Working from home – how to create a healthy work-from-home environment in a home where there are other people and possibly, limited space. The first thing is to look back at the pandemic years. Remember how we all learned how to do Zoom calls from bed? How we used our laptops on ironing boards? It all seemed like such an odd experiment at the time and now it seems like just normal working life.
Yet, while the idea of Zooming from bed was fun, the actual practice was only ever for a short period, as the world’s demand for remote work settled into hybrid working. The problem is that, for many families, the typical home office isn’t practical. There isn’t a spare bedroom. Or the guest room is taken over by a home worker. Or there is no room at all. And when it gets too crowded, we need to stop looking at spare rooms and instead think about all the space in the home that isn’t now being used for anything. Looking for a home with clever use of space? For Gloucester Estate Agents, visit https://www.tgres.co.uk/
One way to think about this is the ‘cloffice’ or closet office. Closets can make ideal spaces to work in, as they are often naturally quite quiet and have good natural lighting. If a room is too small for a full office, you might try making use of a closet. In fact, this is a popular trend.
However, even if you can’t fit a desk in the closet, you can still make use of it to hide a workspace. In a small apartment, for instance, a home worker can use a room’s closet to stash office supplies, files and other tools. Or, if you live in a house, you can use the closet space to stash office equipment that can be brought out as needed, such as a portable desk. Finally, closets have another advantage when it comes to WFH. They often have doors that can be closed at the end of the workday, keeping your workspace out of sight. If you live with others, especially children, this is an excellent way to keep the workday from bleeding into home time.
This is the beauty of WFH. It allows you to really schedule your life, which is a luxury many of us don’t often get to have. How can you help your home worker ‘zone out’ from work when they are working in the living room? One way to do this is with room zoning or by physically separating a workspace from the rest of the home. You can do this with a screen. Room screens are often associated with Japanese houses but they are also a great way to create a WFH workspace.