How Long Does It Take To Build an ADU?
Not sure how long it takes to build an ADU designed specifically to your needs? Review a breakdown of an average ADU construction timeline here.
Over the past few years, folks across industries have discovered that working from home (WFH) has many benefits. More importantly, people realize that working from home is a viable way to get their work done.
If you’re WFH or interested in doing so, this is the ideal time to get started on your backyard home office. As more and more companies opt into the remote paradigm, a home office setup presents you with a broader range of employment opportunities.
Cottage can help you build the home workspace of your dreams. Let’s go over some of the most compelling benefits you’ll get from your home office and four ideas to make your workdays effortless in your backyard workspace.
What Are the Benefits of a Home Office?
- You Can Be More Productive
- No Commute
- It Can Help Save The Planet
- You’ll Have More Time For Your Home Life
The advantages you get from building a home office in your backyard extend far beyond workplace productivity.
A home office will transform your property’s value, relationship to your home, and much more.
Here are just a few benefits you’ll get from your new backyard home office.
You Can Be More Productive
Employers sounding the clarion call back to the office may be misguided.
Compelling research indicates that working from home makes employees even more productive than at the workplace. Estimates increase worker productivity by as high as 13% when they have the opportunity to work from home.
Employers want more productive workers; employees want the freedom to work from home. Working from home is a win-win for both parties.
Your Backyard Home Office Benefits You and Your Employer
The growing cultural shift towards home offices is transforming our relationship with work.
Employers are embracing the hybrid work environment because it translates into higher quality work from their employees. Employers are increasingly opening up to the prospect of hybrid work environments, if not outright remote work.
After all, they can save bundles on office space themselves.
Workers benefit as well.
With a productive work environment right in your backyard, you can unleash all your potential, get more work done, and do a better job while you’re at it. Boasting a home office to future employers could also give you a leg up in your next interview.
Starting your home office now could help you be more productive in your future endeavors.
No Commute
One of the most grueling parts of modern work life is the arduous commute to the office.
Whether it’s a 30-minute drive or a two-hour slog, our morning and evening commute to and from the office doesn’t just keep us from getting our work done; it adds untold stress levels onto our already existing stressors—dragging ourselves to the workplace.
The last thing you want to do before going to work for a big day is sit through hours and hours of traffic. Similarly, after a hard day’s work, you don’t want to wait through an endless commute before you can finally relax.
With a home office on your property, you can commute to work with your morning cup of coffee in your hand.
Home Offices Save Your Time, Money, and Stress
Commuting costs you precious time going to and from the office.
The gas money you spend on getting to work adds up quickly over the year—imagine spending thousands of dollars a year to get to work.
But what you can’t put a price on is the stress you burden yourself with during your daily commute. A home office pays for itself with all you save from avoiding the morning commute.
See how easy it is to start your new home office—you’ll never have to commute again.
It Can Help Save The Planet
Working from home is more efficient for you as a worker, our traffic-filled highways, and most importantly, the planet.
Millions of people commute to and from work every day. The air pollution caused by the cars clogging our cities' highways alone is staggering. Considering the total carbon emissions caused by the infrastructure facilitating the daily commute, the taxing effect on the planet is overwhelming.
Working from home doesn’t just keep cars off the road. Home offices minimize the energy demand of vast office spaces; from the A/C to the light fixtures in the building, office space sucks up a substantial amount of power from the grid.
Your Home Office Is Environmentally Friendly
By working from home, you are doing your part in keeping air-polluting cars off the road. You’re decreasing energy demand compared to the power needed to supply your previous office space.
With a home office, you aren’t just an efficient worker—you’re an energy-efficient worker. As climate change increasingly affects our lives, building an ADU for your home office could make a difference in your carbon footprint.
You’ll Have More Time For Your Home Life
Working at the office erases your weekday life's entire 9-5 bloc. When you add to that your daily commute, you’re losing a significant amount of your time to your office life.
That time spent in the office and on the commute adds up. The remote work renaissance has allowed people to give renewed focus to their home life.
Whether that’s more time with the family, more attentiveness to their household needs, or their self-improvement goals, a functional home office can revolutionize your relationship with your home life.
A Home Office Lets You Focus On Your Personal Needs
When you’re removed from the household due to work-related duties, you can’t have the same dedication to your personal needs. When you can work at home, you have the opportunity to present in your home life in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
A functional home office allows you to focus more on your at-home needs. See how easy it is to get started on an ADU in your backyard for your future home office.
