At Christmas, more people seem to descend upon your home than at any other time.
AND It’s not just the folks! Think of all the stuff that comes with them! The gifts, the suitcases, the food, the wine (they’d better bring wine, tell me they brought wine!!)
Naturally, your home never gets any bigger to accommodate all of this. No matter how much you love the season, who hasn’t enjoyed how much more roomy your house feels after you pack away the decorations in January? It’s OK, feeling this way doesn’t make you Scrooge! But what if your house could feel this way throughout the whole festive season?
The Gift Of Space
Christmas is a time when Cabin Master’s garden buildings come into their own. What would you do with some additional space? We asked Cabin Master customers and visitors to our Nottingham show site. We present …(pardon the pun!)
Cabin Master’s 12 D.A.Y.S Of Christmas
(Delivering Additional Yuletide Space)
1 – Gift Wrapping Station
Beth’s biggest space issue in the run up to Christmas is finding room to wrap all those presents! “I take over the kitchen table while the kids are out or in bed but there’s always a risk that they’ll come in spoil a surprise. Sometimes it’s such a rush that the presents look like my husband wrapped them.”
Imagine a craft workshop space where you could leave your sticky tape dispenser, glittery paper and gift tags out ready for when you have time to wrap some presents. And a place to keep them safely hidden …
2 – Present Hideaway
Jessica’s 5 kids are present hunters! “We have exhausted hiding places in the house,” she told us, “they’ve rumbled the top of the wardrobe, the first place they look is under the bed, we even came home one day to find the loft ladder jammed after they’d had a rummage in the attic.”
With a Cabin Master building you can lock gifts away, safe and dry and, most importantly, out of view of inquisitive eyes.
3 – A Dining Annex
Claire uses her Cabin Master building as a garden office for eleven and a half months of the year and then, at Christmas, in goes a dining table and chairs and she transforms it into a space for all the family’s festive feasts.
“We have a well-stocked drinks fridge, lights, decorations, a tree, sound system playing Christmas music. The beauty is that you don’t have to clear up before going to bed or come down to a messy kitchen or dining room that needs clearing before you can have breakfast. This way we can tidy up at our leisure, usually the morning after, when the hangover allows!”
4 – Christmas Party Cloakroom
When you have a Christmas gathering where do all your guests’ coats go? Your bed? Not ideal!
Katharine’s Cabin Master garden room doubles as a cloakroom at Christmas time after an amusing incident a few years ago when a guest crawled into their bed for a sleep and ended up scaring Katharine’s mother in law.
“We also like our bedroom to be out of bounds to guests, it’s our private space, but it’s human nature to have a nosey when you get access to someone’s bedroom.” Katharine said.
5 – Santa’s Grotto
Wow! We love this! Adele’s Dad Tony dons the white beard and red suit and welcomes the village’s kids into a festive Santa’s Grotto. They had the idea when the local community centre had to close, and the children were in danger of missing out a visit with Santa.
You don’t have to invite all the neighbourhood’s kids to yours, but how lovely to have a fairy light lit Santa’s grotto right on your doorstep!
6 – Bauble Making & Christmas Crafts Workshop
Since they were small, Dianne’s children have made their own baubles for the Christmas tree every year. Since then, the kids have grown up and had children of their own. This lovely tradition continues but these days a lot more space is needed.
We’ve heard of a Cabin Master building doubling as an art studio for homemade Christmas cards and another as a workshop for old fashioned wooden toys.
7 – Mum’s Yuletide Yoga Yurt
Martina was visiting our show site in Nottingham when we asked what she’d use the extra space for at Christmas. Martina loves yoga, she finds it helps with physical and mental wellbeing but at Christmas the space normally reserved for her Kakasana, Trikonasana or Halasana poses is taken up with Christmas trees, pressies and decorations.
