There are many comments on the price point. I would like to comment on one thing.
"$20k is too much"
I agree $20k is an investment. Could I have done it for cheaper? Absolutely. Would a DIY shell been cheaper? Would doing more of the work myself have been cheaper? Could I have saved by putting in the smaller stock windows and not having a skylight? Of course!
But I am a dad with a young kid, he was 1 when I built the office. I didn't want to spend my limited free time on this project. There was a trade-off between paying for labor and the time it would take to do it myself. At this point in my life I always look at these decisions through a lens of: is the cost savings worth my time. In this case I valued my time more than the cost savings. I was lucky enough to be in a situation where I would rather spend money for someone else to build this then spending my nights and weekends on this project.
I am almost 4 years in I would have paid over $20k for a co-working space. We were able to stay in our smaller house with a ridiculously low mortgage rate. We made the right choice for us.
Cheap is relative. Sometimes your time is worth more. There are litteraly entire companies built on this premise, cough DoorDash
My 12x16 took way more time, but I did it all myself. I mostly worked at night once the heavy loud stuff was done because of the young kid factor. But at only a couple hours a day, it took about 4 months. Although I did build mine down into a ~3 feet deep basement of sorts which complicated it (I didn’t want it visible from outside my fence). Even did off grid electric with solar to avoid needing contractors or permits. I won’t hate because I get the time trade off, and I really hate/appreciate a few trades more than before (drywall the most). For reference mine was $15k in 2025.
The main thing I’d advise people against and say you could have possibly saved on is the structure. Tuff Shed is usually over priced and could be built usually with $2k-3k of material and labor. But the time you did this may have made that hard too, all the contractors were slammed.
I'm in the middle of finishing out my own (significantly larger) shed I just had built, basically all DIY except for the structure itself. The number that popped into my head at the start of your post was $30k - each step adds up when you're paying small job overheads. That you did it for $20k is pretty great.
That you think $20k was a good deal for this shack in your backyard is indicative of how little we know about building.
You got raked over the coals. You can downvote me, but as someone who knows how to build structures man, I feel so sorry for people reading your message thinking this is OK.
This is really, really poor quality for the cost.
I’m not even a commercial builder. A bag of Portland cement concrete is $5/bag. You don’t need to pay $2k for such a small foundation.
Beyond the fact that there's absolutely no reason for you to post this, I'm not sure what you're looking at. I'm not a pro but I've been building sheds and things for decades and based on the pictures here I don't see low quality. Maybe I'd put more joists in the roof but Portland doesn't get a ton of snow so I'm sure it's fine. $2k is a fine price for that slab, especially compared to the pain of lifting 80lb bags of concrete yourself all day. People shouldn't be afraid of spending the money on a pro if they've got the money to spend.
Maybe he could have saved a few thousand with different subs (maybe) but your comments are nonsensical. I see tons of janky builds people post on Reddit and this is not one of them. You should spend your commenting time over there.
He's getting downvoted, but he's not wrong - however, finding someone who specializes in doing this would be hard, and knowing how to word it so you can use "standard crews" would itself be $2-3k for a GC.
This is the danger of "cheap projects" - they can grow legs before you know it, and you end up paying half the cost of increasing the square footage of the house (or the garage).
Unless he’s a commercial builder, I’d suggest he is wildly wrong about what is involved in properly pouring, leveling and making sure concrete has properly set in various weather conditions. And if you take a look at his post …
Huh. I would have gone the other route if I was going to rant and say there’s no way to do this for so cheap because I’ve looked at replacing a shed in NH with something a bit more sizable and while you can get a nice looking prefab for like 6-8k, that’s before the pad. Add in real windows and a mini split and insulation and I’ve no idea how to keep it that low, but I am jealous.
You can buy all the Quickcrete you want (not sure the last time you priced it), but it won’t make you good at pouring a level pad. That alone puts me off trying to do it some days.
> I’m not even a commercial builder. A bag of Portland cement concrete is $5/bag. You don’t need to pay $2k for such a small foundation.
An 8x10 6” slab has 1.5 cubic yards of concrete. Making concrete takes more than a bag of Portland cement, you also need gravel, sand, a mixer, a wood frame, a source of water, shovels, floats, et cetera. If you want rebar, add in steel and rebar tools and wire.
You could frame up the wood yourself and have Cemstone deliver the concrete but you still need to spread it out, float it, and finish it.
Instead of buying or renting all of that, I would sub it out. I subcontract out light pole bases and concrete pads for transformers, EV chargers, and other equipment all of the time.
For work-from-home, I can't emphasize enough how much of a game changer it is to have a physically separate building for your work, especially if you have a family with kids and noise and pets and things. Working from a spare bedroom, even one without a bed / outfitted as an office, is just not my thing. Even if your family "knows the rules" and let you work in peace. It subjectively still "feels like you're home". With a separate building, I can do a short walking commute and take those 10 seconds to "get into work mindset." And, once I'm out there, it can be a hermetically sealed, zero-distraction zone.
If you are lucky and fortunate enough to live in an actual house with land, and work (or are thinking about working) remotely, seriously consider investing in an actual separate building for your office.
If what you want is an office you can go to which is not in your home, it seems like it would be ever so much simpler to go live near your actual office, which your employer already pays for, than to move far enough away from everything that you can afford to buy a piece of property, build an office on it, and then have to deal with all the extra driving a remote lifestyle implies.
In my opinion it's commuting to the office which sucks, and not working in the office: I had a couple years where I walked in to work every day, and that was basically ideal. (It was, ironically, a job I started while living on the opposite side of the country: I then moved to a place about a mile from the office, quite a pleasant walk through the heart of the city.)
I would not go out of my way to live near where I work when my employer can fire me on a whim.
If the office was in a place where I could reasonably expect to find other jobs as well, then that could be part of my consideration, but I would never choose to live somewhere based primarily on whatever my current job is.
That's a good point. The office I mentioned was located in downtown Seattle, a city where jobs are plentiful and I have many connections, so moving there was an easy choice.
>live near your actual office, which your employer already pays for,
I've been in the game for almost 40 years now, and I'll say I've never had an office paid for by my employer that is as nice as that toughshed. I've never been in a dedicated office with a door, except when working from home.
Edit: ProTip: If you are doing concrete, rent a "Mud Mixer". Me an the kids were able to pour the 8x12x5" (130 bags of 80lbs) in well under a day, probably would have been even less if we had moved the bagged concrete to the pour site before the pour happened rather than as we were pouring.
My office suuuucks. All the actual machines are in a dedicated space so we have to hot desk and remote in even if we come to the office. There’s not even cubicles, just rows of desks. I would go out of my way NOT to work there.
Everyone has different opinions about this stuff, but I for one found _working_ in the office to absolutely be the worst part. And since Covid, my workplace has torn down old buildings and reduced square footage per employee, so if I went back to the office it would be even worse.
It’s been a broader trend of businesses downsizing the square footage when they can and when they can’t they start to mandate in office to justify the cost.
> it seems like it would be ever so much simpler to go live near your actual office
This constrains the companies you can work at to ones with a local office, if you do not want to move house. If you want to live within walking distance of many companies, you could easily be looking at paying millions of dollars for a poor quality house.
There is a happy medium if you like offices (see below): co-working spaces.
> it's commuting to the office which sucks, and not working in the office
Most company offices are fucking horrific - open plan, atrocious coffee, noisy, full of people who won’t stay home when they are sick.
Yeah the worst thing about working from within your house... bathroom, coffee, anything at all that necessitates going out of the room entails a major context switch for the most inane reasons and conversations.
I agree with that, but I often wonder whether maintaining a separation for longer periods just leads to a bigger backlog of these topics building up and making it worse when it does happen.
to be honest, having to walk inside to use the bathroom or refill your cup of coffee seems like a nice way to stand up and get the blood flowing again + breathe some fresh air.
I've got a bathroom in my out-building office, too, and a small kitchen with a sink, coffee maker, toaster, fridge, and so on. The limit is money to spend and land area to build on :)
Yeah, second that. I made my office separated from the main house and it's incredible.
We bought an old house and did a full remodel and planned for an office and a work kitchen (my wife is a chef) separated from the main house (and each other).
I've been WFH since Covid and, when it first happened, my office was in a finished attic that was not well conditioned. I like it warmer so I didn't mind, and the lack of comfort for others meant I enjoyed more solo time.
These days, I may as well not even have a door. I put auto-shutting hinges on it, but that failed as reminder/deterrent long ago.
We've got a 10x20 out back that was supposed to be my workshop, but it's filled with all the things most Americans put in their garages - because we don't have one. I'm seriously considering a deep purge and converting at least 1/2 of to an office; the distractions and context switching are disastrous.
I visited a friend's apartment and he was going on and on about how everyone around him seems to be getting exploding dogs, so I think the key is to live by yourself in a house separated from others.
We built a new garage with an upstairs ADU when I started working from home in 2018. It is indeed a game-changer, and when we no longer need the space we can use it for a rental, guest house, etc.
Stepping back a bit, if you are working remotely that's likely a proxy for an increased likelihood of job loss due to AI.
Why start and invest in a construction project for a building that may not be staffed long term? Perhaps renting a small coworking space in town is the safer financial move. And have your employer pay for it.
One could argue this will get at least 50% ROI if you’re forced to sell your home. It’s strictly illegal in most places to room someone in one of these, but I’m sure people do it all the time. It won’t go to waste.
I jumped to the end and saw $2.3k for the mini split and couldn't believe it. I've installed mini splits on two homes and the quotes were always in the $15-25k range for 3-5 head units, so $2.3k for a head + outdoor condenser unit sounded implausible, but then I saw he found a surprisingly good deal:
> I got a ton of quotes for installing a mini split. They ranged from $4-$7k, which was higher than I expected after researching the cost of a quality small unit and knowing this would be a tiny job for an HVAC contractor, especially because I had my electrician prewire the electrical. I was considering installing a DIY system (Mr. Cool DIY system with pre-charged AC lines), But found an HVAC contractor who would install a system for a much lower price than the other quotes I received (and he had great reviews on Thumbtack). In the end, I got a Daikin Mini-split, a common system with many replacement parts. The installation took about 5 hours, and my tech did a great job. I am glad I researched and got a lot of quotes for this one.
I bought my first minisplit ~4 years ago since none of the contractors were available in the hot summer.
I bought the tools as well (vacuum pump, manifold, pipe cutters, etc.).
It cost me ~650$ total.
The next time I bought a minisplit (3.5kW one), I already had the tools and it cost me only 450$. A proper one meant for use during harsh winter would probably costs a bit more though, at around 1000$.
So I have set up a few of them for my family and friends so far. The units come pre-charged with gas for ~5M of ducts, there is nothing hard to set them up.
I also set up ESP32 controllers so I could attach them to Home Assistant, bypassing any Chinese cloud apps, etc.
>160 hours of education/vocational training and 2 years’ verifiable experience in the trade
To get the license to install minisplits (two years experience generally means working an apprenticeship).
