Setting Up Your Home Office

Ideally, you will have a spare bedroom or a den where you can locate your home office. It is really helpful to be able to close the door to your work space. Especially if you have children or pets that can be left alone in the next room for short periods of time. It also helps to keep a balance between work and the rest of your life.

If you don't have a spare room, you could always set up your office in the basement. That is probably the last place I would want my office, but as they say: You gotta do what you gotta do!

When I started my job working from home we did not have any kids yet. So I set up my office in a bedroom on the 2nd floor. That was not ideal, because it was sort of weird working in a bedroom. Then when we had our first child I re-located my office to our dining room. This worked out okay. I purchased a roll top desk so that I could close things up at night and on the weekends. Then we moved, thank God! The house we bought had a spare room on the first floor, right off the kitchen and living room. It really is the ideal spot for a home office. The kids can be in the living room if I am working late, and I know what they are up to.

No matter what you do, find a little spot to carve out that is exclusively your office space. Try to place it in a quiet spot in your home.

The supplies, furniture and equipment you will need depends on the type of job you will be doing. I was working as a claims adjuster and my former employer was not paperless. That was problematic to say the least. I had over 150 open files and I had to store the closed files for months on end. They bought me a file cabinet that was way to small. Then I convinced them that I needed a larger cabinet to accomodate all of my files. I also put some shelves in the basement to store closed files and items that I don't use every day. A closet in the room I use as an office was filled with other supplies, as was a trunk. If you're lucky your employer or business is paperless!

You also may need to arrange to have a separate phone line. This is important if you receive a lot of work related calls. You are not going to want people calling your home or cell phone during evenings, weekends or vacations. I needed a separate fax line as well. I tried having a combination phone/fax and it just didn't work out. My employer paid for all of the extra phone bills. The job that I currently have doesn't require phone calls or faxes, so when I switched jobs I cancelled the fax and extra phone line.