Guest Post: How to Create a Home Office in a Restored House

Owning a beautiful old house is highly rewarding, but I feel that it involves taking on an important responsibility. If this is a home that we have restored ourselves, it will be as if we have saved a bit of history. We have taken on the responsibility to protect this house so that we can ensure that it survives for another generation. Of course, if this is going to be our home we will need to adapt it to our needs, and these may differ greatly from those who originally built the house. If we intend to create a home office, we may need to think carefully about how we can do this without undoing the good work that we did by restoring it.

Tips for Creating a Home Office in a Restored House

Here are just a few tips for how you might go about creating a home office in a restored house:

• Offices are not a new invention and many of these older buildings will have rooms that were intended for this purpose originally. This is particularly true of the large buildings that once would have belonged to business owners and other important people of their day. It will usually not take too much to make this type of room suitable for our current office needs.
• I would suggest that you purchase home office equipment that fits in with the ambience of the house. It is probably not going to work out too well if you plan to use furniture that is too bright and contemporary. It may cost a bit more money, but it will be worth it to find desks and cabinets that fit in with what is already there. You may find that a rewarding project would be to find an old desk from a similar time period to the house and restore it. The only item that you will not want to do this with will be your office chair – if you sit down a lot, you are going to want something modern and ergonomic.
• Many of these older houses will have rooms with large windows. These are great because it means that you get plenty of natural lighting during the day. You can use the light in these rooms, so that you don’t have to make renovations in order to add additional light sources. If you intend to work in the evenings you can buy a nice desk lamp – you must make sure that this is going to be bright enough so that you will not be straining your eyes.
• A problem in these older homes can be draughts and this can be a real nuisance if you are working in one room for most of the day. Sometimes these draughts will be due to old doors that have gaps at the bottom. You can have these replaced or you can just use draught blockers that you lay down on the floor in front of the door.
• Hopefully when you restored this building you made sure that the electrics were all up to scratch. One of the problems that you might encounter is that there are not enough power sockets in the room you intend to use as your office. This can be tricky, and you will certainly not want to overwhelm the sockets you do have with lots of extensions or have wires coming from other rooms. In some instances, you may have no choice but to pay to have additional sockets put in the room, but his needs to be done in such a way as to protect the integrity of the renovation.

These are just a few tips for creating a home office in a restored home. If you put a bit of effort into getting this type of project right, you will be rewarded with something functional, comfortable, and a natural fit with the rest of the house.

This article was brought to you by Burlington Scott, your 24 hours a day emergency repair and property maintenance for domestic and commercial properties in London.