It's no wonder install costs are so much in the US. And as you've experienced, they're hardly rocket science to install. The 160 hours training would be more than enough, I'm not sure why 2 years experience gets tacked on the end.
Unless your state is very unusual that is the requirement for installing them for other people as a tradesman. In most states if you are DIY for yourself all you legally need are the electrical permits for the wiring hookup (which for DIY don't require that "apprenticeship").
Nothing because the political optics of doing anything are bad ad the last thing they want is to create a victim that causes people to ask the question why the rules are even written how they are.
Environmental law is the same way. You're mostly (details depend on jurisdiction) not supposed to pave anything without getting permission but if they pushed the issue on everyone who put a pad under their car port the rules would get changed.
They also don't 100% enforce the speed limit either.
There are people on here who live in this fantasy world where all house work is permitted and performed by licensed tradespeople which is... counterfactual.
This kind of thing is right up there with calling dig safe before a project that will be exclusively hand excavated. At some point you're basically just paying to circle jerk it with the other boot lickers in the office or at the cocktail party over how much you paid for no reason just because the rules that will never be enforced say you ought to.
I couldn't believe it either because it seemed so expensive! EU based colleague got a high-ish end japanese unit (purhased and professionally installed with over 20% VAT on parts and labour) for less than that. The devices can be had for 1000 bucks or less.
I figured it had to be because the US devices are very different but they seem to be the same, and the explanation given by the usual automaton suspect was that the climate control business in the US is basically a cartel with highly inflated prices and shady regulations around how they can be sold.
Not sure if the claim is valid, but the price diff is remarkable so there must be some explanation. Usually everything you can buy is cheaper in the US.
Honestly, I would recommend just doing it yourself. Especially if you have a contractor pull in the electrical connection for it. I installed a pre-charged unit in a much more complicated attic setup (condenser mounted to outside wall on second floor, 20' of refrigerant lines run with lots of angles) and the whole thing took 6-8 hours with no experience. Mounting it to a shed where you're basically just cutting a hole in a wall and the indoor unit and outdoor unit are in more or less the same location should be extremely straight forward. The unit cost me less than $1k five years ago and has been running perfectly ever since.
if someone finds out you did this yourself then can't the city put a lien on your property preventing a sale until you rip everything out and have it re-done by a licensed person? I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house. at least i think that's how it is..
> I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house. at least i think that's how it is..
Where? No electrician is inspecting every house that goes up for sale in the US. Sure you can ask an electrician to inspect a house electrical… but that doesn’t bar a house sale anywhere I’ve ever seen.
For the home inspections I've been a "walkthrough witness" to, the "electrical inspection" portion involved the inspector opening the normal access door to the breaker panel levers, and plugging in one of those $5 Home Depot wiring fault detectors into a few random plugs here and there to verify no wiring faults appear.
But they do not remove the panel cover to look inside, nor do they open up any receptacle box anywhere to look at any of the wiring inside. So they wouldn't know (nor discover) if the wiring job was done well or done in a shoddy manner.
Better home inspections will remove breaker panel box or at very minimum use a thermal camera to check if the breakers are all reasonably warm. Usually both. But that still doesn’t really tell you much about whether something is done to code or not.
AFAIK the biggest risk is disclosure. Some states (Oregon for sure) explicitly require the seller to disclose unpermitted work. It's part of the standard forms you fill out with your realtor when making the listing.
They won't stop you from selling the house as-is but some buyers will walk, some will demand you get it permitted, most will at least want a real inspection done. Getting as-built work permitted after the fact will cost 2-3x as much in permit costs than it would have if done properly, and it may require you to remove drywall to expose things for inspection, but as long as it meets code you won't have to rip everything out and have it redone by a licensed person. In most places you can do work on your own house, so it's the lack of permit that needs to be remedied.
Home inspections are pretty normal when you buy a property. I have no idea what work on my >200 year-old house was permitted. While the latest batch was, I'm guessing a great deal wasn't. But I don't actually know. And, if you're buying a >200 year old house, you know that along with a lot of other things.
Inspections are common but mostly just a surface examination. They cannot, for example, inspect electrical wiring. They can recommend you hire an electrical inspector.
I just sold a 120 year old house. “I don’t know” is a valid answer to the disclosure requirement but it better be true.
Barring very obvious problems, I think you're way overestimating how deeply either home inspectors or town/cities are going to be deeply inspecting (especially older) properties and/or permits. My property is over 200 years old and a lot of the work on it has been licensed but there is doubtless a lot that is older.
In the SF Bay Area, I'd bet good money that the vast majority of work like that is unpermitted. When I was adding an EV charging station to my home, I actually paid a (reputable, licensed) electrician and he rolled his eyes hard at me when I asked about permits. He said it would add weeks to the project and double the cost. Without it, it was a three-hour job.
The city isn't in the business of busting doors and issuing citations if you replace kitchen cabinets without a permit. They basically act if someone credibly complains, which is mostly if you're doing some exterior additions / changes that annoy a neighbor.
I mean...what are the odds of that? And if it does happen, it sounds like a hassle, but the overall cost in that scenario probably isn't THAT much higher than having the licensed person do it in the first place?
Sure, if the odds are 50/50, or you go to jail, or the fines are $50k or something, then yeah, do it right from the start.
But if there's a 2% chance of getting caught, getting caught costs you 150%, and not getting caught costs you 10%...the choice is pretty obvious here, isn't it?
one thing about discount DIY mini splits: they're sometimes/often the same model, with a hodge podge of similar but not identical components. it can be very difficult to get a repair person to work on these - they stand a lot to lose if they try to operate on it and make it worse. they really prefer consistency, and - they also seem to harbor a bit of a distaste for diy systems. Actually, I was educated by one serviceperson's opinion and by the end of their complaints, the experience cost more than the cash, injury wise. But I think relaying this, has some value, because I suspect it's common.
HVAC techs are in such high demand, they can charge exorbitant rates to install/service, that its not in their interest to service them, or even install them.
It took me a while to find a company to install a mini split I purchased on my own, and I paid $$ for labor. This was only because I didn't have the time.
That said, mini splits are so cheap (sub $500) that its easier to just purchase a new one than repair.
> I jumped to the end and saw $2.3k for the mini split and couldn't believe it. I've installed mini splits on two homes and the quotes were always in the $15-25k range for 3-5 head units, so $2.3k for a head + outdoor condenser unit sounded implausible, but then I saw he found a surprisingly good deal:
It doesn’t take long to install a mini-split condenser with a single air handler. Precast pad for the condensing unit, set the condensing unit on the pad (or buy a wall mount if you need to mount it off the ground), run sealtite to the condenser from the disconnect switch and pull in wire, drill two holes for the line sets and one hole for the power/signal cable that runs from the condenser to the air handler, mount the air handler, connect the line sets, plug in the power/signal cable, install and wire the thermostat. Seal the holes with silicone and turn the mini-split on.
It’s less than a day of work, finding a mechanical contractor to install equipment you furnish for $160-175/hr shouldn’t be hard, contractors just like ripping off homeowners because they don’t know any better.
You don’t really even need a mechanical contractor with precharged line sets, just ensure the disconnect switch is off and locked out before touching any line voltage wiring, and make sure you mount anything heavy to studs and not plywood or drywall.
Minisplits install costs are the biggest scam in the US, in Japan installs regularly cost under $1000 (that includes the minisplit!).
They're literally designed to be easy to install, but in the US licensing requirements tend to be insane (in my state it's 2 years apprenticeship experience for their 'easier to get' mini-split license) and HVAC companies make more off whole home systems.
These things are regularly installed DIY by homeowners (illegally most of the time but you know), it doesn't take two years of experience to be able to install these without issue. 2 weeks, or half a dozen installs surely would be more than enough.
For the author, I really like the way it turned out. Your choice of the larger windows does change the game for a space like that. You gained useful space on your property that can be reconfigured later if conditions change.
I did notice that you mentioned soffit vents. From the photos I am having a hard time picturing how those vents were installed on that shed since they are designed to allow airflow from the soffit to the ridge. Knowing that you had a ridge vent cut in it makes it likely to me that you used baffles to allow the airflow between soffit and ridge and then insulated between the baffles and the interior space. I don't see that in the photos though so I apologize if this makes no sense.
I like the way that you finished it all out. It looks very functional. I have often considered something similar for our property but have been tied up in so many other projects that it never seems to happen.
> In Portland, I didn’t need a permit for the building because it was under the size threshold
You still need a structural building permit, beyond any electrical or plumbing permits, if it's both heated and used either as a living space or "for a business".
The city added the "for a business" wrinkle in 2024 and is very squirrely about whether using it as a work-from-home office counts as "for a business". It _does_ include working from it without bringing employees or clients into the buildling, but the way it's written implies that it's for people running a business out of their home address and not working for someone else's business.
It's a gray-enough area that I hope you got some solid legal advice. We ended up getting the permit to cover our bases in case I had to move to freelance/consulting self-employment.
Author of the blog post here. That new "for business" line was added in 2024, a year after I completed this build. It's good to know now though in case we sell and I want to do another build like this.
For anyone thinking of building like a 12x14 size back yard shed/office for year round ues, look long and hard and do the math on the cost difference in using 2x4 for the exterior wall framing vs 2x6 (like a real house). Lots of cheap shed plans default to 2x4, unfortunately.
Compared to the total cost of the project, using 2x6 and correspondingly thicker standard pink fiberglass insulation (R-13 to R-15 for a 3.5" cavity vs R-19 to R-21 for a 5.5" cavity) the cost difference is not a lot.
Thanks for taking the time to make this detailed write-up! You got a beautiful result, and I appreciate the spirit of sharing what you learned and helping people who are considering similar projects.
I'm glad you measured CO2. I've recently noticed I tend to get headaches when working or sleeping in small poorly-ventilated spaces, and I'm surprised how often I encounter new structures without ventilation. I guess tightly-sealed buildings are still a relatively new idea.
In the PNW you could probably be comfortable >90% of days with a cracked window, fan, adjustable shades, and a little electric radiator, but if I was doing this project I'd probably opt for the modern heat pump / ERV combo as well.
There isn't really any clinical evidence for CO2 levels impacting stuff beyond so called "sleep efficiency," where the effect is small (above 1000 ppm is 5% reduction in sleep efficiency) and it has the counterintuitive effect that less efficient sleep is sleeping longer, which is usually what people want. That said, placebo effects are still real.
i'm aware of this one. clinical evidence - do moderately high CO2 levels CAUSE a disease? afaik no. the test in this study: they measure something real, but it is not used to diagnose someone routinely (despite what they say). they had a surprising result where performance on one of the subtests increased, and some were not affected (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23008272/#&gid=article-figur...). i am basically saying that, CO2 levels - do they cause headaches like the user is saying? I don't know, nobody has investigated that. 2500 ppm is very high concentration. it merits more study but not a panic.
It might be that poor ventilation gives me headaches for other reasons, and CO2 concentration is just a useful proxy that's easy to measure. The evidence seems to support this idea, whereas like you said the evidence for CO2 in isolation is pretty questionable.
