Antonio Perez spent one year and $32,000 creating a dream gym for his family.
Courtesy of Antonio Perez
Software engineer Antonio Perez, 47, spent the past year and $32,000 building his dream at-home gym.
After his wife became wheelchair-bound, he felt guilty leaving daily for the gym.
The most expensive piece of equipment was a $3,600 AssaultRunner Pro treadmill he bought for his daughter.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with software engineer Antonio Perez, 47, who lives in Bath Township, Ohio, about 30 minutes south of Cleveland. Over the past year, he turned his house's woodworking shop into a basement gym. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I bought the five-bedroom house for $485,000 in 2019. The previous owner used the basement as a woodworking shop, but I knew we would transform it into something different.
Originally, I thought the basement might be a home movie theater and I would just use one of the bedrooms for my exercise equipment. While researching home theaters, though, I realized we probably wouldn't use it enough to justify the cost.
The original woodworking shop in Perez's basement.
Courtesy of Antonio Perez
My wife developed Multiple System Atrophy, or MSA, in 2020, a neurological disease similar to ALS. By 2023, she was wheelchair-bound and it was difficult for her to leave the house. I started to feel guilty every time I left for the gym. What if she needed help going to the bathroom and no one was there?
The gym was also for the whole family. I'm trying to get back into shape personally. I weightlift around three to five days a week when I'm focused on a program. I also have two daughters, 19 and 17, who have played lacrosse, tennis, soccer, and basketball over the years.
My two-month project turned into a yearlong odyssey
Like all home improvement projects, you think it's going to be faster than it is. I originally thought it'd be a two- to three-month project. I started in February 2024 and only felt like everything was completed last week β over a year later.
I didn't set a specific budget. I knew I wanted it to be nice, and I kind of did it on the fly. If I saw a piece of equipment that I wanted and I could afford it, I bought it. In total, the project cost me around $32,000.
The flooring took a lot of research. I had to strip out all the old linoleum glue, which required renting a sander. I knew I wanted a material that mimicked professional gyms, so I went to Home Depot and got samples. I wanted it to feel dense when you stepped on it.
Perez researched flooring at professional gyms to find the right style.
Courtesy of Antonio Perez
While researching home theaters, I saw a really cool speaker system. It was dark black, but you could see the wood grain coming through. I tried to replicate that for the walls, and I think I nailed it.
The hardest part was spray-painting the ceiling. I used 10 gallons of paint, which means I held up that extension wand for hours and hours.
I taught myself how to do some of the DIY work and learned to be patient
The lighting was surprisingly easy, especially since it was my first electrical job ever. I used YouTube videos to learn how, but it turned out to be a simple project to run together a couple of lines and put together junction boxes. I settled on the hexagonal shape after seeing pictures of some other home gyms. The lights were relatively cheap, only around $500, and I didn't even use all the ones I picked up.
I wanted it to be extra bright since the floors and walls were so dark. My daughter thinks its too bright, but I think it's perfect.
If you're attempting to build a home gym on your own, just know it takes time. Life gets in the way. You'll put down one coat of paint and realize you need another, but then your family needs you, so you don't go back for another month or two.
I bought some equipment secondhand and splurged on other pieces
I knew I wanted a really solid power rack system, so I started with that. There were options for 80" or 92" of height. Initially, I was worried I would hit my head on the ceiling doing pull-ups with the 92", so I got the 80". But when I set it up, it was too small for me to do overhead lifts. So now I have two racks.
I used Facebook Marketplace for some of the equipment, like two rep bars, a trap bar, and a powerlifting bench for the glutes and hamstrings. For really big equipment though, I didn't want to skimp. I wanted to make sure it was reliable.
Perez used decorations from his daughter's graduation party for the gym.
Courtesy of Antonio Perez
The hardest piece of equipment to pull the trigger on was the AssaultRunner Pro treadmill. It was about$3,600, which I thought was just way too much for a treadmill. Nothing powers up like it β you can get to the speed you want instantly. My daughter really wanted it for interval training, so I got it.
For my daughter's high school graduation party last year, I bought a whole bunch of cutouts of her in action. Now, they decorate the gym. I told the younger one that we'll add her photos to the collection next year.
