I love the seaside - I particularly love a good traditional sea front with lots of little beach huts. In fact, I want a beach hut more than I want to be by the sea - it's a sort of grown-up Wendy House. Unfortunately, I live in Northamptonshire which, mathematically speaking, is about as far as you can get from the sea. And so the discussions with my husband started and we realised that if I want a beach hut, it's going to have to be a land-locked one. Thus started our hunt for the perfect little log cabin.

At the time we decided to buy, I was working from home – then along came the redundancy axe which fell on my head just a few days after we placed the order. Our idea was to buy a hut that's big enough for me to work in when the weather is nice so that’s gone a little awry but I’m still glad to have my little blue palace in the garden.

So where do you start looking for a log cabin?
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We headed off to garden centres and big DIY places like B&Q /Homebase etc. We were looking in February and I can tell you now that nobody has them at that time of year. All the big DIY places have catalogues with nice cabins in but none had them on show. The size we were looking for was coming out at around £1500.

I price-check EVERYTHING but as the cabin was intended as a birthday present for me, my husband the techno-phobe was set the mission of hunting down options on the internet and he found 'Garden Buildings Direct' amongst many others. It soon became apparent that the photos in the DIY store catalogues and on the GBD site were the same - but the prices were very different. We chose the 'Walton's Retreat Log Cabin' in 12ft 6 by 10 foot 6 size at a cost of £1014 - saving around £500 off the cheapest we had seen elsewhere. By anyone’s standards, I think that has to be considered a really good discount.

What do they sell?
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The website covers:
Sheds - wooden, metal, plastic
Play houses - for the kids
Log cabins - slot together systems made from 28-40 mm thick planks
Summer houses - like a shed with windows and doors - each wall comes as a single piece
Garden Storage - for locking up your lawnmower etc
Garages - obvious
Pet houses
Greenhouses
Accessories - e.g. alarms, electrics, preservatives.

When you reach the site, all the latest top offers are on display. Some of the savings are spectacular and all are quite genuine.

Pick a section from the list above and you can then browse all the options in each category. Each comes with pictures and detailed specs. On any page there is a link so you can ask questions about the product and there are also frequently asked questions for each product as well as customer reviews. These reviews seem to be quite genuine and not censored - some have people expressing their frustrations with missing parts or instructions.

You've picked your cabin - what next?
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Do you want to see it in the flesh or are you happy with a photo? We were happy with the photo but if we wanted to, they could supply a list of stockists where we could go and see one. Our nearest was in Newark which is quite a trek so we went off the photo.

Want to know when they can deliver? - each listing has an indication of how long it's likely to take for delivery.

Delivery is FREE - my favourite price - to anywhere in the country.

Checkout
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For reasons best known to himself, my husband didn't use the online ordering - he telephoned them so he could discuss delivery and paid over the phone. If you want to pay online - you need to register first and then I believe it's quite straightforward.
We did have one small problem which was that the first credit card we tried was turned down due to some problem with Mastercard. The operator said it was quite common and we tried again with a Visa and everything was fine.

What next?
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Once your order is placed they send you an email which contains the estimated delivery time. However, they will contact you to reconfirm the appointment when it's ready to go. They were very helpful in rushing it to us a few days ahead of the very reasonable 10 day delivery because we were up against a deadline to get it up before we left on holiday for a week. I think we had it in about 4 working days. You can track the order on line as well and if for any reason they don't meet their delivery target, you can cancel.

In the meantime, you probably want to get cracking on getting a base made - if it's a summerhouse or a log cabin. Hubby went crazy with a cement mixer and a large amount of aggregate and created a splendid (if rather too big) base for the log cabin.

The cabin arrived as a large pile of wood with a set of instructions. Sometimes they deliver it with a crane but due to restricted access at our house they brought it off the truck piece by piece. We had the delivery in February and the weather was lousy so you may want to get some plastic sheeting in before hand.

Note - a 12’ 6” by 10’ 6” log cabin is a lot of wood and unless you have a big tidy garage you will probably have to store it outside until you build.

The instructions are not the easiest to interpret - but if you ring the helpline they are very good at talking you through the confusing bits. Also have a look at the customer feedback on your shed as there may be some helpful tips.

Building it
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You have prepared the concrete base and you are raring to go. First task is to make the base of the cabin. This is a little tricky so I left it to my husband and wandered off to listen to the Archers omnibus. It took him a couple of hours. I then returned for the fun bit - slotting all the piece together. When I was a kid I had a construction set called ‘Betta Builder’ – it was poor kids lego and slotted together. This cabin was a giant construction kit.

It was a bitterly cold day with threats of snow and we threw it together in about 3 hours and then whammed on two coats of paint before it got dark and started to rain. Husband finished off the roof the day after. Then he ignored it for ages before finally doing the ‘finishing’ touches – we shouldn’t have done it, but it’s characteristic of our DIY but not FIOY (Finish it off yourself) tendencies.

I'm rubbish at practical stuff like this but even I managed to figure out what to do. It's not rocket science but you do need to keep your wits about you

And so….
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Several months later, she’s had a couple more coats of paint outside, and a coat of cream eggshell inside. She’s gorgeous. We are planning to put laminate flooring in over the weekend and maybe lay some electrical cables out. But to be honest, I just can’t look out the bedroom windows and see my lovely log cabin without it raising a big smile on my face.

Advantages – excellent value for money, great deliveries
Disadvantages – not the easiest instructions to follow.