Creating Your Home Office With Temporary

Creating a home office in a rental house is a challenge because your landlord would not want you causing him costly repairs when you end the lease contract.

But you can install a home office without causing any damage on the wall, the ceiling or the floor. You just make some minor patches when you leave and the landlord would never notice you installed something in his property.

The most practical way to create a home office would be to partition a room using temporary interior walls. Here are the steps for installing interior walls to partition a room:

1. Determine where your home office will be. One of the most practical locations would be where you would install only two walls, which would form the L-shape. Decide the total area.

2. Make measurements of the following:

• distance between the ceiling and the floor in various locations to check if there is no variation
• lengths of the new walls that will form the L-shape design
• height of the interior wall studs

3. Buy your interior wall partitions, wall studs and supplies. Check your tools. You will need at least a measuring tape, electric drill, hammer, level, cutter and square.

4. There has to be someone holding the top plates or runners while you put the studs in place so you need to have a helper. Install the wall studs of the longer wall first. Use the drill to create holes for the three-inch screws that will connect the studs to the plates or runners.

5. After all the wall studs have been installed, put sound attenuation batts into the stud cavities. These batts help reduce noise. Then start putting the drywall. To reduce noise further, install drywall of different thickness on each side of the wall. You can use half-inch on one side and five-eighth on the other.

6. To have more assurance that the interior walls would not tip over, attach the top runner to the ceiling with fastener at several points of the runners. You can patch and paint these points later when you leave and remove the wall.

7. To improve soundproofing and to protect surfaces, insert one-fourth-inch-thick foam between the top runners and the ceiling and between the bottom runners and the floor.