4 Ideas For Your Home Office
- Include A Meditation Space
- Include a Built-In Snack Station in Your Office
- Bring In Your Home Decor
- Optimize Your Workspace To Your Needs
The benefits for your own home office are clear. So how can you ensure you’re building the optimal workspace that confers all these key benefits?
Cottage allows you to make customized designs for your home office space. After all, to make your space your own, you need input, down to its very structure.
To get your brain churning on how to optimize your future office space, here are a few ideas that Cottage’s clients have embraced in their home office projects.
Include A Meditation Space
A calm, relaxing space to decompress in the office can be hard to come by.
When you have the opportunity to tailor your home office experience to your needs, you can afford yourself the room for a meditative space.
Practices that promote mindfulness have been shown to boost job performance. In a conventional office environment, there isn’t the same opportunity to comfortably destress that your own home office has.
Design Your Home Office With Mindfulness In Mind
With Cottage, you can directly impact the design of your home office space so that peace and relaxation are built into your space.
Include more natural light so that you can sit in the sun to relax. Fill your space with your personal effects on cabinetry built to your specifications. Bring in a daybed so you can lay down and relax midday. Give your work area a paint color that soothes your mind.
Your input in your space determines your level of relaxation—an ADU built by Cottage affords you the highest level of input in the design of your space.
Include a Built-In Kitchen or Snack Station in Your Office
In a conventional office space, you must migrate to the lunch room to refuel yourself comfortably for the rest of the day.
Furthermore, the time constraints of commuting to the office and the lack of time to prepare nutritious food for the day can often lead to poor dietary choices.
ADU home offices provide you with a multi-functional space or kitchen that affords you the freedom and time to take more control of your diet. Kitchens are a large part of what sets ADUs apart from other, simpler work sheds without plumbing or running water.
You can also include food stations in your home office to supply the nutritional content you need to be more productive.
Structure Your Diet With A More Structured Work Environment
The importance of a nutritious diet on job performance cannot be understated—eating right helps you be more productive. When you have a personalized office space in the comfort of your own home, you have the time and ability to take a more involved role in your diet.
With Cottage’s design plans, you ensure that your home office serves every function you need: like food preparation.
From a full kitchen to something simpler like a built-in pantry or simple refrigerator and cabinetry, you can get complete control over your workspace and your diet.
Bring In Your Home Decor
Making a space yours makes all the difference in your comfort level.
Your workspace should be as comfortable as possible. To be as productive as possible, you need to feel at home. Making your office decor feel homey can be difficult. Your ability to make alterations to the space is limited.
With customized ADU units from Cottage, you have full rein over the design plans for your workspace. Down to the layout of your workspace, you have the opportunity to make your space feel like home—it’s your home workspace, after all.
Decorate Your Office How You Want
The decor ideas for your home office are limitless when you build with Cottage.
Folks working from home have relished in tailoring their workspace, using design as an opportunity to express who they are.
Design built-in bookshelves to display the reading material that shapes you. Include cabinetry for plant life that refreshes your work area. Hang artwork so your office nook looks like a gallery wall at a museum. Give your walls a pop of color that livens your spirits—it’s all up to you.
When you’re leading the design of your home office, everything is possible.
Optimize Your Workspace To Your Needs
In a conventional office work area, you may be unable to alter your environment in a way that suits your needs.
On the other hand, having complete control over your home office setup allows you to design your work area to operate at your peak.
How Can You Optimize Your Workspace?
Optimizing your work area is a matter of including designs personalized to what makes you productive. When you have free rein over the design of your work area, you can make the exact adjustments that promote productive habits.
Leave wall space for a pegboard or a chalkboard to keep up on daily and monthly tasks — position in your desk area where you can enjoy some natural light. Arrange filing cabinets to your specifications.
When you’re calling the shots in your home office, you have full control over your office furniture, from your desk to your desk chair. Make sure to get an ergonomic office desk, possibly a standing desk that takes advantage of vertical space.
Get Started On Your Backyard Office Today
Building a new home office in your backyard won’t just save money, time, and stress in your work life; it will add value to your property.
Invest in your work life and your home value at the same time with a Cottage ADU.Cottage has worked on a wide range of ADU projects—see how these properties have been transformed with our handiwork. Our team of professionals use your input to craft you the ideal space for your property.
Book a free consultation today and build a better future for your work life tomorrow.
Sources:
Are Workers More Productive at Home? | Bloomberg
How our daily travel harms the planet | BBC
The Association between Meditation Practice and Job Performance: A Cross-Sectional Study | NIH