With the lock down slowly coming to an end, many businesses and employees are wondering if home working and flexible working could be a viable option on a more permanent basis. For businesses, they will save money on office rent by having employees that work from home. Meanwhile, for employees they get to create a better work / life balance for them and their family.
What Are The Benefits Of A Garden Office?
- There is no commuting to work in rush hour. Research shows that the average person takes an average of 1.15hours to get to and from work. Worked out to a person’s average career length, this is over 10,500 hours commuting to and from work. Due to fact you’re not commuting you’re also saving money on travel too. Less money on petrol, train tickets and more, but also the reduced risk of ‘accidental’ purchases such as the fancy coffee and cake on the way to work!
- Working from your garden office means you get more time with your family, which is essential when you have younger children. If you work in an office and finish at 5pm, you won’t get home until much later. However, if you work in the garden office you’re home with your family minutes after finishing work. Finally you can make school parents’ evenings, story time and bath time. All the things you were missing are now, literally, on your doorstep.
- It’s your space. You don’t just have your desk and a window, or a grey cubicle. Instead you have your own space and your own office. If you want photos of your family or pets all over the walls you can do. Fancy a nice rug for the floor? No problem. From the size of your desk, colour of your chair and style of your office lighting – it’s all completely your choice. It is your space and your office; you can do what you want with it.
- You’ll get great views too. While colleagues may fight for the window in the office, or for the view of all the warehouses and offices around you; it’s different from your garden office. You love your garden space and now you get to admire it all day long while you’re sat working hard in your office. You can see the roses blooming, the luscious green grass and the nature of your back garden – all from your office window.
- A garden office gives you that work / home divide. You’re not in a room in the house or crammed onto the kitchen table. Instead you are leaving the house each day to go into your garden office. This helps make sure the lines of home and work don’t blur; which can be tempting when you’re working from home, in the home.
- The addition of a garden office can add as much as 5% or 7% to the value of your property. This makes a garden office a really sensible and effective investment in your home as well as your future.
What Are The Benefits Of A Garden Office To Your Business?
We had a chat with Karl at Direct Peak about the benefits of a garden office to your business and we were surprised with just how beneficial a garden office can be to a business. If you are purchasing the garden office through a Ltd company then the garden office is a structure and there is no corporation tax relief to claim to claim.
However, tax relief can be claimed on any furniture or equipment that is installed inside your garden office using capital allowances. As a Ltd company you will also be able to claim tax relief on electrical wiring and plumbing using capital allowances. There will be ongoing costs that can be offset against your tax too. These include things like electric, heating and repairs.
If your business is VAT registered you will be also reclaim the VAT on all purchases made as part of your garden office. Please note that if you use the garden office for personal use then there will be a personal tax cost due to it being classed as a benefit in kind.
When selling your home with a garden office it is important to note that if the office is used exclusively for business then there will be a capital gains tax charged on the garden office. The amount charged would depend on how much land the office takes up.
To Summarise
As you can see there are loads of great benefits to having a garden office; we have only listed some of them. If you would like to get a quote for an office in your garden, call our team. However, if you’d like to know more about the benefits of a garden office for your business, please contact Karl and his team at Direct Peak.