Three days a week, Annie spends two hours commuting to her public relations job outside Denver. Her company changed its office policy last year from remote to hybrid, leading her to lease a car and get back on the road. So on Fridays β without telling her coworkers β Annie typically doesn't work.
On the final day of the workweek, Annie watches TV, goes to the gym, takes a walk, or sometimes goes skiing. She keeps her phone or computer nearby to be available for messages in case something unexpected happens, but pushes her easiest work to Fridays, wraps it up quickly, and starts her weekly long weekend as early as possible.
When Annie is on the mountain instead of at her desk, she has "zero remorse," she tells me β on a phone call she scheduled on a Friday afternoon β even if she's a little worried about getting caught. (She asked that I change her name for this story for fear of retribution from her employer.)
Annie says the return-to-office mandate has worn down her social battery and made her less productive than when she worked from home full time. She was recently diagnosed as autistic, she says, and working from home has allowed her to focus better without coworkers interrupting. "If they expect me to come into the office and be fully present and sacrifice a lot of really important things that have improved my quality of life," she says, "then Fridays are the very least that I can do for myself to get through it."
What was once the final push to the weekend is becoming a sneaky personal day for some remote workers. The trend has been called "quiet Fridays" or "gentle Fridays" β a clandestine progression of casual Fridays or summer Fridays from the prepandemic era.
Some companies are instituting policies to ban meetings from being scheduled on Fridays and discourage sending emails. Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation last year calling to shorten the workweek to 32 hours. In Tokyo, government workers will soon have the option of four-day workweeks, a move meant to give people more time to prioritize family as fertility rates in Japan have fallen and some have overworked themselves to the point of death.
OpenTable saw 44% more diners book reservations between noon and 5 p.m. on Fridays than on other weekdays.
But the dream of an official four-day workweek stays largely out of reach from many. Greece last year enacted a law enabling a six-day workweek in certain industries, a move to combat a shrinking population and lack of skilled workers. Workers are revolting against unpopular RTO mandates. Now, fed-up remote workers are sometimes taking back the day for themselves, particularly as the rise-and-grind girlboss mindset of the 2010s has been eclipsed by the ascent of the anti-work movement. Since the pandemic, burnout is up, workplace loyalty is shrinking as companies conduct mass layoffs, and people are prioritizing self-care over impressing the boss with long hours. Office attendance may be creeping back up, but Friday remains the least popular day to commute, by far. And as I found, for many workers at the end of the week, the W in WFH is in scare quotes.
A search through Reddit and TikTok will reveals number of viral hacks to trick your boss into thinking you're actively online. There are mouse jigglers and apps that keep screens on but also tips like turning off your phone's auto-caps settings so Slack messages look like they're sent from a computer and not a phone. More rogue hacks include putting PowerPoint into presenting mode to keep a screen on, entering into a Zoom meeting with yourself, or tying a mouse to an oscillating fan.
While workers may appear to their employers to be online and grinding away, evidence suggests that many have shut their laptops and gone out into the world. In 2024, for example, OpenTable saw 44% more diners book reservations between noon and 5 p.m. on Fridays than on other weekdays. "Shifts in work culture are definitely impacting dining habits," Debby Soo, OpenTable's CEO, told me over email. Similarly, on Resy, 28% of weekday-afternoon reservations were on Fridays, more than on any other weekday. Zocdoc shared booking data with me that shows that booking appointments on Fridays have crept up slightly since 2021, and that several types of appointments are more common on Fridays, including acupuncture, IUD procedures, and annual physicals.
ActivTrak, a workforce-analytics and productivity-software company, has found that people are in fact calling it quits earlier on Fridays. In an analysis of 71,000 workers at more than 800 companies that are ActivTrak customers, the company found that in late 2024 workers clocked out about an hour earlier on every day of the week than they did in early 2021. The steepest drop was on Fridays, with workers leaving at 3:42 p.m., some 80 minutes earlier than they did four years ago.
A Friday-morning Costco run is magical.
Jenna, a sales professional in Philadelphia
Some people may be out and about more on Fridays because their companies encourage them to log off. Buffer, a social media management software company, moved to a four-day workweek in 2020. It started as an experiment but proved so positive for morale that the company has kept it in place, says Hailley Griffis, its head of communications and content. After the initial adjustment of cramming more meetings into the first four days of the week, the schedule now "really helps reduce the amount of stress and anxiety," she says. "It would be very difficult for me to go back to working five days a week, in terms of energy management."
