Our Office Makeover
Jamie Cho Photography
We are excited to share with you about our office makeover project. We have been working on this project slowly since last late summer due to furniture hunting, some custom projects, and back-ordered pieces which took up some time to finish it. Now, it is finally completed. I want to share with you about this project process.
When I started my online interior design business (Roomz Design at that time) over three years and half ago I was working in our dining room back in our old apartment in Irvine, California as that was the only space available with no den or second bedroom. We had a lot of cheap black colored furniture for years; very neutral, durable, and practical. I didn't have the finances to invest in nicer furniture to run the business at that time. You know, for a designer, their space is important and a source of inspiration. We moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada due to Jeffry's career. Our current place is a rental condo in a high rise building in downtown Vancouver. The office space we have is a really tiny space(6'4" x 6'9") but functional. I am really happy that I finally have a real office space to call my own that is separate from our living space. The current place has dark laminate flooring which didn't work with the old black furniture. It made such a small space much darker and colder feeling than it needed to be. As my business grew, we decided it is time to give our office a makeover to make it more light and airy. You can see how dark our office used to be before makeover below here.
This is what our office used to look like before makeover.
Originally, we wanted to have an industrial style office but we have spent lots of time hunting for perfect office desk that would fit in our tiny office. Many desks we loved are either too big or small for this office. I also got in touch with few custom furniture manufacturer to see if they would make us specific office desk we were looking for. It was either over our office project budget or unable to make exact same office desk. We were disappointed by that so we moved on and kept looking for it. We decided to go forward with mid-century modern style instead of industrial style since we found a perfect office desk and chair from Structube for great price and style. Once the desk and chair arrived, it changed the entire office look for the better. I did the design plan for our office makeover project by created the 2D rendering board here.
This is our design proposal for our office makeover project.
We decided to replace our black floating shelf to reclaimed wood floating shelf. I have spent the great amount of time to find the right one with right size. It turned out it was nightmare because of almost none of vendors have exact size I need for our office. I was frustrated by that. Funny thing, the very next day, Jeffry and I went to Steveston Farmer Market last September on our day off. I met a lovely lady named Carole Hartfield (Carole's Inspirations) who makes beautiful reclaimed wood artworks and furniture that she was selling at one of the Steveston Farmer Market booths. We were in love with her work and we introduced ourselves to her and asked her to see if she could do custom made reclaimed wood floating shelf and she said yes. We were so thrilled by that. She built us a beautiful reclaimed wood floating shelf for our office and installed it for us. It turned out really beautiful and is exactly what we wanted for our office. We are very happy about it. Thank you, Carole!
After the floating shelf got installed, we accessorized it with some existing accessories and added the artwork and plants. We have to have plants to improve the mood and keeping our air clean so we added lots of plants to our office. It is definitely really help improve the office mood big time.
Jamie Cho Photography
It is possible to create a tiny space into stylish and functional space just like we did to our tiny space for our office. I'd love to hear what do you think of our office makeover project by leave the comments here.