Most people who successfully work from home have a place where they can go to get work done. It might be the garage or a spare bedroom or a basement. I have neither of these things. I work on my laptop on the couch in the living room or in my bed. If I’m going to be make a living with my online businesses, I need a dedicated workspace. While this isn’t a home improvement blog, I’ve decided to document my new office build here because having a dedicated home office is important when it comes to working online. In this post, I’m going to be doing some pre-planning.
Where to put my new home office?
The first thing I need to decide is where to put my new home office. I have a few different options. Before I go on, I’ll tell you a little bit about where I live. I live with my parents. It’s a over/under duplex. My parents live in the basement apartment and they have their own entrance, kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom and two bedrooms. They also have access to a patio overlooking the 2 acre backyard. I live on the main floor of the house. I have a large sunroom, a huge living/family room, a dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, two bedrooms and a large deck overlooking the backyard. The best places for my new home office are the sunroom, guest bedroom or living room.
Let’s go over the pro’s and con’s of each:
Sunroom
The sunroom is a large 13 ft by 19 ft room. One wall has large glass doors leading to the living room that can be closed for privacy and the other wall has a glass door leading to the deck. The other two walls are covered in windows. This room gets a ton of natural light and I can look out over the backyard. I love sitting in here and watching the wildlife and birds. This would be an amazing room to work in except for a few things. The big thing is temperature control. It gets extremely hot in there in the summer and extremely cold in the winter. There are HVAC vents but the windows are older so it’s not very insulated. The sun shines bright in the late afternoon and heats it up quite a bit. In the winter, the heat goes right out the windows. It’s too hard to control the temperature in here. I would always be too hot or too cold. The other problem with using this room as an office is the size. I really don’t need an office this large. I could possibly use half of it as a home office and then make the other half a game room, a library or a craft room. Between the temperature, the sun glare from all the windows and the large size, I just don’t think it makes sense to use it as a home office.
Guest Bedroom
A guest bedroom is the perfect place for a home office. It’s in a far away corner of the house for privacy. I could leave my work behind and lock the door when I’m done for the day. My guest bedroom is 9 ft by 14 ft which is a good size for a home office. The problem is that I have my washer and dryer in my bedroom. I would hate having to work while the laundry was going. Another problem is isolation. I really don’t like being isolated while I work. I hate the feeling of being trapped in a room. At my last house, my home office was in a guest bedroom and I hated working in there during the day. It reminds me of working in an office and that’s one place I don’t want to work and it’s why I’m self-employed. Privacy is nice when I need it but I live alone so it’s not as important for me. I think the guest bedroom would work better as a home gym, especially since the washer and dryer are in there.
Living Room
You might be surprised when I say this but I think the living room is the perfect place for my home office. Not everyone likes having their work and living space together but I don’t think I would mind it. My living room is 19ft by 32ft. There is plenty of room to put my home office in the corner by the big bay window and still have plenty of room left for a TV area and an area for my future dog to play. My living room can easily be divided into thirds. There is a large gas fireplace in the middle of the living room and to the left and right of the fireplace are divided equally. They could each be their own rooms. The area to the right of the fireplace would make the perfect home office. There is a window on one wall and a large bay window on the other wall. It gets a ton of light, yet is always the perfect temperature. Since it’s in the northeast corner, it doesn’t get much glare from the sun. When I’m done working at night, I can just turn off my computer and ignore that corner of the room since it is out of the way. If I have a lot of storage and organization, I don’t think it would ever be messy. By putting my home office in the living room, I could use the sunroom and the guest bedroom for other things.
What’s next?
Now that I’ve decided where I want to put my new home office, I need to come up with a plan and a budget. I need to figure out exactly what I want and need in my home office and then price that stuff out. Once I know how much everything will cost and how much I need to save, I can start trying to earn extra money to pay for my new home office. The next post I make will be detailing what I want my home office to look like and what I envision having in my home office. After that, I’ll create a detailed budget of how much all of this will cost.
