5 Great Ideas to Put a Spare Room to Use

Do you have a spare room? I bet for many of us the answer is yes we do. But do you put it to good use regularly? I’m fairly certain that the number who answer yes to this question is significantly lower. But why is this? Well, it's easy to have a spare room set up to be a guest bedroom as that's essentially the default setting of a spare room. But how often is it likely that you are going to have people staying over? I don’t think that it’s likely to be a high number though and that leaves a lot of unused room space just sitting around doing absolutely nothing. So here are a few good ideas on what to do with the unused space and with many of these you are still going to be able to use the room for friends and relatives to stay over when necessary. 

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Home Office

This is probably the second most used occupation for a spare room to have and set-up a home office space and this allows you to have somewhere to take of things that have a far sight fewer distractions than other areas of the house. It’s fair to say if you are trying to be productive it’s going to be difficult if you are doing it in front of the TV or at the kitchen table where family life is going on all around you. If you set up a room with a dedicated work desk, computer and office supplies then you will find that you’ll get far more done.

AirBNB

This option is really not that different in set-up than keeping the area as a guest bedroom with the big exception of the fact that you are going to be able to make money from it. With AirBNB you rent out the room as often or as seldom as you like and you’re just having a house guest although you don’t have to entertain them all the time. Understandably, this can seem a little invasive so it makes sense that not everyone is going to do this all the time. But you need to ensure your place is AirBNB ready which includes knowing how to describe the place to attract the appropriate audience and to create a theme and decorate well to make it as attractive as possible.

Home Gym

Why not use the opportunity to get in shape and do this by creating a home gym. It’s relatively easy to do unless you are looking at something particularly specialist and requires very little in terms of modification, you may want to install some rubber gym flooring but that's it other than bringing in the equipment itself. You will want to know if you are more interested in weight lifting or if you are more wanting to get some cardiovascular work done, this will tell you if you need more exercise bike and treadmill type equipment or if it’s weights you will more be looking at.

Start A Home Business

We’ve already talked about setting up a home office but this is a much more specific point than that as you can do certain types of home working from anywhere and that’s not exactly what we’re talking about. So it’s more about the types of business where you can use a space for either a small business where you are selling items and so could use the spare room as a space to store the good and package them up before sending them out. If you have other skills though you can work from home and use them to make a living. For example, if you are a hairdresser then all you need are your scissors and tools and a chair, or a beauty therapist could set up. These types of businesses are good for home working as you are saving a huge amount on rent of space in a salon and this gives you a great competitive advantage if you only want to work in a limited capacity.

Arts & Crafts

You can set up in the spare room for all sorts of arts and crafts, pretty much anything from knitting, sewing, quilting. All you will need for the space to be good for work or fun, maybe with the kids to teach them skills or for making a bit of extra money it’s all good.