Being a dab hand with DIY comes in remarkably useful for home improvements, helping out friends and family with advice and fixing their do it yourself disasters, while also saving money. However, what you might not have considered is how it could help you with your full-time job by working from home.
With more and more people taking to home working, any advantage and improvement you can get is a real bonus. These five points demonstrate how your skills can change the way you work.
1. Reduce clutter
A tidy room makes a tidy mind. Having less clutter increases your productivity, and even the act of tidying gives you a sense of achievement. If you are able, building storage space such as cupboards, boxes, shelves, and cabinets will provide you with places to tuck away all the distractions and messes that usually plague your home office.
The ability to keep your workplace neat and tidy without spending vast amounts of money on storage is an enviable one.
2. Separate your work from your home life
Being able to build or renovate a specific space in your home so that it is entirely separated from your personal life is an excellent way to compartmentalise your thoughts and help you relax at the end of the day. Finding garden offices to suit you or converting a garage could give you that separation you need; peace and quiet are essential to getting plenty of work done.
3. Improve comfort
Staying comfortable is an essential part of being able to work effectively at home. In a 2015 survey, the top three features identified by workers as critical to an effective workspace were a desk, chair, and temperature; all are related to comfort. With expert DIY skills, you can improve the ergonomics of your home workplace by building comfortable seats. These desks have all of your necessary tools within reach and installing proper insulation.
4. Specialise your spaces
If your DIY skills stretch to renovating entire rooms or external buildings, you should be able to specialise spaces for select purposes. This is incredibly important for workplaces dedicated to working from home.
For example, if you work as an online fitness instructor using video calls to tailor workouts for clients, your office-cum-studio will look much different from that of an accountant, operating with spreadsheets and documents from a remote computer. This means a space should have the unique items and layout required of it, which, for those without the gift of DIY skills, could be extremely costly.
5. Use up leftover materials
People into building, renovating, and designing are likely to have plenty of leftover materials. These can easily be repurposed into equipment or furniture for your work from home space, saving you a trip to the tip or the expense of new materials. This saving of time and money will benefit your home working as you have more freedom to complete your tasks and more cash to spend on relaxing outside of work hours.