House not quite big enough with WFH

[liloa]

Has anyone else found this? We bought a three bed terrace a number of years back, pre-pandemic and pre-DC, back when we were in the office 5 days a week. Now we both work from home 3 days a week, have one DC and another on the way, and are struggling to figure out how to make it work without feeling like the house is going to be super cramped.

At the moment our box room is an office for us both which works really well, but that will become the baby's room ultimately. We therefore need to move our desks out somewhere, but we use two monitors each and can't really just work from laptops (I think our employers say we have to have screens set up if we're working from home), so wherever we put the desks will need to be a pretty permanent setup.

4 beds round here are either crazy money or we'd suddenly be quite far from nursery, the station etc. Anyone made a garden office work?!

Is there room in the garden for an outhouse?

Garden office sounds ideal in your situation.

Yeah, DH keeps rambling about garden offices. You can get premade shed-style versions (obviously with insulation etc.) or of course build a small building, although guess you would need planning permission

Quite far from the station doesn't sound too bad if you WFH 3 days a week, then you've only got 2 commuting days.

How far is quite far from nursery? I can understand that being more of a pain!

Garden offices can be fab, but my friend who got one in lockdown finds it a bit cold in winter / annoying to go back to use the toilet etc / can't hear the door go! Her company also have a policy on laptops etc so she's not allowed to leave in the garden office because it's basically a shed, my company is the same - so she has to bring a bag into the house every night.

@TTPDTS she should get a ring doorbell and have the alert on her phone if she needs to get the door, alert can be switched off as needs be.

You can get garden rooms that do not need planning permission. Companies can do the whole project. Pay for good insulation. We considered one when DH started to WFH as lost the spare room. But due to his creative skills he adapted the bed in to a giant desk and it can be made back in to a bed. He is very inventive.

If you can give up part of the garden to put an office, could you instead give up a part to have an extension to the house? A heated garden office is quite an investment and if for some reason you don’t need it later it’s less useful than extra space in the house.

why can't one of you go back to working in your real office?