If nothing else, at least a well-ventilated room expels my farts and other airborne waste products.
And people don't want to sleep longer, they want to feel well-rested. So I think higher sleep efficiency is better.
Boy things are different in Portland where you pay people to insult sheds…
But 8x10 for $20,000 just goes to show how expensive USA is for construction. There’s a point where I would review coworking space cost (not as convenient, I know) to just living and owning property abroad.
In this day and age, where material stuff is so cheap, isn’t 20K for a tiny shed crazy? Clearly it is because it involves so much work, and work is so expensive, but I can’t help but think there should be a technical solution to this. Or buildings are just not automatable? I’m amazed.
This is pretty fancy to call it a shed. Walk outside any Lowe’s or Home Depot and you will see several pre-built options that can be had for $500-$4000 with them getting increasingly elaborate.
Electrical + AC is a firm line where that goes from shed to detached office.
I mean I was just in Costco and they were selling some 8x12 sheds for like $6500. They weren't even finished inside. Just a floor, 4 walls and a roof. No foundations, no insulation, no sheetrock, no power. I suck at carpentry and even I could build that in a few days.
It's probably mostly labor cost. An 8x10 shed kit starts at under $US2k but if you pay someone to assemble it, including electrical, the price will go up very quickly.
I know someone who builds horse shelters that are larger than that, but a fraction of the cost, delivered. I've actually been thinking that if I wanted an outside office, I'd ask him to custom build one with the fourth wall closed (horse shelters are 3-sided) and I'd insulate and sheetrock it myself. IIRC he did our 10x30 one for about $2k, including delivery.
Around here, the cutoff for needing a permit for a "permanent structure" is 10'x12' which is a pretty good sized outside office.
You could do it for less than half that cost if you do your own labour. I actually came into the article thinking that’s what they did but was disappointed.
It was about $9k for the shed and the foundation, poured and installed. The other $11k was for everything else making it a living space and not just a shed. Not so bad in that context.
For reference, ~2 years ago I did a 8x12 shed for under $3K, DIY. It is not insulated or finished inside. Footer and slab were under a grand, I used some reclaimed 2x4s and bought the rest, sheathing, roofing, flashing, self-made windows were around another $1,200-$1,500. Paint was the real surprise at almost $300.
Theres a baseline cost for work to be done, the OP decided to build an 8x10, but easily could cost a similar amount or a few thousand more for a shed 4x larger.
> But 8x10 for $20,000 just goes to show how expensive USA is for construction.
Labor is expensive. You could probably close to double the size for an additional $10,000, you’d need another yard and a half of concrete for the foundation (6” depth*80 sqft = 40 cubic feet) and more material for the building, but not twice as much material, or labor. Electrical service could stay the same.l and the mini-split wouldn’t have to be much bigger.
Im jealous of the Tuff Shed or prebuilt being an option. Where I live we have incredibly high snow loads, so any structure ends up needing to be custom built to meet our requirements (even out buildings). I've found plenty of pre-fab units that claim to handle "high snow loads" that will not meet code where I am.
I'm still planning on building out an office/studio, but it will be a much larger investment despite being able to DIY much of it.
Heya I'd love to help you bring it to life and DIY it. I'm working on https://myhomecat.com/ - which lets you design a code-compliant version and you can fiddle around with budget, needs, etc. I've helped other folks with step by step guides after they've created a design they're happy with.
Can I ask you how you're designing it right now? I could whip up some designs for you for free.
well it just has to stop significant buildup over multiple days right? IDK, seems pretty effective here in tahoe where ive seen it applied on parts of peoples houses
Do people in Tahoe heat-tape their whole roof or just the edge where ice dams would otherwise form? I've only ever seen the latter, and even doing that will be noticeable on your power bill.
Cascade mountains. I've seen over 5 feet of snow in under 48 hours, then freezing rain. Its heavy! Lots of these "it'll be fine" type structures collapsed.
Building code for snow load is a factor of location and elevation here. We are around 130 lb/sq ft.
Roof pitch can help with shedding, but then you've got other problems (roof avalanches can and do kill, not to mention snow up against materials that don't want to be wet all winter).
This is a problem with the people and ideology that are concentrated in your jurisdiction and the resulting rules that come of that. Even the snootiest "Barack Obama is my neighbor" zip codes have permitting and code exemptions for various sorts of small sheds.
Structurally a wet fart will hold up plenty of snow when we're talking spans on the order of 10ft. A garden shed that can literally roll away in a tornado is only a few hundred dollars of material different from one that can't.
Of course Tuff Shed (or anyone else) isn't gonna make a special product line for one town in CO or wherever that wants to de-facto outlaw the construction of shed by people less than a certain wealth level. Those people can have their stuff built from scratch at great cost. Of the dozen lost sales they were likely some of the most problematic anyway.
Of course they wont! Plenty of people around here still use structures not built for the load or build under the square footage that requires a permit. Those can and do fail, and I'd prefer not to be in one when they do :).
My feedback is merely: boy it'd be nice to have the option to just order a pre-built.
Looks awesome, but I would have run single-mode fiber between the house and the office. Eliminates any issues with lightning strikes taking out equipment or other electrical gremlins, not to mention providing opportunity for expanding bandwidth in the future by just swapping out the SFP modules on each end. Pre-terminated fiber from fs.com is inexpensive and easy to work with - just measure and install.
Media converters are effectively a switch, but less flexible. I would buy a switch with an sfp+ port instead and use it with an appropriate sfp module.
Nice, I also have an office in my backyard. Although its a ~100 year old brick structure that was originally staff quarters. Had to put a new roof on it, run power, fibre and install AC. Now its my office / data centre (yes I put a rack in a room I sit in...)
Did similar, but went 12x16, trenched power and cat6, did rockwool insulation, did pine tongue and groove paneling and an Alaskan white cedar porch.
When we sold the house, I'm pretty sure the shed is what sealed the deal, people had all sorts of things they wanted it to be, even as a spare bedroom
i did a 24x36, with a loft. 2015, 32,000 bucks from lavalley's in newport nh, installed 80 miles away in another random town. poured slab. 6 windows, 2 garage doors. i realized, all i did was build a garage, not a work from home office.
but over the next few years i learned so many hobby art projects: insulation, electrical, sheetrock. a few inspections, a few consults. a few surprises that people in this state can just go buy the stuff at a box store!
and then eventually, my 12x6 foot office appeared, the same width as a 1960s metal tanker desk. finally!
and ... i instantly hated working out there. i didnt make it 6 weeks. it's just an office for storing crap, now: i work out of the house, where the kitchen, dogs, bathroom, are. but the journey was worth it, even if the destination was not.
We did this for my wife right before the Pandemic. Luckily we already had a 12 foot by 12 foot cement pad in our backyard. The building itself was 10 feet by 12 feet and cost $5000. Then we had to install insulation and drywall which was another $1500. Then I had a single 20 Amp power line installed and that cost another $1000, but I also had him do some other work and I assisted with the digging of the trench. I think we were at around $9000 all in with it. I checked with the company and that model of building we got is around $8000 now, so maybe around 60% more now?
> I wrote up my experience building a backyard office because I wish I had come across more articles like this when planning my build. I hope this post helps you on your journey.
I don't recall how technical it is[^1] because I read it years ago, but Michael Pollan wrote an entire book about building himself a writing room:
$20k seems steep for whats effectively a small shed with a nice finish. Especially that the bare shed itself was $6k. In Ireland I can get an 18x10ft cabin for about €5k, and this is one of the most expensive countries
West coast prices are in a different ballpark. Im shocked at how cheap the concrete work was. I got 20 quotes and 6k was the cheapest for a 12x12 pour.
I have a neighbor 100k+ into a foundation retrofit for his living room.
I always think about it, but then I remember I couldn't sleep knowing my tech stuff is inside a shed in the backyard. Too easy to break in and steal it.
I don't know what kind of tech stuff you have, but since you can run ethernet (or better, fiber) to the shed, you could keep most of it locked in the house and just walk out with your laptop to your workspace each day.
Monitors are relatively cheap these days, you can get a name brand 32" 4K monitor for around $300 - if someone busts in and steals it, the door/window repair will probably cost more than the monitor.
Building a home office in your backyard is really hard. It's a good idea (though expensive) to go with a pre-built if you don't wanna figure all the details out. If you DIY the design and build, you have to figure out:
- What type of floor? (2x4? 2x6? will it hold me and my chair without collapsing?)
- What roof type? How big should the overhang be? What's easier to build yourself vs looks nicer but a real pain to build?
- How many windows should be in my office?
- How do I build something within my budget?
- What size of shed should I go with for my purpose? (workshop? office?)
I'm working on https://myhomecat.com - which lets you do all of this. If you enter your address and the kind of shed you want (i.e. 10x12 office), you should be able to get something fully code-compliant that figures out all of your details. It's still early so it doesn't cover every edge case, but the idea is there and it works really well from the feedback I've gotten.
Do you have an idea of the R-value of the insulation you put in? I'm wondering what this will take to heat and cool during the peaks of summer and winter.
True. Depending on how heavily they compressed it to fit between those studs it will likely be less than R13. No matter whether you use fiberglass or rockwool, you should make sure you buy insulation sized to the depth of the cavity it will insulate. Then use an insulation knife to cut in for obstacles within the cavities.
It seems very expensive. I built a 5m x 3m 'log cabin' garden office (in Scotland in 2018), with electricity and cat6 cabled internet for £5k (approx $6800). The shed itself was a kit-build so easy and for foundations I used stakes (concreted in).
I've wanted to build one of these for a while just to have that "going into the office" feel even with WFH; appreciate the detail and breakdown. Also, lovely styled personal site.
Have you started designing? If you're open to it - I could help you jump start this and give you a few designs for free based on what you're thinking about.
True, things in the west tend to cost more than elsewhere (I'm in Seattle WA.)
My mother-in-law lives in rural Missouri and had her 6x10 bathroom remodeled in 2025. Full gut replacement of everything. Total cost: $5600. I got a quote for something similar in a bit larger bathroom in our house in Seattle. Quoted price: $31,000.
Labor is a good chunk of cost, and the OP presented that he simply didn't have the time available to him to do that work himself. On the other hand, I built 20-ish feet of fencing for our backyard this summer, matching an existing design we had done several years ago. Quoted price from the same company that did it the first time: $9800. I did the work myself. My total cost: $1400.
That works out great, right? I also have a significant investment in all the right tools: compound mitre saw, construction-grade table saw, nail guns, impact/hammer/regular drills, angle grinders, power sanders, every drill bit in captivity -- I don't really lack for anything. These make a huge difference in the workmanship of the final outcome.
And that was just a fence. I've considered building an external office here at our house. When I start to take into account the scope of converting an outdoor shed to an acceptable backyard office, I hit the brakes. Electrical power under proper permits, adequate security, something that holds up under our weather, potential water/sewer access, and sufficient space to work (I can't live without a whiteboard)...there is more scope than meets the eye.
