If you work an office job, it’s very likely that you’ve spent a good period of the last two years working from home rather than going into your office. As people rushed to set up work from home spaces, lot’s of people started working from their kitchens and sofas across the country.
While a kitchen or sofa set up, is a good stopgap set up for a home office, long term you should be looking for something a bit more ‘home office-y’ for your set up, if working from home is something you’d like to continue doing.
The best room to set up a home office in is your home’s spare room, should you have one. But if you don’t want to sacrifice your spare room and ability to have guests stay the night at your home, you can double up your spare room, to be a home office and a guest bedroom at the same time, allowing you a professional work from home set up, without giving up the option of having guests stay in your home.
So, how can you strike the perfect balance of office and spare bedroom? Read on to find out.
Sofa Beds
While sofa beds have long been a staple for spare rooms, if you have a proper bed in your spare room, you should swap it out for a sofa bed. As a fold out sofa bed will take up less floor space in the room, you will have more floorspace and flexibility for adding in office features.
A sofa bed is the perfect spare bedroom/home office furniture, whilst working from home you can use the sofa bed in it’s sofa configuration for having a space to take breaks whilst working and have somewhere for others to sit if you have an at home meeting. Then when you have guests spending the night, you just need to fold out the sofa into it’s bed configuration.
Fold Out Desk
Still treating floorspace with a premium, you should look at getting a wall mounted fold down desk for your home office set up in the spare room. The reason to opt for a fold out desk, is that it’ll take up less floorspace and allow you to tuck it back up when you have guests staying so that they don’t feel cramped.
With a wall mounted fold out desk, you’ll need to have your office set up in the corner of the room or against a wall, so that you can mount the desk on the wall and fold it down when needed. Wall mounted folding desks, also will usually have some sort of storage feature in them also, which is great for adding in storage solutions without taking up more of that precious floor space.
Day & Night Blinds
And finally, we move onto day & night blinds, as the name suggests, these blinds work just as well during the day as they do in the night. Allowing you to let natural light in during the day and block out light pollution at night to create a dark sleeping environment for your guests.
Day & night blinds are made out of a long piece of fabric which is built into a cassette. This fabric has alternating strips of blackout material and dimout material, allowing you to line up the blackout layers at night to keep a room dark or line up the dimout layers during the day to let some natural light into your room.