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Turn Your Garage Into Your Office With These Five Easy Steps

When space within your home is at a premium, working from home may create some challenges. Setting up your office does not have to mean sacrificing your guest room, nor does it have to mean building an extra room on your home. If you’re like most people, you have plenty of space in the garage to create a home office. Converting your garage into a home office is easier than you think.

garage home

Follow these five steps to create the kind of office that will make you feel as if you’re working in an actual office.

Make Your Office Chill

Most garages do not have central air hooked up to them. After all, the room is designed to house a car, not an office. Rectifying this is very simple. All you need to purchase is a window-mounted air conditioning unit for the garage and you will not be sweating as you work. If you don’t have any windows in the garage, you can purchase a portable air conditioner that simply plugs into a wall outlet. Try to position the air conditioning unit close to where you’re planning to have your desk. While these units are designed to chill an entire room, you will not feel the chill very soon. As you start to make money from home, you can upgrade your unit and even purchase a heater for the winter.

Set up Your Desk

One of the most important things you need in an office is a desk. This is less because it’s what makes an office an office and more because only a desk allows you to have functionality in your tasks. Desks not only provide you with a place to put your computer and to write, it also provides you with an area to store things and to display anything you need to use on an ongoing basis. The best bet is to have a desk that is ergonomic in design. This means having a desk that puts everything you need close at hand. If you find yourself needing to get up to grab anything on your desk, you need a different desk. Make sure you sit down at the desk you’re considering buying before you ever even look at the price. This will help you to create a short list of functional desks that will suit your individual needs.

Get a Better Router

Even a fast Internet connection can be slow if you have a bad router. The best router includes an 802.11ac protocol. This allows the router to send more information to you whenever you’re in the office or to another location if you decide you’d like to change it up a little bit and work on the deck. If you don’t plan on doing much else with your router, other than working, you can set it up in the garage. If you’re going to use it for streaming movies to your television and other uses, think about installing it in a central place within the house close to the garage. When in doubt, you can get help from your Internet service provider to have the unit set up in the best location for how you’re going to use it.

Create Your Own Style

Another important aspect of working from home is to make your office your own. Some home offices have been completely built out, but you don’t have to go this far, as shown by HGTV. You can simply hang up some artwork and maybe paint the walls to make it look more like an office and less like a garage. Changing some of the lighting in the garage can do wonders to help in creating your personalized work space. Most garages have only dim lighting plus the light of the garage door opener. Rather than settling for this, you can install a ridge in your garage with canned lighting to create an amazing ambiance. Using a desk light can be a good short-term solution as you start to make money from home.

Store All Your Information

Since you don’t have an amazing firewall, like many of the big offices, you might want to store all of your information locally. The best solution for this is to have a good external hard drive. There are even models available that are fire- and water-safe. This is perfect for a garage since the possibility of water getting into the garage is a lot higher than the possibility of water getting into the rest of the home. Even if you have a model that is water-safe, do not store your external hard drive on the floor. Also, make sure that the hard drive stores at least a terabyte of information. This way, you’ll not have to worry about running out of space any time soon.

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