All things considered, I think the OP did a pretty good job here in terms of cost control and recognizing what he could do (windows) vs. needed someone else to do (proper electrical.)
Yep. I'm adding 500sqft to my home in Silicon Valley and the cost will end up being more than I spent to buy the house 12 year ago.
Smaller jobs are more expensive per square foot because not all costs scale with size. Which is why you see all these godawful TJ Homes being built where they just rip out the house, build a 3 story structure (including basement) that takes every square inch of the lot.
Not just places like Silicon Valley - my sister lives in rural Canada in an area where costs have exploded since covid, and just paid nearly as much as their original house price (from <10 years ago) to have a nice garage built.
A lot of that cost is labour. Look at all the spots it says "contracted" in the breakdown. If you can do a lot of the work yourself, then you can save a lot of $$$, but it's a tradeoff of course. (They also could have saved quite a bit by just having a window unit AC, but that's up to them.)
Seems about right given labor. If you do most things yourself other than electrical, can probably cut cost a fair bit. But tradespeople are expensive when you can even get them.
I have one problem that keeps me from doing something like this. Weather. I don't want to get wet walking out or back because it happens to be raining.
You can put in an awning or covered walkway between the buildings. You can even do a fully enclosed, fully climate controlled hallway with lots of windows and doors out to the yard, etc. Just depends on how much you want to pay and your imagination.
I've seen some properties where they build ponds underneath the indoor hallway with glass flooring to see the fish and stuff in the pond. Obviously wild things like that cost a bit more then a simple awning or covered walkway.
And then lose all the regulatory benefit of whatever shed exemption you're trying to use, get absolutely screwed on regulatory compliance and code whatnot that you're leveraging by having it be a detached outbuilding. And then get sneered at by HN when you say the rules as they apply to your situation are stupid.
you might get screwed on regulatory compliance, it just depends on your local govt and how much they want to screw you.
It's got to suck to do the inspectors job. Having to keep up with whatever the code creators come up with, while also getting abused by every home owner and contractor in the area because they hate X,Y or Z. While trying to dodge political leverage from elected officials trying to get whatever pet mess they want done.
It's not a job I'd want, and I bet they get paid trash to boot.
Code compliance and inspections exist for a reason, and if you are lucky, the current inspector/code compliance dept in your local govt realizes it's to ensure the building doesn't fall down around your ankles when you least expect it and not to screw you over.
> It's got to suck to do the inspectors job. Having to keep up with whatever the code creators come up with, while also getting abused by every home owner and contractor in the area because they hate X,Y or Z.
Permit inspectors are basically unaccountable. There's no requirement that what you sign off meets code or that you'll sign off if it meets code.
As a builder, best thing is if you can fix whatever needs fixing while the inspector is there. If not, there's a non-zero chance you get a different inspector for the reinspection who likes it the way the first inspector said you couldn't do it.
That's like a 5-10 second walk, I can't imagine your legs are going to get all that wet in that timespan.
Like if I'm bringing my bins to the road for pickup, I never bother putting on a jacket or w/e regardless of weather. If it does happen to actually be a torrential downpour, I just switch to a new t-shirt when I'm back inside.
I ran PVC between my house and shop/office with 2 sets of single-mode fiber instead of ethernet. Electrical code will require proper grounding for copper for lightning strikes.
Like /u/someothherguyy said it depends on the cable type. There are shielded and jacketed outdoor cables that don't require PVC/EMT, but usually you'll have to terminate them yourself so there's additional tooling required.
I went with PVC because it's the easiest to work with, NEC only required it be buried 12in below the surface for residential, but I went to 24". I oversized the PVC a bit so I had room to run more cables as well. I filled the trench with gravel, ran the PVC over that, then filled over it with some more gravel. A thin layer of dirt, marking tape and then the rest of the dirt. Rent a trencher if you have hard ground.
If you're having a licensed electrician do the work of connecting house and office power then you can ask them to run the conduit for it at the same time.
$20K still seems like a lot to get some mosquito bites walking through the yard to work. Lack of plumbing, coffee, etc (some of those are fixable of course) is a bit of a turnoff but perhaps the walk is part of the charm.
I find that with kids mostly in school and knowing the rules the exterior space isn’t a requirement, but I don’t have a ton of meetings these days so YMMV. Mostly this is cope because I don’t have 20K to drop on a cool office! :)
If you're relatively handy, a lot of what OP paid for can be DIY'ed. I would have never paid a contractor to do all of that. Probably just the electrical. Especially the Tuff Shed structure. Those things are dead simple, marketed at DIYers, and can be finished in a weekend. Insulation, drywall, trim, and flooring is also child's play. OP could have easily cut the project's cost in half if he wanted to.
Yeah I had the same thoughts about what they chose to DIY vs hire out. Insulation is so simple, and trim can be done at your leisure. But thats also not likely to save much overall since the contractors also know how simple those are.
You're missing the important part: doing all of this WITH A ONE YEAR OLD CRAWLING AROUND AT HOME. You can get things done, it is just an order of magnitude longer that it would take without kid(s).
Author here. I have heard this complaint from others before. If you live in an area where it snows I am assuming this would be a pain. But a 20 foot walk to my house is not a trek. If I was in an office the bathroom and coffee would be farther away. Honestly I like the outside part of the trek, it is a nice change.
The Coffee issue is easy to solve, just bring a pitcher of water with you in the morning to pour into the coffee maker - it's what I did when my home office was in a spare room above the garage. The walk from his back yard to the indoor bathroom is probably shorter than the walk he'd have in any office.
I considered doing this or buying a house that already had an ADU/casita when we were house shopping, but I have a very different situation with being mostly home alone during the day and a dedicated room in the house for an office. I still think this might be an ideal though, because having a physically separate space has both psychological and physical advantages. Particularly, I wish I could pre-wire a /lot/ of networking in the space and separately air condition it, because I prefer much colder temperatures and it'd be cheaper to keep a separate office at 68F and the house at 74F than try to keep the house at 68-70F.
There is no country on earth that doesn't have the massive wealth disparity where some people can't afford to buy a home while other people can afford a shed.
Not a great idea for those in snowy areas of the USA. A short burst of snow storms and now to get to work you're dealing with typical access problems such as frozen doors, shoveling, ice, and cleaning up the melt or adding some small mudroom to get in and out during the day. Also, watching your kids play and build a snowman right in front of your window while you sit in a meeting would feel like torture.
I'm sure it would increase the cost of the project by many times and require more complex permits, but just think how cool it would be to access your office shed through an underground tunnel.
But you've got to shovel and clear snow regardless? Shoveling a small path and being careful how you take off your shoes sure beats scraping ice off of a car and dealing with the plows' windrow.
The biggest problems I see is wanting to frame out the walls with 2x6's for thicker insulation, ceiling trusses at 16 oc for snow load and thicker for insulation as well (or lose the headroom and build a traditional ceiling/attic), and of course more heating load from the heat pump.
Author here. Thanks for the comments everyone!
There are many comments on the price point. I would like to comment on one thing.
"$20k is too much"
I agree $20k is an investment. Could I have done it for cheaper? Absolutely. Would a DIY shell been cheaper? Would doing more of the work myself have been cheaper? Could I have saved by putting in the smaller stock windows and not having a skylight? Of course!
But I am a dad with a young kid, he was 1 when I built the office. I didn't want to spend my limited free time on this project. There was a trade-off between paying for labor and the time it would take to do it myself. At this point in my life I always look at these decisions through a lens of: is the cost savings worth my time. In this case I valued my time more than the cost savings. I was lucky enough to be in a situation where I would rather spend money for someone else to build this then spending my nights and weekends on this project.
I am almost 4 years in I would have paid over $20k for a co-working space. We were able to stay in our smaller house with a ridiculously low mortgage rate. We made the right choice for us.
Cheap is relative. Sometimes your time is worth more. There are litteraly entire companies built on this premise, cough DoorDash
> I am almost 4 years in
Also worth mentioning 2026 - 4 = 2022. Not a great year to be stick building from a cost perspective.
My 12x16 took way more time, but I did it all myself. I mostly worked at night once the heavy loud stuff was done because of the young kid factor. But at only a couple hours a day, it took about 4 months. Although I did build mine down into a ~3 feet deep basement of sorts which complicated it (I didn’t want it visible from outside my fence). Even did off grid electric with solar to avoid needing contractors or permits. I won’t hate because I get the time trade off, and I really hate/appreciate a few trades more than before (drywall the most). For reference mine was $15k in 2025.
The main thing I’d advise people against and say you could have possibly saved on is the structure. Tuff Shed is usually over priced and could be built usually with $2k-3k of material and labor. But the time you did this may have made that hard too, all the contractors were slammed.
$20k is too little.
Thank you for the cool post.
I'm in the middle of finishing out my own (significantly larger) shed I just had built, basically all DIY except for the structure itself. The number that popped into my head at the start of your post was $30k - each step adds up when you're paying small job overheads. That you did it for $20k is pretty great.
That you think $20k was a good deal for this shack in your backyard is indicative of how little we know about building.
You got raked over the coals. You can downvote me, but as someone who knows how to build structures man, I feel so sorry for people reading your message thinking this is OK.
This is really, really poor quality for the cost.
I’m not even a commercial builder. A bag of Portland cement concrete is $5/bag. You don’t need to pay $2k for such a small foundation.
Beyond the fact that there's absolutely no reason for you to post this, I'm not sure what you're looking at. I'm not a pro but I've been building sheds and things for decades and based on the pictures here I don't see low quality. Maybe I'd put more joists in the roof but Portland doesn't get a ton of snow so I'm sure it's fine. $2k is a fine price for that slab, especially compared to the pain of lifting 80lb bags of concrete yourself all day. People shouldn't be afraid of spending the money on a pro if they've got the money to spend.
Maybe he could have saved a few thousand with different subs (maybe) but your comments are nonsensical. I see tons of janky builds people post on Reddit and this is not one of them. You should spend your commenting time over there.
It's not $5/bag. There's also tools to be bought or rented, knowledge and skills to learn, and time spent. $2k is the cheat code to skip all of that.
My calculus is to evaluate time, cost, and quality. If someone can match or beat me on 2/3 of those dimensions then I'll hire them.
He's getting downvoted, but he's not wrong - however, finding someone who specializes in doing this would be hard, and knowing how to word it so you can use "standard crews" would itself be $2-3k for a GC.
This is the danger of "cheap projects" - they can grow legs before you know it, and you end up paying half the cost of increasing the square footage of the house (or the garage).
Yeah of course you could DIY this or find your own subs much cheaper, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not that bad.
You get a finished and conditioned room, and it most likely added value to his house.
Unless he’s a commercial builder, I’d suggest he is wildly wrong about what is involved in properly pouring, leveling and making sure concrete has properly set in various weather conditions. And if you take a look at his post …
Huh. I would have gone the other route if I was going to rant and say there’s no way to do this for so cheap because I’ve looked at replacing a shed in NH with something a bit more sizable and while you can get a nice looking prefab for like 6-8k, that’s before the pad. Add in real windows and a mini split and insulation and I’ve no idea how to keep it that low, but I am jealous.
