28
Jan
Home Office Remodel – After
Back on December 23rd I wrote about my plans for a Home Office Remodel and posted my “before” pictures. My apologies for taking so long to blog about the experience and post my “after” pictures.
You will recall that my plan was to complete this in 4 days:
- Monday: Remove everything from the room. Tear off the baseboard. Prime the walls and trim.
- Tuesday: Paint the walls and trim.
- Wednesday: Rip up the carpet. Install the laminate wood floor and new baseboard. Office furniture will arrive.
- Thursday: Assemble new furniture and move everything back in that needs to be in there. Set up new dual-monitor computer.
Many people had commented that this was an extremely tight schedule and that it was unlikely that I could pull it all off on schedule. Except for some problems with the delivery of furniture that I ordered from Office Depot, everything went great though.
I originally indicated that I would be blogging about the experience as we did the work. I realized quickly that the pictures were rather boring so I decided to just wait and relate the whole experience when we were finished.
Here are the “after” pictures of all four walls:
Home Office North Wall – After Remodel
Home Office East Wall – After Remodel
On Monday my wife and I moved everything out of the office. This made a real mess in our bedroom, living room, and spare bedroom, but we knew it was only for a few days. A friend stopped by on Monday and said he was bored so he thought he would see if I wanted to go ahead and remove the carpet and baseboards. We removed all that and hauled it off to the dump. That night my wife and I primed the walls. At this point we were well ahead of schedule because I hadn’t planned on removing the carpet until Wednesday morning.
On Tuesday my wife and only needed to paint the walls. I was a little disappointed at first because the paint color didn’t seem to be quite what I had envisioned. After it had fully dried a few days later I was much happier with it.
On Wednesday my friend came back over and helped me install the laminate wood flooring. Neither of us had ever done that before, but we were both looking forward to the challenge. Gary is a cabinet maker by trade and that knowledge and skill proved very valuable. We borrowed a table saw and mitre saw from my neighbor and in less than 6 hours we were done with installing the floor and new baseboards and cleaning up our mess. Good thing to, because it started to sprinkle rain just as we were returning the saws back to my neighbor.
At this point things are further ahead of schedule than I ever could have imagined. The project had gone so smoothly I expected the Office Depot delivery truck to show up as soon as we got back from returning the saws. Sadly, this didn’t happen, however. On Tuesday evening I had received a courtesy call from Office Depot saying that my furniture would be delivered between 8:30 and 5:00. I decided to take advantage of a potential 3 hour window and catch up on some blog and news reading. At 5PM my furniture still hadn’t arrived so I called Office Depot to see where it was. They apologized and said that they would mark it for early morning delivery on Thursday.
Around 11:30 Thursday morning, I realized that they weren’t going to make the early morning delivery so I called to find out what was going on. They gave me the name of the carrier so I called them and they gave me the cell phone number of the independent carrier they had working for them. I talked to him three times that afternoon and each time he said that he was on his way and should be there within the hour. He finally showed up at 6PM. At long last I had my furniture! But wait, there was a box missing. The missing box was for the credenza shell. The return attaches to the credenza and the hutch attached to the credenza as well, not to mention the fact that this is the back-most piece of the ensemble—so this was probably the most critical piece of all. The driver apologized and said that he would deliver it the first thing the next morning and make me his first stop.
I called Office Depot to express my displeasure. I was extremely nice about it and just relayed the facts as I have done here. I had only ordered part of my furniture on this order. I had saved the rest of it to order in early January. I’m in the Office Depot Advantage program and I get an extra $50 back for each quarter that I spend over $500. By splitting up the critical pieces and the non-critical pieces, I would save an extra $50. Anyway, Staples carries the exact same line of furniture. I asked the gentleman why I should purchase the balance from Office Depot and not from Staples. He said that while 90% of their shipments arrive on time, he understood that to me they had a 100% failure rate. He gave did give me a $75 credit for my trouble and re-ordered my credenza—he wasn’t confident that the driver knew where the missing one was. It wouldn’t arrive until Tuesday though, afer I was back at my day job.
On Friday the driver never showed up with my credenza as his first delivery and I decided to go ahead and assemble what furniture I had and set up the new PC.
Tuesday came and went and I heard nothing. On Wednesday I got a call from Averitt Express saying that they wanted to make arrangements to deliver my credenza on either Thursday or Friday. They were concerned about getting an 18-wheeler into and out of my neighborhood, however. I told them I would just pick it up at the Averitt Express terminal which was an hour out of my way. They told me which trailer it was on and which dock it was at and said that it would be ready for me. When I got there they couldn’t seem to find it. I waited 45-minutes and had to leave in order to make it to church on time. I expected that they would just attempt to deliver it to my home the next day after they found it.
The next day I got a call saying that they had found it and that I could pick it up any time. I was tired of waiting so I took off on my lunch break and did the hour round-trip to the terminal to pick it up. It felt so good to finally have that box in my posession. When I got it home that night I opened it up and found that there were two damaged pieces. There was no apparent damage to the box, but the backboard was cracked and there was a 3/8″ gouge in the corner of the top piece. I took pictures of the damaged parts and sent them to the manufacturer to see if they would replace them. I decided to go ahead and assemble the credenza even though I knew that I would have to take it apart and replace the parts later.
After this fiasco with Office Depot I decided to order one piece, a 30″ cabinet that my printer sits on, from Staples. I had explained this whole story to them and they said they would do much better. The cabinet arrived very will protected and in a timely manner. In the future, Staples will get all my office furniture business, unless they majorly mess something up too.
Besides adding some more pictures on the walls, we may also:
- Replace my wife’s desk with one that matches mine.
- Replace the book shelf with the matching one for my desk.
- Add window casing around the window and wood blinds.
- Add crown moulding.
Overall, I’m well pleased with how things turned out. It’s a much better work environment.
Technorati Tags: Home Office, Small Office, Remodeling, Work At Home, Office Depot, Furniture