subject: How A Home Office Can Help Reduce Care Home Waiting Lists [print this page] Many private care homes across the UK are full to capacity and many have waiting lists of up to three years. But the owners of one Surrey care home group saw this coming and took steps to mitigate the potential difficulties.
A few years ago and with their home fully occupied, the owners of the picturesque Oak House in Weybridge converted three of their office and administration offices into rooms for residents. Now, obviously all that office and administration work doesn't just disappear so alternative provision was needed.
Not wanting to put residents through the mess and upheaval of lengthy extension work, the space at the rear of the home was looked at as a possible location for adding some outbuildings.
Garden rooms, garden offices, home offices - jump onto Google and the choice is vast, but all garden buildings are not the same. Oak House were looking for a company that offered a fully insulated product in a traditional style that would need minimal maintenance and upkeep. They decided upon The Home Office Company.
Following a site visit, the locations for the three buildings were decided upon. Planning permission was not an issue - it seldom is but is always worth checking- and within three weeks the offices were erected, furnished and in use!
A spokesperson for the home said "The office buildings were a much more economical option than an extension and much quicker too as they were each erected within four days." He went onto say "They are excellent for office use, very usable and comfortable. We are right next door to the home if they need us but the separate offices mean we can keep the administration side of things completely separate."
Heating the buildings in the winter is very low cost too. The walls, floor and ceilings are all phenolic foam insulated and the glazing is Pilkington K- glass throughout so all that is needed is a small heater which is turned on for an hour in the morning to warm the building up - the building then retains the heat all day- providing the doors are not left open!
The cost of a garden building from The Home Office Company starts at 9995GBP including VAT; the three larger buildings at Oak House each cost around 17995GBP so a total investment of nearly 54,000GBP. But with the weekly cost of a room around 400GBP (a conservative estimate), the cost of each building was recouped in just 11 months!
The Home Office Company started in 1998 and was one of the first companies to see the potential of the garden buildings market in the UK. Over 12 years, satisfied clients across the UK and Europe have purchased garden rooms for such diverse purposes as swimming pool houses, recording studios, granny annexes and games rooms as well as the most common purpose- as a home office.
Matthew Clarke, Managing Director of The Home Office Company said, "Over the years there has been an increasing appreciation of garden buildings as a cost-effective, fast alternative to building an extension. Our buildings are constructed with state of the art materials to give superb heat and sound insulation, but at sensible, affordable prices- in fact we have kept our prices at 2007 levels as well as now offering 0% interest free credit. It really does make no sense to have an extension costing two or three times as much as a garden room as well as several months of mess and disruption everywhere, when you can have a garden building erected and usable inside a week."