You can buy all the Quickcrete you want (not sure the last time you priced it), but it won’t make you good at pouring a level pad. That alone puts me off trying to do it some days.
> I’m not even a commercial builder. A bag of Portland cement concrete is $5/bag. You don’t need to pay $2k for such a small foundation.
An 8x10 6” slab has 1.5 cubic yards of concrete. Making concrete takes more than a bag of Portland cement, you also need gravel, sand, a mixer, a wood frame, a source of water, shovels, floats, et cetera. If you want rebar, add in steel and rebar tools and wire.
You could frame up the wood yourself and have Cemstone deliver the concrete but you still need to spread it out, float it, and finish it.
Instead of buying or renting all of that, I would sub it out. I subcontract out light pole bases and concrete pads for transformers, EV chargers, and other equipment all of the time.
For work-from-home, I can't emphasize enough how much of a game changer it is to have a physically separate building for your work, especially if you have a family with kids and noise and pets and things. Working from a spare bedroom, even one without a bed / outfitted as an office, is just not my thing. Even if your family "knows the rules" and let you work in peace. It subjectively still "feels like you're home". With a separate building, I can do a short walking commute and take those 10 seconds to "get into work mindset." And, once I'm out there, it can be a hermetically sealed, zero-distraction zone.
If you are lucky and fortunate enough to live in an actual house with land, and work (or are thinking about working) remotely, seriously consider investing in an actual separate building for your office.
If what you want is an office you can go to which is not in your home, it seems like it would be ever so much simpler to go live near your actual office, which your employer already pays for, than to move far enough away from everything that you can afford to buy a piece of property, build an office on it, and then have to deal with all the extra driving a remote lifestyle implies.
In my opinion it's commuting to the office which sucks, and not working in the office: I had a couple years where I walked in to work every day, and that was basically ideal. (It was, ironically, a job I started while living on the opposite side of the country: I then moved to a place about a mile from the office, quite a pleasant walk through the heart of the city.)
I would not go out of my way to live near where I work when my employer can fire me on a whim.
If the office was in a place where I could reasonably expect to find other jobs as well, then that could be part of my consideration, but I would never choose to live somewhere based primarily on whatever my current job is.
That's a good point. The office I mentioned was located in downtown Seattle, a city where jobs are plentiful and I have many connections, so moving there was an easy choice.
>live near your actual office, which your employer already pays for,
I've been in the game for almost 40 years now, and I'll say I've never had an office paid for by my employer that is as nice as that toughshed. I've never been in a dedicated office with a door, except when working from home.
Edit: ProTip: If you are doing concrete, rent a "Mud Mixer". Me an the kids were able to pour the 8x12x5" (130 bags of 80lbs) in well under a day, probably would have been even less if we had moved the bagged concrete to the pour site before the pour happened rather than as we were pouring.
My office suuuucks. All the actual machines are in a dedicated space so we have to hot desk and remote in even if we come to the office. There’s not even cubicles, just rows of desks. I would go out of my way NOT to work there.
Everyone has different opinions about this stuff, but I for one found _working_ in the office to absolutely be the worst part. And since Covid, my workplace has torn down old buildings and reduced square footage per employee, so if I went back to the office it would be even worse.
Do you work at Microsoft or is this a broader trend?
It’s been a broader trend of businesses downsizing the square footage when they can and when they can’t they start to mandate in office to justify the cost.
> In my opinion it's commuting to the office which sucks, and not working in the office
I'm not a fan of commuting either but for me it's definitely the working in an office that sucks
Maybe if it wasn't an open office bullpen style place but I've only worked in places without private or semi private offices, or even cubes
> it seems like it would be ever so much simpler to go live near your actual office
This constrains the companies you can work at to ones with a local office, if you do not want to move house. If you want to live within walking distance of many companies, you could easily be looking at paying millions of dollars for a poor quality house.
There is a happy medium if you like offices (see below): co-working spaces.
> it's commuting to the office which sucks, and not working in the office
Most company offices are fucking horrific - open plan, atrocious coffee, noisy, full of people who won’t stay home when they are sick.
Yeah the worst thing about working from within your house... bathroom, coffee, anything at all that necessitates going out of the room entails a major context switch for the most inane reasons and conversations.
I agree with that, but I often wonder whether maintaining a separation for longer periods just leads to a bigger backlog of these topics building up and making it worse when it does happen.
In this case they'd still have to go inside to go to the bathroom. :/
to be honest, having to walk inside to use the bathroom or refill your cup of coffee seems like a nice way to stand up and get the blood flowing again + breathe some fresh air.
I've got a bathroom in my out-building office, too, and a small kitchen with a sink, coffee maker, toaster, fridge, and so on. The limit is money to spend and land area to build on :)
Yeah, second that. I made my office separated from the main house and it's incredible.
We bought an old house and did a full remodel and planned for an office and a work kitchen (my wife is a chef) separated from the main house (and each other).
It's been a game changer
I've been WFH since Covid and, when it first happened, my office was in a finished attic that was not well conditioned. I like it warmer so I didn't mind, and the lack of comfort for others meant I enjoyed more solo time.
These days, I may as well not even have a door. I put auto-shutting hinges on it, but that failed as reminder/deterrent long ago.
We've got a 10x20 out back that was supposed to be my workshop, but it's filled with all the things most Americans put in their garages - because we don't have one. I'm seriously considering a deep purge and converting at least 1/2 of to an office; the distractions and context switching are disastrous.
Hmm. I have a decent shed outside my house and my current office (in the house) is decent but when kids get home it gets a bit harder.
I wonder if I can convert an existing shed...
It's smarter (and cheaper!) to live by yourself because your entire house is distraction-free.
Even better, avoid making my friends so you won't receive pesky texts asking you to hangout.
In fact, probably better to just put your desk in the bathroom for maximum efficiency!
I visited a friend's apartment and he was going on and on about how everyone around him seems to be getting exploding dogs, so I think the key is to live by yourself in a house separated from others.
But down that path lies a cabin innawoods.
This is correct. There needs to be some outside air in between you and people, not just a wall.
A moat would also be nice.
Head to the shed:
https://www.idler.co.uk/article/sheds-in-the-time-of-lockdow...
We built a new garage with an upstairs ADU when I started working from home in 2018. It is indeed a game-changer, and when we no longer need the space we can use it for a rental, guest house, etc.
ADU: Accessory dwelling unit.
<https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/originating-underwriting/...>
The perfect work-from-home office is a tethered balloon. Change my mind.
Stepping back a bit, if you are working remotely that's likely a proxy for an increased likelihood of job loss due to AI.
Why start and invest in a construction project for a building that may not be staffed long term? Perhaps renting a small coworking space in town is the safer financial move. And have your employer pay for it.
> if you are working remotely that's likely a proxy for an increased likelihood of job loss due to AI.
only as likely as literally every other scenario. the difference is you can continue to use your backyard office for your new job
One could argue this will get at least 50% ROI if you’re forced to sell your home. It’s strictly illegal in most places to room someone in one of these, but I’m sure people do it all the time. It won’t go to waste.
in the post:
> I had tried coworking spaces but didn’t love the vibe or the idea of spending hours in a phone booth.
* Goes ahead and builds a $20k phone booth.
Fantastic.
I jumped to the end and saw $2.3k for the mini split and couldn't believe it. I've installed mini splits on two homes and the quotes were always in the $15-25k range for 3-5 head units, so $2.3k for a head + outdoor condenser unit sounded implausible, but then I saw he found a surprisingly good deal:
> I got a ton of quotes for installing a mini split. They ranged from $4-$7k, which was higher than I expected after researching the cost of a quality small unit and knowing this would be a tiny job for an HVAC contractor, especially because I had my electrician prewire the electrical. I was considering installing a DIY system (Mr. Cool DIY system with pre-charged AC lines), But found an HVAC contractor who would install a system for a much lower price than the other quotes I received (and he had great reviews on Thumbtack). In the end, I got a Daikin Mini-split, a common system with many replacement parts. The installation took about 5 hours, and my tech did a great job. I am glad I researched and got a lot of quotes for this one.
I bought my first minisplit ~4 years ago since none of the contractors were available in the hot summer. I bought the tools as well (vacuum pump, manifold, pipe cutters, etc.).
It cost me ~650$ total.
The next time I bought a minisplit (3.5kW one), I already had the tools and it cost me only 450$. A proper one meant for use during harsh winter would probably costs a bit more though, at around 1000$.
So I have set up a few of them for my family and friends so far. The units come pre-charged with gas for ~5M of ducts, there is nothing hard to set them up.
I also set up ESP32 controllers so I could attach them to Home Assistant, bypassing any Chinese cloud apps, etc.
In my state they require:
>160 hours of education/vocational training and 2 years’ verifiable experience in the trade
To get the license to install minisplits (two years experience generally means working an apprenticeship).
It's no wonder install costs are so much in the US. And as you've experienced, they're hardly rocket science to install. The 160 hours training would be more than enough, I'm not sure why 2 years experience gets tacked on the end.
Protection racket. They guys doing the installs now would make much less money if just anyone with some tools could start competing with them.
Unless your state is very unusual that is the requirement for installing them for other people as a tradesman. In most states if you are DIY for yourself all you legally need are the electrical permits for the wiring hookup (which for DIY don't require that "apprenticeship").
You also need an EPA 608 Type 2 license, though minisplits have been skirting around that for some time.
Easy to test for, though I'm not sure if you can do it for free like skillcat used to offer.
Thankfully, the training is only required if you're doing the installs for/as a business.
I think in pretty much every state releasing the refrigerant 'requires' a license (if it's not a DIY model).
And in my state, I copy pasted what was required for a 'residential' HVAC license (idk if you meant commercial HVAC or just making money on installs).
Not Montana apparently. They don't even have an HVAC contractor license anymore that I can find.
Exception rather than the rule
100%.
What will they do if they learn you installed your minisplit yourself?
Nothing because the political optics of doing anything are bad ad the last thing they want is to create a victim that causes people to ask the question why the rules are even written how they are.
Environmental law is the same way. You're mostly (details depend on jurisdiction) not supposed to pave anything without getting permission but if they pushed the issue on everyone who put a pad under their car port the rules would get changed.
They also don't 100% enforce the speed limit either.
There are people on here who live in this fantasy world where all house work is permitted and performed by licensed tradespeople which is... counterfactual.
See the Brazil movie :)
Idk for Americas, but here in rural EU no one would give a fuck. Some will ask for help.
Nothing assumes no issues. If it catches/causes a fire, good luck with insurance
This kind of thing is right up there with calling dig safe before a project that will be exclusively hand excavated. At some point you're basically just paying to circle jerk it with the other boot lickers in the office or at the cocktail party over how much you paid for no reason just because the rules that will never be enforced say you ought to.
