Add an office in basement or attic? HomeImprovement

Hi there HIddit,

I'm looking to add an office to my house for me to work out of.

Currently I work in the spare bedroom, but there's a bed in here and it's a little unprofessional when video-calling for others to see my bedroom stuff in the background. Also my kids are getting old enough to want/need their own rooms, so one of them will be sleeping in my "office" soon anyway.

I have basically two spaces available where I could add an office: the attic or the basement. I can't decide which is better and want some external opinions and viewpoints I might not have considered. The house is not very old (<20 years) and the construction is sound generally.

The basement:

The basement is clean, dry, and has a full-size window near one of the corners; but is otherwise completely unfinished (concrete floor and half-walls, wood and insulation above that). It has high ceilings and enough room for a 12x12 office fairly easily, still leaving enough room for the basement-y stuff (we use it for storage and such currently). The furnace and waterheater (both natural gas) would need to be moved as they are close to the window. I would also have to walk through unfinished basement to get to the office area (or do something creative like build a sort of hallway, or half-finish the rest of the basement, or something).

The attic:

The attic is the full size of the house footprint, but the roof is not very steep so there is not a lot of "usable" space (assuming minimum 7 foot ceiling rule). It's completely unfinished, but has a basic plywood stairway up to it that could be finished. There is a large refrigerator-sized air-conditioner unit, air-return, and ducting up there that could be creatively moved. A window would have to be added. I think theoretically this could be counted as a "bedroom" legally, so it could potentially help resale values in that regard (additional bedroom instead of additional non-bedroom with the basement). It would require a bit of work on the 2nd floor as well though because the attic stairwell is only accessible through a bedroom currently. We would have to either add a hallway (one of the kids rooms is ridiculously large and could accommodate a hallway just fine), or somehow make it as a master-suite addition (have the stairwell only accessible from the master bedroom) but I'm not sure that would work as well given the placement of some windows. I would likely only utilize half of the attic space for a finished room (leaving the rest as normal attic), enclosing the stairway into the room.

So, there's my dilemma. I don't know if there are any other pros/cons to basement-vs-attic that I haven't considered. My wife also brought up the idea of a separate small "shed" building in the yard for an office, but I don't like that idea very much (but I'm open to "unusual" ideas if they make sense).

Submitted June 06, 2016 at 07:47PM by encaseme http://ift.tt/25Hsgs3 HomeImprovement