Nothing can feel more liberating than shifting into your first office. It is not an easy task to buy office space, so if you have achieved this, congratulations!
You need to save up quite a lot in order to even pay the downpayment for buying the space. Offices can be used for a number of businesses. This is quite a milestone in any entrepreneur’s life.
Once you buy your office and get done with all of the paperwork that is necessary, you need to start focusing on the interiors. This will be a professional space so you need to choose wisely. You need to decide your budget for the interior wisely since you have already spent quite a lot of money purchasing it. It is important to come up with a plan otherwise things can get quite messy.
You can hire an interior designer but that will cost you a lot of money. Any person can get quite overwhelmed with such a huge project, which is why we have come up with a few tips and tricks to help you convert your office into the ideal working space.
Stick to a budget
The most important thing to do while starting on the interiors is to come up with a detailed plan about how much money you would like to spend on each and every aspect of your office. There are quite a few things that you need to look after such as the furniture, the fixings, lightings, computers, photocopy machines, coffee machines, the paint and so on. It is important to allocate a budget for every cabin and every piece of furniture that you would like. If you want to do some renovation such as changing the pantry or even the tiles, a separate budget needs to be allocated to that.
Remember to keep some extra money on the side since it is quite possible that you will not find the exact materials that you are looking for in your budget, which means that you will probably go overboard. Good budget plans are the ones that allocate a separate reserve for things like this, not ones that stick completely to the budget.
Start with your cabin
Being the person heading the company you get the privilege of having your own space in your office. While there are many entrepreneurs who share the same space as their employees, research shows that the head of the companies needs to have their own personal space on the floor for various reasons.
One of those reasons is getting the right kind of privacy when needed while being able to keep yourself open and in connection with the rest of the office. For this reason, many cabins spaces have blinds installed. Also, you don’t have to make your cabin lavish. While privacy is something that you need, even though it sets you apart from the rest, luxury isn’t.
Seating arrangement matters
Your office will consist of a number of different departments which might have more than one employee. In the long run, it will be advantageous for you to plan the seating and delegation of the work area according to the designation.
Club the people with similar designation/ department and make them sit together. You do not have to give them a cabin but make them work in close proximity for efficiency. Sometimes the co-ordination of 2 departments is needed a little more than often. Make sure these 2 departments are also not very far off.
While getting into the planning of such things it helps to draw a map to scale out the area used in all the sections. Leave some breathing space between desks and all in all, try to avoid making the whole area look crammed up.
Use a neutral color palette to your advantage
There might be a time when you are bored of the theme that you have chosen for your office and will want to redecorate. This is why painting your walls and separations in a neutral color palette will help you. It will also help tie everything together. Colors such as white, off-white, and cream will help you bring everything together in the office space, even if all of the furniture doesn’t match perfectly. You can hire a commercial painter since you do not want to ruin your new furniture by getting paint on it if you do it yourself. Bright and neutral colors also make a cabin look much bigger than it actually is, which is a bonus point if your cabins are a bit small.
Do not try to match everything in your office
When you look at furniture brochures of retail stores, you might have the urge to match every piece of furniture in your office. Remember, it is not important to make it look like the cover page of a magazine. Some pieces that have the same type of styling are good enough to make a cabin look cohesive and to give your office a theme. Your business needs to show through the things you choose to decorate your office with. You should focus more on symmetry and balance than anything else. Getting oversized furniture that doesn’t fit in your office just because they match will not help you at all.
Do not try to buy everything at once
We know you want your place of business to start looking perfect as soon as possible, but trying to buy everything at once is quite hard on the pocket. It will also make you miss the opportunity of finding the perfect piece of furniture or the gadget that you have been looking for since you already spent money at the start.
It is very important to follow certain guidelines while focusing on the interior of your office. Without following them you can easily mess things up which can start creating problems in the long run. Use this to help you navigate your way through this process without having to shed precious dollars on an interior designer
Photo by Shridhar Gupta on Unsplash
