When it comes to garages there are a lot of things that you can do with the space. The most common use of the space is to store things like your car, some clothes and things that you are really just putting off parting with. While cars are a great thing to keep in your garage you may have a two car garage with only one car needing to be stored or even no cars at the moment. Maybe you are a big cyclist or just enjoy taking public transit everywhere for the environmental benefit. Whatever your reasoning is for not owning a car your garage should never be a reason that keeps you beholden to a car. Garages are one of the most versatile rooms in your entire home and so can store a car for the first five years you own a home, be used for something else for the next eight and then spend another ten years storing two cars. These changes will all even be relatively easy and cheap to undergo making the garage shift to meet your home’s needs quite easily despite the large difference of what those actual needs are. One of the best ways to use your garage if it isn’t being used to store cars is for a workspace.
More people than ever are working from home, telecommuting, or simply working for themselves. The internet has opened up the world to us in a way that lets us stay in our homes at the same time. This means that your next business idea or income stream could very well be started and managed all from a small desk in your home with a laptop and an internet connection and anything else you might actually need. Entrepreneurs are sprouting up left and right and the crazy thing is that many of them run their businesses almost entirely from their homes. Garages make the perfect offices for a bunch of reasons that we’ll get to in this article, but the take away from this article for anyone who runs their own little business or is thinking about maybe doing so in the future is to think of your garage not as the place where you keep your cars all the time, but as a place that you can mold into practically any type of useable space. The garage is like the room that you can make huge changes to with almost no consequences so embrace that freedom.
Working from home can be tough, if you have kids they may be home at hours when you are expected to talk with clients or customers. You can easily get distracted by the pile of dishes in your sink and things quickly get out of hand to where you have been cleaning and getting other house related errands done when you were really supposed to be working. It happens to pretty much everyone who tries to be productive at home and can be tough to stop. One of the best ways is to get yourself a space that is somewhat removed from the chores of your home. This lets you get into the zone of working on your own and so you become more productive and don’t procrastinate like you might if you were to be doing your work at the kitchen table like you may have been doing before. While an office is nice it is usually a luxury that get’s replaced by things like a child’s bedroom or something similar. The best type of office is in a place that is entirely devoted to work.
What better place to work then than your garage? The garage can be set up pretty quickly to be a great office with just a little bit of time, effort and money. In just a few days you can go from spending your time working between the living room and your dining room table to having a dedicated desk in your garage that has all of your files on hand, a printer if you need on etc. Moving things in and out of a garage is easy, the garage door means you can have your desk wheeled in within about five minutes and any filing cabinets, wires, stock can be quickly transported to and from your garage work space in absolutely no time at all. Whether you are a creative putting together elaborate pieces to sell to people all over the world or if you are someone who is working remotely with a company that you used to go in to work with every day the garage office can be just the solution to all of your problems. It’s as permanent or temporary of a solution as you need and can be as minimal or luxurious as you want it to be. Taking meetings in your garage may not be the best idea, but other than that the garage workspace is all but a replacement for the traditional office space.
The garage is one of the most flexible spaces in your entire home. The garage door and inherently open area gives you the flexibility to change things at a moment’s notice. One of those changes you might make is to finally really commit to that business idea you’ve always had and turn it into an office. Or to just telecommute to your job and spend more time with your kids by avoiding the unnecessary meetings and commutes that come with the typical office space. It may not be the most luxurious space for client pitches and meetings, but the way the internet is opening up the world of business you just might be able to build your corporate empire from your garage in you pajamas. All you have left to do is move the desk into your garage, hook up a router and a few extension cords and you are quite literally “in business”.