I couldn't believe it either because it seemed so expensive! EU based colleague got a high-ish end japanese unit (purhased and professionally installed with over 20% VAT on parts and labour) for less than that. The devices can be had for 1000 bucks or less.
I figured it had to be because the US devices are very different but they seem to be the same, and the explanation given by the usual automaton suspect was that the climate control business in the US is basically a cartel with highly inflated prices and shady regulations around how they can be sold.
Not sure if the claim is valid, but the price diff is remarkable so there must be some explanation. Usually everything you can buy is cheaper in the US.
Honestly, I would recommend just doing it yourself. Especially if you have a contractor pull in the electrical connection for it. I installed a pre-charged unit in a much more complicated attic setup (condenser mounted to outside wall on second floor, 20' of refrigerant lines run with lots of angles) and the whole thing took 6-8 hours with no experience. Mounting it to a shed where you're basically just cutting a hole in a wall and the indoor unit and outdoor unit are in more or less the same location should be extremely straight forward. The unit cost me less than $1k five years ago and has been running perfectly ever since.
if someone finds out you did this yourself then can't the city put a lien on your property preventing a sale until you rip everything out and have it re-done by a licensed person? I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house. at least i think that's how it is..
> I know with electricity whether you do it per code or not a licensed electrician has to sign off before you can sell your house. at least i think that's how it is..
Where? No electrician is inspecting every house that goes up for sale in the US. Sure you can ask an electrician to inspect a house electrical… but that doesn’t bar a house sale anywhere I’ve ever seen.
For the home inspections I've been a "walkthrough witness" to, the "electrical inspection" portion involved the inspector opening the normal access door to the breaker panel levers, and plugging in one of those $5 Home Depot wiring fault detectors into a few random plugs here and there to verify no wiring faults appear.
But they do not remove the panel cover to look inside, nor do they open up any receptacle box anywhere to look at any of the wiring inside. So they wouldn't know (nor discover) if the wiring job was done well or done in a shoddy manner.
Better home inspections will remove breaker panel box or at very minimum use a thermal camera to check if the breakers are all reasonably warm. Usually both. But that still doesn’t really tell you much about whether something is done to code or not.
AFAIK the biggest risk is disclosure. Some states (Oregon for sure) explicitly require the seller to disclose unpermitted work. It's part of the standard forms you fill out with your realtor when making the listing.
They won't stop you from selling the house as-is but some buyers will walk, some will demand you get it permitted, most will at least want a real inspection done. Getting as-built work permitted after the fact will cost 2-3x as much in permit costs than it would have if done properly, and it may require you to remove drywall to expose things for inspection, but as long as it meets code you won't have to rip everything out and have it redone by a licensed person. In most places you can do work on your own house, so it's the lack of permit that needs to be remedied.
Home inspections are pretty normal when you buy a property. I have no idea what work on my >200 year-old house was permitted. While the latest batch was, I'm guessing a great deal wasn't. But I don't actually know. And, if you're buying a >200 year old house, you know that along with a lot of other things.
Inspections are common but mostly just a surface examination. They cannot, for example, inspect electrical wiring. They can recommend you hire an electrical inspector.
I just sold a 120 year old house. “I don’t know” is a valid answer to the disclosure requirement but it better be true.
Barring very obvious problems, I think you're way overestimating how deeply either home inspectors or town/cities are going to be deeply inspecting (especially older) properties and/or permits. My property is over 200 years old and a lot of the work on it has been licensed but there is doubtless a lot that is older.
In the SF Bay Area, I'd bet good money that the vast majority of work like that is unpermitted. When I was adding an EV charging station to my home, I actually paid a (reputable, licensed) electrician and he rolled his eyes hard at me when I asked about permits. He said it would add weeks to the project and double the cost. Without it, it was a three-hour job.
The city isn't in the business of busting doors and issuing citations if you replace kitchen cabinets without a permit. They basically act if someone credibly complains, which is mostly if you're doing some exterior additions / changes that annoy a neighbor.
I mean...what are the odds of that? And if it does happen, it sounds like a hassle, but the overall cost in that scenario probably isn't THAT much higher than having the licensed person do it in the first place?
Sure, if the odds are 50/50, or you go to jail, or the fines are $50k or something, then yeah, do it right from the start.
But if there's a 2% chance of getting caught, getting caught costs you 150%, and not getting caught costs you 10%...the choice is pretty obvious here, isn't it?
Pulling in the electrical connection is actually simpler. So you might as well do that yourself too.
It is, but you'd be surprised at the number of folks who will DIY stuff, but won't DIY anything electrical.
one thing about discount DIY mini splits: they're sometimes/often the same model, with a hodge podge of similar but not identical components. it can be very difficult to get a repair person to work on these - they stand a lot to lose if they try to operate on it and make it worse. they really prefer consistency, and - they also seem to harbor a bit of a distaste for diy systems. Actually, I was educated by one serviceperson's opinion and by the end of their complaints, the experience cost more than the cash, injury wise. But I think relaying this, has some value, because I suspect it's common.
HVAC techs are in such high demand, they can charge exorbitant rates to install/service, that its not in their interest to service them, or even install them.
It took me a while to find a company to install a mini split I purchased on my own, and I paid $$ for labor. This was only because I didn't have the time.
That said, mini splits are so cheap (sub $500) that its easier to just purchase a new one than repair.
> I jumped to the end and saw $2.3k for the mini split and couldn't believe it. I've installed mini splits on two homes and the quotes were always in the $15-25k range for 3-5 head units, so $2.3k for a head + outdoor condenser unit sounded implausible, but then I saw he found a surprisingly good deal:
It doesn’t take long to install a mini-split condenser with a single air handler. Precast pad for the condensing unit, set the condensing unit on the pad (or buy a wall mount if you need to mount it off the ground), run sealtite to the condenser from the disconnect switch and pull in wire, drill two holes for the line sets and one hole for the power/signal cable that runs from the condenser to the air handler, mount the air handler, connect the line sets, plug in the power/signal cable, install and wire the thermostat. Seal the holes with silicone and turn the mini-split on.
It’s less than a day of work, finding a mechanical contractor to install equipment you furnish for $160-175/hr shouldn’t be hard, contractors just like ripping off homeowners because they don’t know any better.
You don’t really even need a mechanical contractor with precharged line sets, just ensure the disconnect switch is off and locked out before touching any line voltage wiring, and make sure you mount anything heavy to studs and not plywood or drywall.
Minisplits install costs are the biggest scam in the US, in Japan installs regularly cost under $1000 (that includes the minisplit!).
They're literally designed to be easy to install, but in the US licensing requirements tend to be insane (in my state it's 2 years apprenticeship experience for their 'easier to get' mini-split license) and HVAC companies make more off whole home systems.
These things are regularly installed DIY by homeowners (illegally most of the time but you know), it doesn't take two years of experience to be able to install these without issue. 2 weeks, or half a dozen installs surely would be more than enough.
For the author, I really like the way it turned out. Your choice of the larger windows does change the game for a space like that. You gained useful space on your property that can be reconfigured later if conditions change.
I did notice that you mentioned soffit vents. From the photos I am having a hard time picturing how those vents were installed on that shed since they are designed to allow airflow from the soffit to the ridge. Knowing that you had a ridge vent cut in it makes it likely to me that you used baffles to allow the airflow between soffit and ridge and then insulated between the baffles and the interior space. I don't see that in the photos though so I apologize if this makes no sense.
I like the way that you finished it all out. It looks very functional. I have often considered something similar for our property but have been tied up in so many other projects that it never seems to happen.
Good job for having a plan and making it happen.
> In Portland, I didn’t need a permit for the building because it was under the size threshold
You still need a structural building permit, beyond any electrical or plumbing permits, if it's both heated and used either as a living space or "for a business".
The city added the "for a business" wrinkle in 2024 and is very squirrely about whether using it as a work-from-home office counts as "for a business". It _does_ include working from it without bringing employees or clients into the buildling, but the way it's written implies that it's for people running a business out of their home address and not working for someone else's business.
It's a gray-enough area that I hope you got some solid legal advice. We ended up getting the permit to cover our bases in case I had to move to freelance/consulting self-employment.
Author of the blog post here. That new "for business" line was added in 2024, a year after I completed this build. It's good to know now though in case we sell and I want to do another build like this.
For anyone thinking of building like a 12x14 size back yard shed/office for year round ues, look long and hard and do the math on the cost difference in using 2x4 for the exterior wall framing vs 2x6 (like a real house). Lots of cheap shed plans default to 2x4, unfortunately.
Compared to the total cost of the project, using 2x6 and correspondingly thicker standard pink fiberglass insulation (R-13 to R-15 for a 3.5" cavity vs R-19 to R-21 for a 5.5" cavity) the cost difference is not a lot.
Thanks for taking the time to make this detailed write-up! You got a beautiful result, and I appreciate the spirit of sharing what you learned and helping people who are considering similar projects.
I'm glad you measured CO2. I've recently noticed I tend to get headaches when working or sleeping in small poorly-ventilated spaces, and I'm surprised how often I encounter new structures without ventilation. I guess tightly-sealed buildings are still a relatively new idea.
In the PNW you could probably be comfortable >90% of days with a cracked window, fan, adjustable shades, and a little electric radiator, but if I was doing this project I'd probably opt for the modern heat pump / ERV combo as well.
Mini split + ductless ERV [1] would probably be cost efficient and effective for this home office. No need to get a full ducted hvac setup.
[1] e.g. https://www.pioneerminisplit.com/products/pioneer-ecoasis-50...
There isn't really any clinical evidence for CO2 levels impacting stuff beyond so called "sleep efficiency," where the effect is small (above 1000 ppm is 5% reduction in sleep efficiency) and it has the counterintuitive effect that less efficient sleep is sleeping longer, which is usually what people want. That said, placebo effects are still real.
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2012/10/17/elevated-indoor-carbon...
You are wrong about the impact of moderately high CO2 levels.
i'm aware of this one. clinical evidence - do moderately high CO2 levels CAUSE a disease? afaik no. the test in this study: they measure something real, but it is not used to diagnose someone routinely (despite what they say). they had a surprising result where performance on one of the subtests increased, and some were not affected (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23008272/#&gid=article-figur...). i am basically saying that, CO2 levels - do they cause headaches like the user is saying? I don't know, nobody has investigated that. 2500 ppm is very high concentration. it merits more study but not a panic.
It might be that poor ventilation gives me headaches for other reasons, and CO2 concentration is just a useful proxy that's easy to measure. The evidence seems to support this idea, whereas like you said the evidence for CO2 in isolation is pretty questionable.
If nothing else, at least a well-ventilated room expels my farts and other airborne waste products.
And people don't want to sleep longer, they want to feel well-rested. So I think higher sleep efficiency is better.
Boy things are different in Portland where you pay people to insult sheds…
But 8x10 for $20,000 just goes to show how expensive USA is for construction. There’s a point where I would review coworking space cost (not as convenient, I know) to just living and owning property abroad.
