Home Offices

Are you one of the growing number of people that has been given the opportunity to work from home full-time or part-time? If so then when you first start out simply working from your existing computer or from a spare bedroom at home is what most people do.

After a while though, particularly if you have children, you will tend to find that you will want to have a dedicated office space but then you may have the problem of where to have your own office, as most often building an extension to your house will be extremely costly and require planning permission.

However you could do like a growing number of people are doing and purchase a home office in the form of a summer house so that you can set aside a private space for working. The good news is if you’re self-employed that as it is a separate building from your house that you can also offset the cost of its construction and installation against your tax bill. A definite plus point to my mind. Indeed my first Home Office was a lean-to conservatory on my house and unfortunately it was classed as part of my house and I was not allowed to claim tax relief on it. The next year I built a substantial summer house in the garden, which was classed as my home office and was able to offset the whole amount around £10,000/$16,000 against tax.

You can purchase dedicated home office buildings, which are very designer in style and if you have the money I would say go for it as they can look simply stunning and the value will be reflected in your property unlike other amendments to your house that you could make.

A dedicated home office space makes extremely good sense as you can fit it out with electrics, communications and Wi-Fi to suit your demands, you cannot really do that with your spare bedroom – and best of all it’s a space that you can keep your work away from the kids. Yet it can also be somewhere that you can fit in a TV or home audio system or games system so that you can have a little bit of relaxation time in between working.

When building a home office at the lower end of things you can simply start out with purchasing a suitably sized summer house and insulate the walls so you can use it all year round and fit it out with power and communications, through to the high end of things whereby you can spend 70-90k on a state of the art home office.

By Richard Allen -