Add Value To Your Home With A Home Office

Homeowners always look for ways to add value to their most significant asset—their home. This strategy is often employed just before the house is listed for sale to maximise the sales price.

Life has taken a different turn since the pandemic, and working from home is the new normal. A home office is a top priority for homebuyers. So, how do you create a home office that improves your remote working and adds value to your property?

Renovating

Renovating a property is costly, especially if it involves adding or removing structural walls.

Adding a new room or changing the current layout to accommodate a modern lifestyle can add value or cost you equity.

Done well, it can add thousands to the sales price, or it can cost more than you’ll ever get back when you sell up. This is called a negative equity position, where the cost to purchase and renovate exceeds the sales price achieved.

Therefore, before you rush in and engage a builder or tradesperson to convert a bedroom into a home office, research how you can improve your current home’s footprint and layout and weigh the options’ cost-benefit analysis.

Will working from home die out when life returns to normal?

Post-lockdown workers are keen to work from home for at least part of the workweek. Therefore, adding value to your property with a home office is a worthwhile exercise.

As the New York Times says, managing bored kids and trying to use Zoom from the kitchen table is not a good look, nor is it sustainable, and the proposition to businesses to allow their workers to continue working from home is lost with this setup.

With an ergonomic, professional office arrangement on your property, the video conferencing calls will work seamlessly insofar as clients won’t know if you’re in the office or working from home!

Where To Locate The Home Office

Modern floorplans have an open-plan kitchen, dining, and living environment, which challenged workers during the lockdown. Workers worked off the dining room table or on their laps in the living room, making it hard to sit for hours like in the workplace.

Therefore, worker productivity has been challenging due to family disturbances, pets, and the need to do household chores and maintenance jobs. Thus, situating your home office in an open-plan environment should be avoided.

Spare Bedroom

If you don’t want to add an extra room to your property, you can use a spare bedroom as your home office.

Set the room up as a professional work environment with an office desk, ideally an electric stand-sit desk, so you can choose when you want to stand or sit.

To improve your posture, use an ergonomic chair and a monitor or two instead of bending your head towards your laptop screen. Also, use a separate keyboard and mouse.

Garage

Are you using your double garage for your cars, or is it used mainly for storage? It’s somewhat unsurprising that most homes use their garages for storage, not parking, and herein lies an opportunity to turn the space into a home office.

If your garage is a separate dwelling, you may also be able to extend the building to include a home office, ensuite, parking for a large and small car or one car and storage.

As our lifestyle changes, it may be that you no longer require more than one car. Using the second car space in the garage for a separate home office is a better use of space and adds to your home’s resale value. Get quotes on adding an internal wall to separate the garage from the office.

Make sure the office has windows and a door. Insulate the ceiling and walls and add suitable flooring for your office chair. For example, use office carpet on a concrete base so your office chair can move as quickly as it would in the workplace.

Add an ensuite to your office. Now, we’re adding value with a redefined home office. You can never have too many bathrooms, and professional flippers, aka property investors who buy, renovate and sell, will always look to add an extra bathroom to improve the property’s resale value.

Summary

Today, businesses are agreeable to workers working from home for all or part of the week. Workers do need to prove they have a workspace conducive to productivity.

Therefore, homebuyers will add the home office to their list of priorities, and the properties with the professional office will reap the rewards with a top sales price.

See our renovations category for more articles on renovating, particularly overhauling high-traffic zones such as bathrooms and kitchens.