In this day and age, where material stuff is so cheap, isn’t 20K for a tiny shed crazy? Clearly it is because it involves so much work, and work is so expensive, but I can’t help but think there should be a technical solution to this. Or buildings are just not automatable? I’m amazed.
This is pretty fancy to call it a shed. Walk outside any Lowe’s or Home Depot and you will see several pre-built options that can be had for $500-$4000 with them getting increasingly elaborate.
Electrical + AC is a firm line where that goes from shed to detached office.
I mean I was just in Costco and they were selling some 8x12 sheds for like $6500. They weren't even finished inside. Just a floor, 4 walls and a roof. No foundations, no insulation, no sheetrock, no power. I suck at carpentry and even I could build that in a few days.
It's probably mostly labor cost. An 8x10 shed kit starts at under $US2k but if you pay someone to assemble it, including electrical, the price will go up very quickly.
I know someone who builds horse shelters that are larger than that, but a fraction of the cost, delivered. I've actually been thinking that if I wanted an outside office, I'd ask him to custom build one with the fourth wall closed (horse shelters are 3-sided) and I'd insulate and sheetrock it myself. IIRC he did our 10x30 one for about $2k, including delivery.
Around here, the cutoff for needing a permit for a "permanent structure" is 10'x12' which is a pretty good sized outside office.
You could do it for less than half that cost if you do your own labour. I actually came into the article thinking that’s what they did but was disappointed.
It was about $9k for the shed and the foundation, poured and installed. The other $11k was for everything else making it a living space and not just a shed. Not so bad in that context.
For reference, ~2 years ago I did a 8x12 shed for under $3K, DIY. It is not insulated or finished inside. Footer and slab were under a grand, I used some reclaimed 2x4s and bought the rest, sheathing, roofing, flashing, self-made windows were around another $1,200-$1,500. Paint was the real surprise at almost $300.
Theres a baseline cost for work to be done, the OP decided to build an 8x10, but easily could cost a similar amount or a few thousand more for a shed 4x larger.
> But 8x10 for $20,000 just goes to show how expensive USA is for construction.
Labor is expensive. You could probably close to double the size for an additional $10,000, you’d need another yard and a half of concrete for the foundation (6” depth*80 sqft = 40 cubic feet) and more material for the building, but not twice as much material, or labor. Electrical service could stay the same.l and the mini-split wouldn’t have to be much bigger.
Im jealous of the Tuff Shed or prebuilt being an option. Where I live we have incredibly high snow loads, so any structure ends up needing to be custom built to meet our requirements (even out buildings). I've found plenty of pre-fab units that claim to handle "high snow loads" that will not meet code where I am.
I'm still planning on building out an office/studio, but it will be a much larger investment despite being able to DIY much of it.
DIY via https://buildfreely.com
Cool app! I have plenty of building experience thankfully, including plenty of structures still standing under the weight of our snow load!
Heya I'd love to help you bring it to life and DIY it. I'm working on https://myhomecat.com/ - which lets you design a code-compliant version and you can fiddle around with budget, needs, etc. I've helped other folks with step by step guides after they've created a design they're happy with.
Can I ask you how you're designing it right now? I could whip up some designs for you for free.
What if you just put heat tape on the roof? These sheds have small roofs, shouldn’t be prohibitive
Heat tape isn't very effective with storms dropping multiple feet of wet snow in under 24 hours (or in general).
well it just has to stop significant buildup over multiple days right? IDK, seems pretty effective here in tahoe where ive seen it applied on parts of peoples houses
Do people in Tahoe heat-tape their whole roof or just the edge where ice dams would otherwise form? I've only ever seen the latter, and even doing that will be noticeable on your power bill.
also idk, tons of people up here have regular sheds for various purposes and they seem to survive just fine
woof, where are you located, coastal/northern Canada?
Cascade mountains. I've seen over 5 feet of snow in under 48 hours, then freezing rain. Its heavy! Lots of these "it'll be fine" type structures collapsed.
Building code for snow load is a factor of location and elevation here. We are around 130 lb/sq ft.
Roof pitch can help with shedding, but then you've got other problems (roof avalanches can and do kill, not to mention snow up against materials that don't want to be wet all winter).
> We are around 130 lb/sq ft
That's not too bad, that's just a floor (and that's for a flat roof, it gets less demanding with pitch).
Sounds like Tahoe.
This is a problem with the people and ideology that are concentrated in your jurisdiction and the resulting rules that come of that. Even the snootiest "Barack Obama is my neighbor" zip codes have permitting and code exemptions for various sorts of small sheds.
Structurally a wet fart will hold up plenty of snow when we're talking spans on the order of 10ft. A garden shed that can literally roll away in a tornado is only a few hundred dollars of material different from one that can't.
Of course Tuff Shed (or anyone else) isn't gonna make a special product line for one town in CO or wherever that wants to de-facto outlaw the construction of shed by people less than a certain wealth level. Those people can have their stuff built from scratch at great cost. Of the dozen lost sales they were likely some of the most problematic anyway.
Of course they wont! Plenty of people around here still use structures not built for the load or build under the square footage that requires a permit. Those can and do fail, and I'd prefer not to be in one when they do :).
My feedback is merely: boy it'd be nice to have the option to just order a pre-built.
Author, if you're here, there's a typo. > I was planning on insulting the office myself
What did it do to you that you needed to insult it?
I’m glad I’m not the only one who found this amusing!
It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. How dare it do that to me. Clearly the only option is insult.
DIY https://buildfreely.com
Looks awesome, but I would have run single-mode fiber between the house and the office. Eliminates any issues with lightning strikes taking out equipment or other electrical gremlins, not to mention providing opportunity for expanding bandwidth in the future by just swapping out the SFP modules on each end. Pre-terminated fiber from fs.com is inexpensive and easy to work with - just measure and install.
What do you use on the house and on the shed side to convert to CAT6?
you can use a media converter or a small switch - for example: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/switching-utility/produc.... You may already have a fiber aggregation switch in the house to handle other fiber connected devices.
You're looking for a "media converter", often sold in pairs for ~$50. Match it to the fiber connectors you buy.
Media converters are effectively a switch, but less flexible. I would buy a switch with an sfp+ port instead and use it with an appropriate sfp module.
Nice, I also have an office in my backyard. Although its a ~100 year old brick structure that was originally staff quarters. Had to put a new roof on it, run power, fibre and install AC. Now its my office / data centre (yes I put a rack in a room I sit in...)
https://tuhat.net/@sbr/p/big-tech-sucks
The rack warms it in the winter so I don't need any extra cooling, and I run the AC in the summer.
Did similar, but went 12x16, trenched power and cat6, did rockwool insulation, did pine tongue and groove paneling and an Alaskan white cedar porch. When we sold the house, I'm pretty sure the shed is what sealed the deal, people had all sorts of things they wanted it to be, even as a spare bedroom
i did a 24x36, with a loft. 2015, 32,000 bucks from lavalley's in newport nh, installed 80 miles away in another random town. poured slab. 6 windows, 2 garage doors. i realized, all i did was build a garage, not a work from home office.
but over the next few years i learned so many hobby art projects: insulation, electrical, sheetrock. a few inspections, a few consults. a few surprises that people in this state can just go buy the stuff at a box store!
and then eventually, my 12x6 foot office appeared, the same width as a 1960s metal tanker desk. finally!
and ... i instantly hated working out there. i didnt make it 6 weeks. it's just an office for storing crap, now: i work out of the house, where the kitchen, dogs, bathroom, are. but the journey was worth it, even if the destination was not.
We did this for my wife right before the Pandemic. Luckily we already had a 12 foot by 12 foot cement pad in our backyard. The building itself was 10 feet by 12 feet and cost $5000. Then we had to install insulation and drywall which was another $1500. Then I had a single 20 Amp power line installed and that cost another $1000, but I also had him do some other work and I assisted with the digging of the trench. I think we were at around $9000 all in with it. I checked with the company and that model of building we got is around $8000 now, so maybe around 60% more now?
$20k to $50k for dedicated office is easily worth it. So much cheaper than moving house in most areas
I like that CO2 detector. I wonder if I could build one cheaply as a DIY project by buying and attaching the sensor to Raspberry Pi?
Lumber in 2022 was brutal. Same build today would probably land a lot lower.
For those wanting more inspiration for similar builds, this reddit community is pretty good: https://www.reddit.com/r/shedditors/
I did this in my backyard in NZ. Built out of "Structural Insulated Panels" it holds the heat well over winter and never gets too hot over summer.
I spent about 14-15k NZD 2 years ago to get it setup. I wish I had done it years ago.
> I wrote up my experience building a backyard office because I wish I had come across more articles like this when planning my build. I hope this post helps you on your journey.
I don't recall how technical it is[^1] because I read it years ago, but Michael Pollan wrote an entire book about building himself a writing room:
https://michaelpollan.com/books/a-place-of-my-own/
[^1]: Being familiar with Pollan's writing, it's likely at least as much philosophical and meditative as technical and practical.
$20k seems steep for whats effectively a small shed with a nice finish. Especially that the bare shed itself was $6k. In Ireland I can get an 18x10ft cabin for about €5k, and this is one of the most expensive countries
West coast prices are in a different ballpark. Im shocked at how cheap the concrete work was. I got 20 quotes and 6k was the cheapest for a 12x12 pour.
I have a neighbor 100k+ into a foundation retrofit for his living room.
I always think about it, but then I remember I couldn't sleep knowing my tech stuff is inside a shed in the backyard. Too easy to break in and steal it.
I don't know what kind of tech stuff you have, but since you can run ethernet (or better, fiber) to the shed, you could keep most of it locked in the house and just walk out with your laptop to your workspace each day.
Monitors are relatively cheap these days, you can get a name brand 32" 4K monitor for around $300 - if someone busts in and steals it, the door/window repair will probably cost more than the monitor.
It doesn't look any easier to break into than my house. Which is to say -- pretty easy, and yet, home break-ins are pretty uncommon.
There's probably lots of ways to secure it if you think about it.
Building a home office in your backyard is really hard. It's a good idea (though expensive) to go with a pre-built if you don't wanna figure all the details out. If you DIY the design and build, you have to figure out:
- What type of floor? (2x4? 2x6? will it hold me and my chair without collapsing?)
- What roof type? How big should the overhang be? What's easier to build yourself vs looks nicer but a real pain to build?
- How many windows should be in my office?
- How do I build something within my budget?
- What size of shed should I go with for my purpose? (workshop? office?)
I'm working on https://myhomecat.com - which lets you do all of this. If you enter your address and the kind of shed you want (i.e. 10x12 office), you should be able to get something fully code-compliant that figures out all of your details. It's still early so it doesn't cover every edge case, but the idea is there and it works really well from the feedback I've gotten.
Do you have an idea of the R-value of the insulation you put in? I'm wondering what this will take to heat and cool during the peaks of summer and winter.
R-19. You can see label in the picture.
Those are 2x4 studs, so R13, shoving thicker insulation in doesn't change much.
