Office Project

Thoughts Before the Project:

I have a new office project starting up next Monday. The flooring for the hardwood – site finished – floor has already been delivered. They put the raw lumber in my dining room / office, and I have been smelling it all week. Needless to say, I am very excited to have the contractor start on the new office soon.

I will try and take before pictures this weekend so I can show you how the house looked before the project. I’ve been trying to think of all the little things that should be done during the construction phase so I can take advantage of them afterwards. For example, relating to the electrical work, I would like to put passive monitor speakers up near my workstation. Each speaker is self driven, and self amplified, therefore, I would like to locate some A/C receptacles near the speaker locations to plug them in. In addition to the electricity, I would also like to run low-voltage TRS signal cables to these locations for connecting to the audio system.

Thoughts During the Project:

I would like to jot down some notes about the office project before I forget. First, the contractor managed to talk me into staining the floor a dark brown color. I originally wanted to have hardwood floors put into the whole house. And, therefore wanted the office to match our new idea, even though it may be some time before I get around to doing the rest of the floors. My original idea was to match the floor to the railing in the middle of the house that goes up the stairs and along the hallway upstairs. His main reasoning for staining the floor a darker color was that the railing would then be a trim piece, requiring contrast with the floor. Going along with the contrast concept, I choose to have the floor dark and the trim stained to match the railing.  I think it looks good.

Another thing I specifically asked for was that the fan be moved from it’s old location (would be in the office) to a new location centred above the foyer. Part of moving the fan would be keeping some kind of switch to power off the fan in case of problems in the future. The electrician was going to put the fan on the same circuit as the hallway lights, so you would have to turn on the hallway lights in order to operate the fan. This was after they had already wired everything, and drywalled, and I painted. He ended up cutting a hole in the drywall and fishing the old fan wire back down into the required electrical box. Man, I wonder why I even try to keep this stuff organized. I swear I asked two or three times for them to explain the circuit to me before they left the first time and everything was drywalled.

I’ll come back and write more later…

Thoughts After the Project:

Overall, the project turned out very well. I now have a new usable space for working. The square footage of the house just went up by like 100 ft2! I’m still waiting to save up for a ergonomic computer desk, but I have all my computer stuff setup on my old desk, and it’s just fine with me for now. I left the areas in front of both windows open so I can access them, sand by them, etc.

There was quite an echo in here at first. My mom brought an old Persian rug runner thing from their attic for me to put down in front of the desk. This helped some. It’s weird to walk on it because part is really spongy and part is really thin. It’s her mom’s rug from her house in Chicago. It was over the threshold between the kitchen and dining room I think. Then I hung up a decorative blanket on one of the walls. This also helped. There is still a little echo, but it’s not nearly as noticeable.

On cost -> What a pain. If he would have been a little more realistic about the cost, I wouldn’t complain as much. It’s the logical thing. He didn’t do a bunch of work he said he would, and didn’t take of equal value for the work. I even had him do some extra stuff to offset the difference, so he would get paid what he expected, and he took advantage. It ended up being way more than it should have been.

I know I complain a lot in this post, but that’s what blogs are for!

I just uploaded an action shot of the office in use here, enjoy.