Stok, a sustainability consulting company, started offering "quiet Fridays" every other week in 2020. The goal is to have no emails or meetings that day, and instead allow employees to put their heads down on projects or take the day for themselves, says Madeleine Drake, Stok's director of people and culture. "Each of us has the awareness and autonomy and collaborative spirit to understand what's best each day," she says, adding that some 90% of the company's employees typically participate.
But flexible gigs are getting harder to come by. Job posts offering four-day workweeks have dropped 42% since late 2022, according to data from Indeed, and those offering flexible Fridays are down 18.5%. Employees are likely "more interested than they've ever been" in flexible Fridays and shorter workweeks, Kyle M.K., Indeed's talent-strategy advisor, says. "But the implementation is probably slowing down," in part due to economic pressures and labor market uncertainty, he adds. There's a disconnect between what employees want and what employers are offering, despite growing evidence that shorter workweeks improve productivity and employee satisfaction and that workers are getting fewer things done on Fridays anyway. "I think employers will start to see a decline in the ability to attract top talent and see their turnover grow if they're not focusing on the work-life balance, the burnout, and the stress level of their employees," he says.
Some workers feel there's no reason to hang around on Fridays if they can get all their work done by Thursday. Jenna, who works in sales in Philadelphia and whose name has also been changed, says she felt burnout in 2020 and would have to log off midday because of exhaustion. Nearly five years later, she's taking nearly all of Friday off and expects her clients or coworkers to be doing little on the last day of the workweek, too. Like Annie, she chats with me on a Friday afternoon β between hanging out at a neighborhood brewery and running an errand. It's a typical Friday for her, which can include vet appointments for her dog, trips to the gym, or boozy lunches with a friend. "A Friday-morning Costco run is magical," Jenna tells me.
The trust gap between bosses and workers is widening. A 2024 survey from PwC found that 86% of business executives believe employee trust to be high, but just 67% of employees say they have high trust in their employer. About half of business executives say they have a great extent of trust for senior leadership, while just 38% say the same of entry-level workers.
Employment is a contract, where both parties should have clear communication to maintain trust, says Shaun Hansen, a professor of management at Western Oregon University. If you're instructed or it's implied that you should be working Fridays, then that's the agreement. But employers can build trust by better communicating their expectations and shifting to more flexible arrangements, Hansen says. That might mean analyzing roles and admitting that not every white collar job has to fit a 40-hour, 9-to-5 schedule to be done well. "If you have a job that you can finish on a Thursday night, but your employer is insisting that you're there on Friday, it not only puts you in an ethical pickle, but it also will cause you to probably look for a better job where you have more flexibility," he tells me.
Of course, no-work Fridays are a privilege reserved for white-collar remote or hybrid workers. The more room they have to slack off, the greater a divide we might see in work-life balance across industries. "I feel guilty about it from the level of: What a privilege I have that I have a job that I can even do this," Jenna tells me. But guilt about not being fully honest with her employer as she fields occasional Microsoft Teams pings from the bar? Not so much.
On a Friday afternoon last summer, a friend and I packed up the car to head away for the weekend. I, taking advantage of my then-employer's summer Fridays, left my laptop at home. But I watched as my friend connected her laptop to a hot spot, opened it on the back seat, and began playing a lengthy fireplace video on YouTube that would keep the green circle next to her face on Slack aglow for the ride. I was given her phone to act not just as a road-trip DJ but also as her secretary, responding to any messages from her boss. It took some teamwork, but where there's a will to work less, there's a way.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
Chet Sandhu is a former smuggler. He estimates that he trafficked over $50 million worth of illegal steroids. In the mid-1990s, Sandhu operated a steroid-trafficking network that sourced its supply from Karachi, Pakistan, and transported it via routes including the Netherlands, France, and Spain to the United Kingdom by bribing airport security. He was arrested during a smuggling run and sentenced to 4 Β½ years in the Fontcalent correctional facility in Alicante, Spain, one of Europe's most infamous prisons.
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