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Man Cave

Status: Complete
Techniques: Planning, Construction, Carpentry

This log documents the process of building a fully insulated garden office/man cave from scratch.

In 2017 we moved from a fairly grotty flat to a nice house, and had a baby. The direct consequence for my hobby was moving from having a dedicated gaming room in the flat to having no dedicated space in the house. The small amount of modelling I did in the following 10 months was constrained to temporary work spaces on the corner of the breakfast bar. Without any dedicated storage space my equipment, tools and parts were spread between boxes that were stacked in the shed. Even when I managed to get a good modelling flow going, I would routinely hit roadblocks when it was too difficult to find a particular item. Needless to say my modelling productivity took a nosedive.

The garden shed was a tiny 6’x4′ shiplap thing. Even if I could somehow make it habitable my modelling and gaming stuff pretty much filled it from floor to ceiling. I started researching garden rooms that I could replace the shed with – something insulated, with power, lighting, and enough space for storage and a work area. But I was put off by several things – few manufacturers produce small enough buildings as standard, none quite matched exactly the specifications I would want, and once you start going into the realm of custom designs and add things like better insulation, proper flooring and electrical installation the costs escalate really fast.

So it only took an offhand comment from my mum to the effect of “why don’t you just build one, it can’t be that difficult?” for me to make a decision: I would learn how to construct a proper building and make my man cave from scratch.