Guide To Outdoor Living
Outdoor living is no longer a concept that is limited to the imagination of a child after watching a film that has a tree house in it. Nor does it need to involve getting extremely cold and wet.
Outdoor rooms are becoming increasingly popular, from your standard conservatory to a small luxury office down at the bottom of your garden. With the application of some modern building techniques and some imagination, anything is possible.
Conservatories
Conservatories are the most common and popular version of bringing a little bit of outdoors indoors, or indoors outdoors, whichever way you want to look at it!
Conservatories offer extra space, either by way of an extra room, or an extension on an existing room, and are a great inlet for natural light. They can also give the external appearance of your house a bit of depth or a new dimension that separates it from the duller, flatter counterparts.
You can buy a standard conservatory from around £1,000 and the variation in styles and designs should allow you to match your conservatory with your house seamlessly. If you want something a little more unique though you can get conservatories tailor-made and constructed to your requirements.
Getting a conservatory built can be expensive in terms of labour; there are DIY solutions that come readily prepped for the easiest of installation. It will no doubt be a challenge and occupy a weekend or two but it should work out a lot cheaper; possibly up to a third of the price of buying a conservatory and getting it built by builders.
Unattached Garden Dwellings
Utilities
The new generation of outdoor dwellings allow for some real luxury spots to be built in your garden, possibly something that you have never even considered before could become a dazzling reality.
They are fully connectible to all the utilities and services that your main house benefits from yet they offer the tranquillity and solace of an isolated cottage. They can be built with bricks, steel, wood or glass and they can take any manner of shape or size.
You can have them custom designed or go for a standard offering, construct them yourself with flat-pack style steel designs or simply pay somebody to do it all for you. They also come with long-lasting guarantees, anything from 15 to 25 years, so you can expect a sturdy structure with an indoors feel.
Design
One of the great things about these garden dwellings is that you can go mad with the design and create a complete escape from work, home life and reality. You can create a small version of your favourite holiday villa, maybe build a construction in the design of something you have seen in a film, or simply let your imagination run wild.
Space
Outside rooms offer you that something different but they are also extremely practical in that you may have extended your house to its limits but still not have that gym or music room that you have always desired.
An outdoor room would be the perfect solution as it offers a certain amount of privacy, noise protection for the rest of the household who do not want to hear your favourite guitar solo over and over again, and most importantly perhaps, an incredible amount of use for a section of your garden that rarely gets used and just adds to the lawn mowing.
Here in Britain we are not blessed with great weather. Therefore any garden that we have can seem like a real waste of land and space for that 90% of the time when you are crammed into your house with 4 noisy children but looking out the window onto a garden that is big enough to house a small football match. Therefore, utilising the space and turning it into somewhere that can be used all of the time, all year round, makes a lot of sense.
Kids
Rotting Wendy houses full of cobwebs and woodlice are a thing of the past. You may think the idea of a garden retreat is brilliant, yet the realist inside you is pointing out that in between work, cooking, putting the children to bed and other daily chores you’ll have no time to enjoy it.
There is then another way of looking at the opportunity of an outdoor room. Children often have very few responsibilities and lots of free time, they seem to run out of constructive things to do in this free time and so just resort to making noise, and as much of it as they possibly can!
Enter the outdoor living space as somewhere for the kids to make as much noise as they want while you cook or work in peace, with only your favourite CD providing the background noise.
Geodesic Domes
If you have always been sent into a jealous rage every time you see those films set in warm climates where the protagonist is relaxing under the stars in an outdoor Jacuzzi after saving the girl of or your dreams from a 20ft alien with his bare hands, you should probably take a reality check and calm down.
Failing that, follow your dream and get a spa dug in your very own garden with a geodesic dome encapsulation!
Think a mini Eden Project housing a Jacuzzi and you would be on the right lines. They are remarkably rigid, stylish pieces that will allow you to enjoy living out your fantasy even if it is bang in the middle of a British winter. If you are still not satisfied, try buying your kids some alien masks with the change.
Resale
A tastefully built garden dwelling or conservatory will of course add value to your house and may even be the deal clincher when you come to sell.
The prices for different projects vary immensely but for a few thousand pounds you can realistically look at building something that will give your garden a real ‘wow factor’, put value on your house, but most importantly, make your stay in your home that extra bit more enjoyable and luxurious while you are there!
