Remodel Your Home With an Eco-Friendly Small Business Office

America's 31.7 million small businesses operate from homes, office buildings, and home offices. Some types of small businesses may require an office or studio space in a central location (such as downtown) that's convenient for clients to visit, but others can be run efficiently from home.

If you have a small business, you may need a home office. And if your business ethos includes caring for the planet, you'll want to develop a home office that's as eco-friendly as possible.

Discover some of the basics about remodeling your home to add an eco-friendly office area for your small business.

Why Add an Office Space?

Some small business owners get by without earmarking an entire room for their business operations. However, at tax time, you'll need to know exactly how much of your home was exclusively for business purposes, and having a designated room can make that easy. And if you're not a single-person household, you need to be able to shut the door on distractions.

Even if you end up expanding your business and need to rent more office space elsewhere, the office at home can still be your base of operations. As a busy business owner, you'll need somewhere to put any work you take home with you and somewhere quiet and private for days when you work from home.

The commute can't be beat, and if you create your own office space rather than renting it, you can control how eco-friendly the space is. Systems such as lighting, heating and cooling, and plumbing are out of your control if you rent space in a building. But if you create your own office, you can make it as efficient as you like, which can be important if you're a green business.

What Are Ways to Make it Eco-Friendly?

If you add a whole room onto the house, you have almost unlimited possibilities for making it as eco-friendly as possible, starting from the ground up. For example:

• You can use energy-efficient materials for the foundation
• You can design the room to be well-insulated on every side for energy efficiency
• You can include daylighting components to reduce the need for artificial light
• You can choose repurposed or recycled building materials

However, even if you simply remodel a room to serve as a small business office, you'll still have plenty of scope for eco-friendly construction. Some possibilities include:

• Retrofitting the room with energy-efficient lighting
• Using sustainable materials and components, such as bamboo shelving
• Upgrading to super-efficient windows or adding window films that block heat gain
• Using non-toxic or low-VOC paint

Your contractor can help you brainstorm eco-friendly ideas and work them into the remodel.

What Is the Time Needed for Adding an Office Space?

The length of time the remodel will take depends on several factors, such as how busy your contractors are, how complex the planning process is, or how easy the materials are to source. But most likely, the biggest factor is the extent of the project. For example, building a whole room from scratch is likely to take much longer than a simple renovation.

If you just remodel an existing room into a home office, with simple adjustments such as adding shelving, insulated windows, and energy-efficient fixtures, the project may be complete in just a few weeks after the start date. But a more extensive remodel that includes adding a room may take four months or so to complete after designing and permitting are complete.

These basics can help you wrap your head around the process and reasoning behind creating an eco-friendly office in your home to run your small business from. To make this idea a reality, you'll need to get a competent custom home

builder on board. Genuine Home Builders, Inc., can help with either a home addition or a renovation, so get in touch today.