Elin Studio Office 4.77 x 3.51m - Double Glazed

This is a remarkable build. There is one almost universal rule, which is that if you find you have to cut a piece of wood, you (I!) have made a mistake, not them. There are minor errors (one major plank was missing from our pack and I had to jig it from the wood that packed it all). The design could be rather more build friendly - i.e. putting a roof on earlier, and there is no reason not to put the decking in around the side earlier too thereby avoiding various trips and slips. Vital to ensure your base is precise. And don't for one second believe the people who put it together single handed in 24 or even 48 hours. Do believe the people who say get a nail gun. And be absolutely sure to sort all the wood into clearly identified piles. But beyond those minor issues, the value is excellent - I worked out that the wood alone would cost roughly the same as the price. The Dutch delivery chap was a marvel and struggled with great good humour up our very narrow country lane. Aside from my errors, it went up well. I could probably write some guidance for the complete moron that would have made my life a lot easier. The result is very attractive.

In short, I’d recommend the Elin Studio – it is now an excellent, spacious outbuilding which looks great painted up. Having spent quite some time insulating well it does seem to maintain a good temperature inside.
Delivery was great, and driver flexible about where to place the large pallet. It arrived well wrapped - it sat on my drive for a few weeks for weather to improve. Perhaps obvious to point out – but do note that there is a LOT of wood in this building. It took about 5 hours for two of us to haul 50M or so up to where it needed to be. Be aware you need a lot of space to lay out the parts. You should (unlike me) take heed Tuin’s advice and ensure you identify & catalogue parts when you do this – scrabbling around a wood pile for a part 23 can be kind of frustrating! Also worth noting that very little is labelled up.
I spent quite some time getting the base and flooring fixed up properly (a day), but then the walls go up pretty quick. While I did need help with larger wall panels it is possible to do a most of the build on your own. I’m certain it would have been quicker with two throughout the build so would highly recommend that. All the interior panelling goes in before the roof so keeping the build dry was a bit of an issue – once roof joists are in place its pretty easy to secure a large tarp over.
I’d agree with Alyson’s review here there are a few minor issues with the manual – I was particularly perplexed by the incorrectly reference to part 41e – its early on in the build and didn’t seem to bode too well for what was upcoming, but that was the only mislabelled part. Some bits are not too clear – perhaps just a smidge behind Ikea instructions. If you’re vaguely capable DIYer you should be able to work it out.
I’m at odds with the other review here - there were no spares at all in my pack. Interior panels are tongue and groove and it’s easy to damage/split off the tongue. I’d have liked a couple of spare lengths added and listed in the manifest so I could have replaced the small number of slightly damaged parts.
Highly recommend a nail/tac gun for the interior – I got through around 3k brad nails with mine – can’t imagine how many sore thumbs saved that equates to!
All except one set of parts fitted almost perfectly together – a number of interior panelling pieces were supplied 1cm too long (against Tuin’s own measurements) so had to be cut down which also slowed the build down.
Tuin’s service is hard to fault – they came back to my emails quickly, but not always with the answer I really wanted (having to cut down parts). They also have re-supplied an incorrect roof part – but beware it takes a long time to arrive has to come from Holland. They also seem receptive to feedback – I think they’ll have some of the minor niggles on this item sorted soon.

We bought the Elin to use as our company's office at the bottom of the garden. We built this ourselves because we wanted to make some amendments to the basic building - we wanted the door on the opposite side and we wanted to bring the windows forward to give more room inside.

For the most part the build was straight forward, but there was a great deal of time spent measuring the wood to find the correct pieces in the first place. Ideally, it would be better if the pieces were numbered/tagged/marked to make it easier to identify them against the inventory. The other frustration was that the packed components were not in build order.

We found the Assembly Instructions easy to follow but would point out the following:-

*Page 5/43 - the top diagram refers to "41e" which should be "1e".
There are 10x "1e" listed in the inventory but only 9x shown on this page.
All of the "41e" pieces have already been used so we could only assume that this was actually the 10th "1e".

*There are no instructions for Pieces 66, 67 and 68.
There are no missing pages in the Assembly Instructions - all supplied are in numerical order - and we can only assume that these pieces have simply been overlooked. It was easy enough to place them in the correct position, once we realised what had happened.

*There are 4x Piece "34" in the pack but only 3x referred to in the instructions (page 37/43).
We put the 4th piece where we thought appropriate in line with the others.

*There were also some extra pieces of various item numbers which was a bit confusing because we assumed they should all have been used. If they were supposed to be spares it wasn't made apparent in the literature that we should expect any. This meant some time delay while we worked out if we had missed something or not.

We also found that the roof covering supplied was quite flimsy and decided to source our own roofing felt for a more substantial finish.

Overall, we are very pleased with the end result. It is a solid building and good value for money. The staff were helpful and quick to respond to any queries. We would recommend Tuin based on the building we bought but, if you are going to build yourselves, take the time to fully read the instructions and label the pieces against the inventory in the first instance.

We would also recommend that Tuin make a left- and right-handed version of this building because it makes it a more flexible option.