The Brand-New House Book by Katherine Salant

Author:Katherine Salant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

thehomeoffice

If you plan to work at home in the evenings and occasionally on the weekend, your home-office needs are modest. You’ll have many choices for a place to hunker over your laptop: the rarely used dining-room table, a corner of your bedroom, or even the builder’s designated den/study, to name a few. But if you plan to make a home office your primary work space, be prepared to set up shop in a second-floor bedroom or the basement, because the builder’s den/study most likely won’t be big enough.

The den/study will certainly be bigger than the cubicle you have at corporate headquarters. But to meet your needs at home, it has to be a lot bigger. First, there’s your office furniture. If you spread out papers or drawings while you work, a desk or a computer work station won’t be enough. You’ll also need a table or counter. And you’ll have those other essential items that were “just down the hall”—a fax machine, a copier, file cabinets and bookcases with reference materials. Some of the file cabinets can go in a basement or a garage, and some of the reference materials you need may be available on CD-ROM, but you’ll still need to allow for some storage. Your equipment won’t take up too much floor area if you get a combination printer-fax-copier.

You’ll also need some breathing room. “Only a cave dweller could be happy in a room that’s less than ten by ten feet. And to feel really comfortable, most people need a space that’s at least twelve by twelve feet,” explained architect Ivar Viehe-Naess of Washington, D.C., who specializes in commercial interiors and office design.

Noise may also be an issue with the builder’s den/study, even if the size works. The favored location in many floor plans is next to the family room, usually the busiest and noisiest room in the house. This is fine for children doing homework, but most adults find the hubbub distracting.

If you can’t decamp to a quieter room, you can reduce the noise significantly by installing a solid-core door (most builders install hollow-core ones) and batt insulation in the walls and ceiling (which is the same material that is put in exterior walls to reduce heat loss in winter). Some manufacturers now make an “acoustical batt insulation” specifically for sound-deadening purposes.

If these modifications do not eliminate the irritating noises, you can get a white-noise machine that masks them. Even if you’ve solved the noise problem, you may still want the white-noise machine to provide innocuous background sound, because most people find that an office space that is too quiet is also uncomfortable (for more on this, see Chapter 14).

Then there’s the daylight issue. Most people want plenty of daylight in their home office, especially if they worked in a windowless office; and no one wants to shut out the view. But too much daylight can be a problem if you work with a computer, because daylight can be five times as bright as the monitor screen, observed architect Murray Milne of Los Angeles, whose home office overlooks the Pacific Ocean.

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