True. Depending on how heavily they compressed it to fit between those studs it will likely be less than R13. No matter whether you use fiberglass or rockwool, you should make sure you buy insulation sized to the depth of the cavity it will insulate. Then use an insulation knife to cut in for obstacles within the cavities.
It seems very expensive. I built a 5m x 3m 'log cabin' garden office (in Scotland in 2018), with electricity and cat6 cabled internet for £5k (approx $6800). The shed itself was a kit-build so easy and for foundations I used stakes (concreted in).
The 8-Bit Guy also built a backyard office and documented it in a series of videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFP-fU0FsF0
I've wanted to build one of these for a while just to have that "going into the office" feel even with WFH; appreciate the detail and breakdown. Also, lovely styled personal site.
Have you started designing? If you're open to it - I could help you jump start this and give you a few designs for free based on what you're thinking about.
Now is the time https://buildfreely.com
Maybe it's just me but it blows my mind that this tiny thing cost $20k. I wish building stuff in the West wasn't so expensive.
True, things in the west tend to cost more than elsewhere (I'm in Seattle WA.)
My mother-in-law lives in rural Missouri and had her 6x10 bathroom remodeled in 2025. Full gut replacement of everything. Total cost: $5600. I got a quote for something similar in a bit larger bathroom in our house in Seattle. Quoted price: $31,000.
Labor is a good chunk of cost, and the OP presented that he simply didn't have the time available to him to do that work himself. On the other hand, I built 20-ish feet of fencing for our backyard this summer, matching an existing design we had done several years ago. Quoted price from the same company that did it the first time: $9800. I did the work myself. My total cost: $1400.
That works out great, right? I also have a significant investment in all the right tools: compound mitre saw, construction-grade table saw, nail guns, impact/hammer/regular drills, angle grinders, power sanders, every drill bit in captivity -- I don't really lack for anything. These make a huge difference in the workmanship of the final outcome.
And that was just a fence. I've considered building an external office here at our house. When I start to take into account the scope of converting an outdoor shed to an acceptable backyard office, I hit the brakes. Electrical power under proper permits, adequate security, something that holds up under our weather, potential water/sewer access, and sufficient space to work (I can't live without a whiteboard)...there is more scope than meets the eye.
All things considered, I think the OP did a pretty good job here in terms of cost control and recognizing what he could do (windows) vs. needed someone else to do (proper electrical.)
Yep. I'm adding 500sqft to my home in Silicon Valley and the cost will end up being more than I spent to buy the house 12 year ago.
Smaller jobs are more expensive per square foot because not all costs scale with size. Which is why you see all these godawful TJ Homes being built where they just rip out the house, build a 3 story structure (including basement) that takes every square inch of the lot.
Not just places like Silicon Valley - my sister lives in rural Canada in an area where costs have exploded since covid, and just paid nearly as much as their original house price (from <10 years ago) to have a nice garage built.
A lot of that cost is labour. Look at all the spots it says "contracted" in the breakdown. If you can do a lot of the work yourself, then you can save a lot of $$$, but it's a tradeoff of course. (They also could have saved quite a bit by just having a window unit AC, but that's up to them.)
The building is cheap, the labor is expensive. I built a much larger shed in volumetric space last year for 1/4th the cost.
Almost a universal rule for all construction over my last 20 years has been (Materials x 4) + 20% for profit/overage.
You can yell at a contractor or the mirror but there's a tax.
Seems about right given labor. If you do most things yourself other than electrical, can probably cut cost a fair bit. But tradespeople are expensive when you can even get them.
It's probably more expensive now. No date stamp on the article but was first submitted to HN in 2023.
I have one problem that keeps me from doing something like this. Weather. I don't want to get wet walking out or back because it happens to be raining.
You can put in an awning or covered walkway between the buildings. You can even do a fully enclosed, fully climate controlled hallway with lots of windows and doors out to the yard, etc. Just depends on how much you want to pay and your imagination.
I've seen some properties where they build ponds underneath the indoor hallway with glass flooring to see the fish and stuff in the pond. Obviously wild things like that cost a bit more then a simple awning or covered walkway.
>You can even do a fully enclosed,
And then lose all the regulatory benefit of whatever shed exemption you're trying to use, get absolutely screwed on regulatory compliance and code whatnot that you're leveraging by having it be a detached outbuilding. And then get sneered at by HN when you say the rules as they apply to your situation are stupid.
you might get screwed on regulatory compliance, it just depends on your local govt and how much they want to screw you.
It's got to suck to do the inspectors job. Having to keep up with whatever the code creators come up with, while also getting abused by every home owner and contractor in the area because they hate X,Y or Z. While trying to dodge political leverage from elected officials trying to get whatever pet mess they want done.
It's not a job I'd want, and I bet they get paid trash to boot.
Code compliance and inspections exist for a reason, and if you are lucky, the current inspector/code compliance dept in your local govt realizes it's to ensure the building doesn't fall down around your ankles when you least expect it and not to screw you over.
> It's got to suck to do the inspectors job. Having to keep up with whatever the code creators come up with, while also getting abused by every home owner and contractor in the area because they hate X,Y or Z.
Permit inspectors are basically unaccountable. There's no requirement that what you sign off meets code or that you'll sign off if it meets code.
As a builder, best thing is if you can fix whatever needs fixing while the inspector is there. If not, there's a non-zero chance you get a different inspector for the reinspection who likes it the way the first inspector said you couldn't do it.
This is is exactly what I meant by the last sentence.
It's only water. It'll wash off.
Buy an umbrella?
Umbrellas are great at keeping your head and shoulders dry, but kind of suck beyond that.
That's like a 5-10 second walk, I can't imagine your legs are going to get all that wet in that timespan.
Like if I'm bringing my bins to the road for pickup, I never bother putting on a jacket or w/e regardless of weather. If it does happen to actually be a torrential downpour, I just switch to a new t-shirt when I'm back inside.
I ran PVC between my house and shop/office with 2 sets of single-mode fiber instead of ethernet. Electrical code will require proper grounding for copper for lightning strikes.
Do you have to do PVC or can you just bury the fiber?
Like /u/someothherguyy said it depends on the cable type. There are shielded and jacketed outdoor cables that don't require PVC/EMT, but usually you'll have to terminate them yourself so there's additional tooling required.
I went with PVC because it's the easiest to work with, NEC only required it be buried 12in below the surface for residential, but I went to 24". I oversized the PVC a bit so I had room to run more cables as well. I filled the trench with gravel, ran the PVC over that, then filled over it with some more gravel. A thin layer of dirt, marking tape and then the rest of the dirt. Rent a trencher if you have hard ground.
If you're having a licensed electrician do the work of connecting house and office power then you can ask them to run the conduit for it at the same time.
it depends on the cable type, what you are willing to spend, where you live, etc
i tried to find a page that wasn't terrible for this, still kind of bad though:
https://www.gloryoptics.com/info/how-deep-does-spectrum-bury...
Insulating -> insulting is a funny typo.
that is insanely expensive for what this is, but i suppose that depends on what you are willing to do yourself
It's not building, it's telling others to build
Looks like a great setup!
$20K still seems like a lot to get some mosquito bites walking through the yard to work. Lack of plumbing, coffee, etc (some of those are fixable of course) is a bit of a turnoff but perhaps the walk is part of the charm.
I find that with kids mostly in school and knowing the rules the exterior space isn’t a requirement, but I don’t have a ton of meetings these days so YMMV. Mostly this is cope because I don’t have 20K to drop on a cool office! :)
Nice work and thanks for the post!
If you're relatively handy, a lot of what OP paid for can be DIY'ed. I would have never paid a contractor to do all of that. Probably just the electrical. Especially the Tuff Shed structure. Those things are dead simple, marketed at DIYers, and can be finished in a weekend. Insulation, drywall, trim, and flooring is also child's play. OP could have easily cut the project's cost in half if he wanted to.
Yeah I had the same thoughts about what they chose to DIY vs hire out. Insulation is so simple, and trim can be done at your leisure. But thats also not likely to save much overall since the contractors also know how simple those are.
You're missing the important part: doing all of this WITH A ONE YEAR OLD CRAWLING AROUND AT HOME. You can get things done, it is just an order of magnitude longer that it would take without kid(s).
Author here. I have heard this complaint from others before. If you live in an area where it snows I am assuming this would be a pain. But a 20 foot walk to my house is not a trek. If I was in an office the bathroom and coffee would be farther away. Honestly I like the outside part of the trek, it is a nice change.
The Coffee issue is easy to solve, just bring a pitcher of water with you in the morning to pour into the coffee maker - it's what I did when my home office was in a spare room above the garage. The walk from his back yard to the indoor bathroom is probably shorter than the walk he'd have in any office.
Its gross but a pee bottle is what I'd do.
that feels pretty excessive
Not in terms of cost.
Really? Why not step outside and help water the plants? It is your backyard, after all.
That's what I do but I don't really have any neighbours in eyesight.
> $20K still seems like a lot to get some mosquito bites walking through the yard to work.
In some parts of the world, people consider spending time outdoors to be a positive thing.
> In some parts of the world, people consider spending time outdoors to be a positive thing.
You're going to have to break that down for me.
$20k is way too much money for that.
~$250/sf isnt really that far off from median though.
It's crazy for something that starts with a Tuff shed and has no plumbing. Should be more along the lines of a garage in terms of PPSQFT IMO opinion.
No, that is the cost of labor and materials.
I considered doing this or buying a house that already had an ADU/casita when we were house shopping, but I have a very different situation with being mostly home alone during the day and a dedicated room in the house for an office. I still think this might be an ideal though, because having a physically separate space has both psychological and physical advantages. Particularly, I wish I could pre-wire a /lot/ of networking in the space and separately air condition it, because I prefer much colder temperatures and it'd be cheaper to keep a separate office at 68F and the house at 74F than try to keep the house at 68-70F.
I can't even afford a home and yet some people are constructing secondary dwellings on their property. The wealth disparity in this country is massive
There is no country on earth that doesn't have the massive wealth disparity where some people can't afford to buy a home while other people can afford a shed.
He spent way too much.
Not a great idea for those in snowy areas of the USA. A short burst of snow storms and now to get to work you're dealing with typical access problems such as frozen doors, shoveling, ice, and cleaning up the melt or adding some small mudroom to get in and out during the day. Also, watching your kids play and build a snowman right in front of your window while you sit in a meeting would feel like torture.
I'm sure it would increase the cost of the project by many times and require more complex permits, but just think how cool it would be to access your office shed through an underground tunnel.
Paging Colin Furze.
But you've got to shovel and clear snow regardless? Shoveling a small path and being careful how you take off your shoes sure beats scraping ice off of a car and dealing with the plows' windrow.
The biggest problems I see is wanting to frame out the walls with 2x6's for thicker insulation, ceiling trusses at 16 oc for snow load and thicker for insulation as well (or lose the headroom and build a traditional ceiling/attic), and of course more heating load from the heat pump.