more than 2.5 metres tall where it sits within two metres of a boundary will normally meet permitted development. Height is what catches people out: the 2.5 metres is measured to the top of the roof, not the top of the walls. Move further than two metres from every boundary and you get more headroom: up to 4 metres to the ridge for a dual-pitched roof, or 3 metres for anything else.

Building regulations are separate and usually do not apply. Under 15 square metres with no sleeping accommodation is generally exempt; between 15 and 30 square metres it is normally still exempt if it sits at least a metre from any boundary. A WC would change that, because drainage falls under building regulations. A shower room or WC is an upgrade on our Granny Annexe range only, so if you need one, start there.

Three things need a closer look: conservation areas, listed buildings, and any room used for a business with staff or customers visiting.

Rules vary between councils, so confirm with your local planning authority before ordering. This is guidance rather than planning advice.

Read the planning permission guide

Substantially, and the time difference matters even more than the money.

A garden room from £9,321 buys a fully insulated, wired, double-glazed room of genuine usable size. A single-storey extension of comparable floor area is typically several times that once you have paid for foundations, structural work, roofing, making good, building control and the inevitable overrun. And an extension takes months, during which your house is a building site: dust, scaffolding, a kitchen you cannot use, trades in and out.

A garden room takes four to eight weeks from order, with one to five days on site, and nothing happens inside your house at all. You carry on living normally throughout.

Permissions differ too. Most garden rooms need no planning application and, with no plumbing or sleeping accommodation, generally sit outside building regulations. Most extensions need both.

The honest limitation: they solve different problems. If you need a bigger kitchen or another bedroom off the landing, you need an extension and a garden room will not do. If you need somewhere to work, train, host or retreat (where being slightly separate from the house is a feature rather than a compromise), the garden room wins on almost every measure.

Four to eight weeks in total, with the on-site part usually taking one to five days.

Most of that time is manufacturing. Your panels are made to order in our Shropshire workshop, insulated, glazed and weatherproofed before anything arrives at your house. That is deliberate: the more of the building that is finished indoors, the less time it spends exposed and the less disruption you get.

Fourteen days before installation we call you to go through the final layout, the access route and the base requirements. That call matters: the base is the most common cause of delay on any garden room project, and this is where problems get caught rather than discovered on the day.

On site, a small room can be finished by the end of the day. A larger or partitioned build typically takes two days. Five days is the outside of it for the biggest specifications.

Two things can extend the timeline, and both are worth knowing early. A base that is not ready or not level stops installation, and a return visit is chargeable. An L-shaped footprint adds a little manufacturing time.