To start with, you will more than likely find that depreciating the furniture will make absolutely no difference on your tax liability. But when you sell the property later in your life, the requirement to recapture that depreciation and pay taxes on it *will* have a potential to hurt. Recaptured depreciation adds to your AGI and has the potential to bump you into a higher tax bracket. So overall, chances are this is a waste of your time and effort for no gain, but a possible loss in the future sale of the property.
Furniture and appliances are depreciated over 5 years.
Furniture in the room that is "exclusive to the renter" can be depreciated at 100% over 5 years.
If the renter actually has use of other appliances and you can prove it (in the contract) then your percentage of business use is probably not at 50%. For common area appliances the percentage is based on the number of people that live in the house.
So if it's you, your spouse and two kids, the addition of a renter makes 5 people. So only 20% of the value of those common area appliances is depreciated. But if you have a couple renting the room that makes 6 people, which comes out to 16.6% use per person. So for the two renters that makes 33.3% business use.
So you can see that's a nightmare that screams for an audit. The TurboTax program just flat out can't handle a scenario where the number of people in the house can change practically daily.
My recommendation is don't waste your time with the common area stuff. As for the bedroom furniture that's 100% business use, knock yourself out. But you'll probably find it makes no difference to your overall bottom line tax liability.
