The Backyard Office

When covid hit, and they sent us all to work from home, it was time to find another office.

I had grown custom to the peace and quiet an office gives when doing programming work, In fact I spent a good portion of the last ten years working in a private office. I still had an office in Alberta, but obviously living in B.C. it was too far to travel. In April 2020, I made some calls locally here to rent one, no one returned my call… So I called again, still no answer. Finally I got a reply from a local office building saying they were not starting new leases because of covid. Shocked by their response, I started looking at my backyard.

I had an old patio that pretty much was just a wasp nest and was fairly useless during the summer. I started measuring and thinking this might work really well. Having very little construction experience, I reached out to “uncle jakes” new construction business. He gave me some guidance and was able to fit me in during the fall of September 2020. Below is what we had to start with.

Construction began at the beginning of September. The patio already had an existing concrete foundation which made the project a lot easier, it also was wired with power already. They started with rebuilding the walls and making some improvements to the structure. I brought them coffee.

They rebuilt the walls and built up the floor with 1×4 and insulated it to. We decided on using a standard patio door with lock and a couple windows I could open. It started to take shape pretty quickly.

We decided on a metal roof and some white facia, and then hired a local drywaller to finish up the interior.

Before the drywall was finished I had decided that I needed to install an AC unit. We had planned this already into the framing but the cut wasn’t made in the drywall yet. We let the drywaller finish up and prime the walls and then I did the painting and flooring install.