Christmas can be stressful for mum so, you could argue, that this time of year is when you need that yoga time more than ever! Having a space dedicated to yoga would be Martina’s ideal Christmas present. We hope her husband Gaz took note!
8 – Kids’ Christmas Breakout Space
Susie is a massage therapist who works from home from her Cabin Master garden building, all set up as a therapy room. Over Christmas, with no clients booked in, she turns the space over to the kids. “I find that Christmas is all about tech gifts these days and it’s nice for them to have somewhere quiet to go just to be peaceful and switched off from the internet. I love seeing them quietly reading or listening to music.”
Mental health among young people is rightly the focus of a lot of attention right now, your children need time out from the frenzy of a family Christmas too! Here are 3 more great reasons to invest in a garden room for children.
9 – Jigsaw Sanctuary
This is basically a family breakout space. Aimee’s had a Christmas jigsaw each year since she was eight years old and now has quite a collection. “It’s a lovely tradition started by my Nana. I’d do a few pieces a day, starting at the beginning of December, it was a lovely way to countdown to Christmas. I now buy my children a jigsaw each for Christmas too and smile and think of my Nana when I see them putting theirs together.”
For a few reasons, Aimee and the kids now piece their jigsaws together out in their heated Cabin Master garden building. Firstly, between them, they now have over thirty jigsaws. Secondly, it’s nice to have somewhere they can just be left out without fear of losing a piece. Thirdly, (and perhaps the biggest reason) they all remember the year that Alfie their Border Terrier decided to help by reducing a complicated 1000 piece jigsaw to a single soggy chewed up ball.
10 – Spare Room
A number of Cabin Master garden offices and garden gyms get turned into Christmas guest rooms for visitors over the Christmas holidays.
Thinking about it, most actual spare rooms in houses double as sewing rooms, gyms or studies when no one is in residence so why shouldn’t a garden building, bought for an entirely different purpose, double as a guest room?
Cabin Master garden rooms can be heated to the same standard as an indoor room and, with the curtains drawn together, your guests will feel like they’re in a little home from home! Here are 3 more benefits of a livable garden room annexe
11 – Mum & Dad’s Mistletoe Escape
Christmas can be hectic and your roles as mum and dad mean that you do so much for everyone else - sometimes you can forget each other! You buy and wrap presents to give your kids the kind of Christmas you loved when you were their age and you invite your parents into your home to repay them for those wonderful times that you remember.
A Christmas home is a busy home and it’s easy to get swept away and forget that at the heart of your family is the relationship between you and your partner. ‘The Mistletoe Escape’ is Natalie’s idea, their Cabin Master garden building is an oasis of peace and quiet. When things get too much for either Natalie or husband Kev they can call a time out, walk across the patio to their garden room where there is always a sprig of mistletoe hanging over the door and a bottle of Baileys in the mini-fridge.
12 – The Miscellany Space
This is a suggestion by show site visitor Kev. “At Christmas there’s always a need for space for something random,” he said.
“It might be what to do with all the bin liners full of wrapping paper on Christmas morning, a place to store all the extra food you buy, or last year my wife and I treated ourselves to a new washer drier but had nowhere to store the old washing machine and tumble drier that it had replaced. We ended up leaving them on our patio which raised eyebrows from the neighbours, it’s not a white goods in the garden kind of neighbourhood!”
“I’m a big believer in ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ but at Christmas not everything has a place. The Cabin would be that space. And then from January it’s my gym!”. Here are 3 more benefits to having a garden room home gym.
For many families, Christmas can be more of a marathon than a sprint. Having some extra space can help you stay the course.
So remember, to spin the RSPCA’s vital Christmas message, a Cabin Master garden room isn’t just for life, it’s for Christmas too. A great place to hide Christmas presents, transform into Santa's grotto or chill out with some yoga (are you listening Gaz?).
Hope Santa brings you everything on your list, and if top of YOUR list is a Cabin Master garden building call in to our Nottingham show site or click cabinmaster.co.uk.
