This is part 3 of a 5 part series on small business moving and design. To read the entire series, click here.
Spoiler alert: It was not as easy as A,B,C.
Once I knew what furniture we had, where it was going to have to go, and what we would be getting rid of, I could start on my major areas of concern: the kitchen and the conference room. Seeing as those are the only community areas in our office and the only areas visitors are likely to end up, I put my top priority there. Looking at our previous space situation, I realized that a lot of our time was spent in the kitchen- congregating, preparing meals, filing (that'e where the files were), printing things (that's where our printer was), etc. So because of that, and because I think the kitchen should be the most beautiful part of any establishment, I decided to put 90% of my effort there. Not to mention, our conference room also serves as our library- so all I had to figure out there was how to move the bookshelves from point A to point B (not as easy as it sounded, turns out).
The kitchen, however, was not going to be such an easy fix. While the existing cheap, laminate cabinets weren't the worst thing I'd ever seen, they just weren't going to work with the colors of mahogany and cherry wood that grace almost all of our furniture. So I got planning. I finally decided on a project that seemed so easy, even I could do it.
Don't get me wrong: crafting is my schnitzel. Wood-working, however, is something I had never had any experience with, and I may or may not have gotten completely in over my head with this one.
Sure, if you've got time to kill, patience for days, and all the money and skills, it'd be a piece of cake. I, however, had 3 weeks and promised to stick to a budget below $500 to get this whole job done. And if the kitchen cabinets weren't going to be enough, I decided to do the three huge lateral filing cabinets that would be calling the kitchen home, too. You have no idea how I HATE the look of those cheap metal filing cabinets. Not in my office.
This project was so huge that if I put it all in one post, it would take 30 minutes to read. So I broke it up as follows, and these links will be updated as they are finished.
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