Do Business Well

Before you even start working from home, it is vital to consider exactly where you will be working and to ensure that you have one space that is always used for your work. The setting up of a home office is considered fun, but some basic points are worth bearing in mind:

Having a space of your own makes it much easier to separate your work life from your home life.’ I tried working in the front room, but it meant that when I sat down to watch the TV, I couldn’t help seeing all my papers and all the things I was meant to be doing the next day,’ says May a medical secretary. ‘It became very hard not to take them up and just have a quick browse through. Once I transformed the back room into an office, I could at least shut the door on my work and walk away.’

• If you have a space of your own, you are far less likely to be drawn into family life when you are meant to be working. ‘Working with the children in the same room was impossible,’ says Sally Wilkins, who started her baby-sling business on her kitchen table. ‘I just couldn’t concentrate and they all wanted my attention anyway. As we didn’t have a spare room at the time, I found the only solution was to work when they had all gone to bed — often into the early hours. But at least I had my own space then.’
• Having a space of your own will also mean that your work life doesn’t literally spill into your family life. It is difficult to live with boxes of papers on tables, or half-knitted garments that have to be moved whenever a visitor arrives. ‘At first my friends thought it was fun to have dinner surrounded by hats,’ says Katharine Goodison. ‘But I found it uncomfortable.’
• If work and personal matters are kept too close together, you are also likely to find them getting muddled up, resulting in lost papers, documents etc. I first realized the importance of keeping work and family life absolutely separate when I left a tape of an interview lying around the dining room. My one-year-old promptly unravelled the tape, resulting in the complete loss of the interview.
• In some professions it is vital to have a space of your own in order to reassure people that you are a professional. This is particularly true in any area which has a great deal of client contact, such as being an optician, chiropodist, counsellor, beauty therapist, or consultant who expects to entertain clients at home. Most clients will want a degree of privacy that cannot be achieved with family members trying to live or eat in the same room.
• Many occupations require a great deal of equipment that needs a permanent home (e.g. a piano teacher needs space for a piano, a computer consultant needs a permanent station for a computer.) If you cannot find a permanent space for the equipment you need to carry out your professional duties, you will not be able to make a success of working from home.
• You will need to contact your building society (or other mortgage lender) if you plan to establish a home office. They are unlikely to raise any objections if you do not wish to alter the property, and if you do they will probably be the first in line to offer you home loans. A few properties also have restrictions preventing them being used for any form of business use — even if the use doesn’t create noise or extra traffic and uses only a small part of the house. However, one civil servant whose work has brought him into contact with many home businesses says that ‘People anticipate problems like planning and restrictive covenants, but in terms of owner-occupier houses most of the time there is no problem, provided the work isn’t disturbing the neighbours.’

However, if you intend to convert a large part of your home into working space, you may also need planning permission.

For council tenants and those living in privately rented properties, there are often restrictions on working at home. It’s worth finding out before you start, though bear in mind that occupations which don’t attract any commotion (mail order, word-processing, consultancy) are more likely to find favour than those which do (running a minicab service, tea shop etc.). ‘Officially, our tenancy agreement says that the property must be used only for residential purposes,’ says one house officer, who doesn’t want to be named. But, to be honest, if someone wants to knit, do office work — quiet things which involve very little traffic — we’re not bothered. It’s when the neighbours complain or the we starts to take over the whole property that we have to act. The most common complaint is of someone starting a car repair outfit out the front.

If your work involves little traffic, few visitors and is large invisible, the chances are that you won’t bother anyone. However, you may need to do a lot more research into the official attitude if your we is highly visible and possibly disruptive.

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