You need more than a sketch when building a garden room
A quick sketch is an excellent way to develop the initial ideas for your garden room. It is a good way to get an idea of the door and window layout and to note down the basic dimensions.
But, this type of drawing is not enough to build a garden room from, particularly today as material prices are rising. You'll want to get an accurate idea of the materials you will need so as to avoid wastage.
We appreciate that you are eager to get started on the build itself, but we urge you to spend time planning your project - It will save you time in the long run and quite likely money too!
Creating an overview model is fairly quick and easy with a tool like SketchUp, and as we can see, it's far more helpful than our basic sketch was!
You can apply materials and even add furniture if you want to get an idea of scale. This will give you a pretty clear idea of what you will create. This type of model is ideal if you need to explain your ideas to someone else.
Drawing plans for each stage of the build is probably overkill, but if you draw up nothing else, take the time to draw up your core structure. You could do this drawing to scale with a pencil and ruler, but if you create a 3D model, you will end up with a more detailed plan that helps you quantify your materials and save you time during the cutting stage.
As you can see from this model, you can get a clear view of your structure and see what does and doesn't work before cutting into a piece of timber.
Much of the garden room industry uses SketchUp for designing. They, like us, use SketchUp Pro, which is a paid version. For a self-builder, the free version SketchUp Web offers everything you need.
You can quickly use the Rectangle Tool, coupled with the Pull Push Tool, to make the plates and studs of your wall frame. If you make them components, you can easily use them again in the model, and any changes you make can be applied to all instances of the component.
Once you have the basic elements, you can quickly start building your frame. Because we are using a real-world scale, you are making the full-size frame, which we can then dimension up for use quantifying materials and when you come to cutting timbers.
Using guides and typing in measurements, you can quickly and precisely work out your stud spacings. We are use a keyboard shortcut with the Move Tool to duplicate the studs. Its CTRL on Windows and Option on a Mac.
To keep our wall frame together as we progress through the build, we are going to group the elements together.
You don't have to, but it can be handy to apply a material to the studwork so that it stands out. To do this, we pick a wood texture from the Materials palette, which is on the right-hand side toolbar.
If you want to dimension the model and print off a plan of your frame, that is easy too. You need to change the camera angle; in this case, we are choosing the rear view. We also want to turn off the perspective view, by selecting parallel projection, so we have a flat drawing. You make both these changes in the Scenes tab, which is in the right-hand side toolbar.
If you want an easy to print, clean drawing, it is worth switching the default style to one with a white background. This gives your drawing greater contrast. You can do this from the Styles tab in the right-hand toolbar.
If you want an easy to print, clean drawing, it is worth switching the default style to one with a white background. This gives your drawing greater contrast. You can do this from the Styles tab in the right-hand toolbar.
If you pick the Dimension tool from the Tape Measure flyout in the left-hand toolbar, you can mark out the measurements of the different components and their spacings.
You will see that the Dimension tool snaps to the corners for precise measurement. Pull the dimension line out to where you want it.
If you want to print out this plan, click the top left menu and select Print from the dropdown menu. This gives you a plan to quantify the materials you will need and for creating a cutting list.
