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Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

imkylelambert.com

211–220 of 281 posts

Re: Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

#211

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". W…

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…

> In my opinion it's commuting to the office which sucks, and not working in the office

Nah. Other people are selfish.

Shitty open floor plans, so that other peoples drive bys become distrations

Meeting rooms that are set up to hold only 3 people, because everyone wanted smaller rooms for their 1 on 1s, mean that most meeting rooms are now too small for you to gather your team in. Which leads to people having team meetings at their desks and goes back to point 1.

Crappy equipment. I work at a large enough bank that you will have heard of it, even outside the US. You get a 1080p monitor at your hot desk. After upgrading to a 1440p over a decade ago when those cheap Korean screens came out, and having a 4k for many years now, I struggle to go back to a 1080p. Applications have so much chrome because of the larger monitors.

Hot desks can fuck off too. Come into the office so you can sit with your team. Oh, but not everyone, you guys have to go to 6 rows down.

Re: Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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 t…

60lb premixed concrete bags are $5 in the US, and getting it delivered would be cheaper at this scale - the slab could cost under $500. The other costs sound normal -> materials + markup + labor. The more realistic money saving would have been a prefabbed module that doesn't need a slab for less than half the price. It would be easier to get rid of / sell in the future too. This looks much nicer though.

Re: Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 o…

i think it is pathetic that your rebuttal to a comment you dont like is go back to reddit

youare the same type that tell foreigners to go back to their country because you dont like being called stupid more than you dont like actually being stupid20k for this is a joke like yoi

Re: Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Some things are deceptively complex (foundations and roof trusses come to mind) and the cost if you get it wrong can easily double the total cost of your build 6 months after you think you are done.

Walls, floors, ceilings and everything in between them are both less complex and cheaper to fix than foundations or trusses.

Re: Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

#217
post #32

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 r…

Really? I paid ~1500eur for a Mitsubishi mini split including installation. Not quite sure why your setup would be so insanely expensive.

Re: Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

#218
post #81

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.

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.

I don't know. That's a wooden shed, while my house is brick and concrete with a common European armored door and roller shutters.

Re: Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

#219

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…

> 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.

I am very glad that the grainy 40 year old photos of me at that sort of age with my father are us digging a hole together or me crawling around on a freshly poured slab of concrete - rather than at a soft play venue.

Re: Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

#220

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…

> 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. I am very glad that the grainy 40 year old photos of me at that sort of age with my father are us digging a hole together or me crawling around on a freshly poured slab of concrete - rather than at a soft play venue.

What are you going on about?

What memories with a 1 year old? Besides the fact that it's almost impossible to actively access memories from when you're 1 year old, a 1 year old shouldn't be anywhere near a construction site.

There are much better and safer uses of time together with a 1 year old that don't revolve on hoping they'd see a grainy (or nom grainy) photos 40 years later.

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