Depreciation on home office for shared office

[lpz-day]

MFJ. Husband and I share an office. We filled out two home offices and split the info for the square footage deduction.  Then comes the area for adding home office assets, asking about either selecting "depreciation for the entire home" or an "home improvement". Upon selecting entire home, entering in the cost of the entire home, and the year we purchase it, it says we used our home 83% of the time for business. Two questions.... am I entering that information correctly (or should I just be entering a percentage) and two do we put this same "depreciation for the entire home" on both home offices?

[Anita01]

I'll try and explain the difference between entire him and office only.  If your home office sits inside oyur house and is, for example, a bedroom, and oyu have a whole house heating system, oyu would wan tto enter the whole house and then the program would calculate a percentage for the home offices based on the square footage of the offices.  

If, on the other hand, you've added a cooling system just to the home offices area because of computer equipment, you would want to say it''s just an office-only improvement and deduct that expense or depreciation 100%.  Another easy example is painting. If you paint the whole house, that's a whole house expense that would be allocated to the office based on square footage.  You might choose, though, just to paint the home office part, so that's a 100% home office expense.

For depreciation, you want to look at the numbers and make sure they make sense.  If depreciation for the whole house would be 10,000 and each office is 10% of the house, then each office should only show $1,000 in depreciation.