4 Questions To Answer When House Hunting For The Perfect Home Gym

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1) What Do You Need From A Home Gym

Is this going to be used primarily by one person or multiple people at once? Are you planning to use it for yourself only, or do you plan to open a home-based microgym? Does everyone in the household need access to equipment simultaneously? Do you want something catered towards basic strength training vs. lifting heavier weight? Cardio focused? Cross-training focused?

Answer these questions before you begin searching. Why? You might want a separate entrance into the planned gym space if you want to open a microgym. While that may not be important if you and your family will be the only ones using it.

If you don't plan on purchasing a ton of equipment, you may only need a corner of your living room. A Peloton bike takes up very little space, and you can buy one with 2lbs to 3lbs weights. By contrast, a setup for Olympic weightlifting-focused home gym is very different. You need hard floors, concrete preferably, that can take a beating. Do you need to park your car in the garage? Consider that. In most homes these days, the garage is the only place you can reasonably drop heavyweights.

2) How Well Insulated And Ventilated Is The Space You'd Use

This is an often overlooked consideration, and many home gym owners regret not paying closer attention to it when signing the dotted line. Are you moving to hotter climates? Are you heading toward the north pole? Facebook group after Facebook group is littered with questions from desperate home gym owners seeking tips to cool or warm up their gym space.

If you're faced with very few options, you want to price out and budget the costs to insulate the space you plan to use. Fortunately, there are reasonable measures you can take when wrestling with climate control. Decided to go with the garage? Consider insulating the garage door with a door insulation kit quickly found on Amazon.

3) How Much Storage Space Is There To Store Your Extra Household Items

Unless you've bought in wholesale to Marie Kondo's "Spark Joy" and rid yourself of everything you owned that didn't spark joy, chances are you're like the rest of us and have a ton of stuff. So, wherever you set up the equipment for your home gym, you can forget about putting all that extra stuff. Are you planning to build a Gym Shed? You can forget about putting the ride-on-mower there.

If you're going to use an entire room for your home gym, look for a house that has plenty of closet space.  Older homes, apartments, and condos generally offer less storage, or closet space.  Fortunately, there's an entire industry built around storage solutions. Wall-mounted and overhead storage racks, for example, are relatively cheap to purchase and easy to install.  

4) How Close To The Neighbors Is The House

If you're like me, you've probably been guilty of letting a loaded barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell slip from your sweaty palms as you eagerly rush to the next exercise. Or, maybe you drop them regularly (guilty). If you fall into this category, you need to consider your neighbors.

Of course, life would be so easy if we lived and let live, but the reality is we can't ignore the impact music and heavy weights will have on those around us. So, when you walk into the next Open House, look around the neighborhood, and specifically the home adjacent to the one you're looking into buying. Does the home gym space face the neighbors master bedroom? Does sound carry far, or is there foliage to dampen the noise? How thick are the walls?

Conclusion

It can be difficult to find the perfect home to fit your needs, let alone a home that will accommodate you're vision for the perfect home gym. So, before you get started on your journey to buy a new home, consider these 4 questions to answer when house hunting for the perfect home gym.

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