growing pains.........

our tulsa office is expanding!  for those of you that don't know, i am a registered commercial interior designer in an architecture firm.  we do alot of education, churches and other random commercial stuff. our tulsa office has only been open for 2 years and most of the 2 years me and one other person were in the office consistantly.  now there are 4 of us in the office....the original square footage of the tulsa office was only a little over 500 square feet.  as you can imagine with 4 people...it is tight to say the least!  anyways, we are way excited about the expansion.

but, as probably everyone knows with growth most of the time are pains.  the suite next to ours has been vacant for a while, so we decided to take it over, doubling our space.  there was a perfect wall for us to cut a door into {after removing the sink} and we would be ready to go.  the demo guys got out here, knocked the sink and "door" out only to find a drainage pipe that could not be moved on our budget. 

SOOO...plan 'B'...we had to move the door down about 4' completely screwing up my plans for the reception area.  then the demo guys didn't patch the walls correctly so when we finally got another dry wall guy out our carpet installers were starting that day as well, and that royally pissed off the dry wall guy.  i wanted to tell him, "well, if you had been here when you were suppose to be here and done your job correctly, you wouldn't have this problem", but i kept my mouth shut {surprisingly} and politely smiled.  then he left at lunch and never came back, so we had to patch the dry wall {not me....a couple of the other guys in my office} ourselves. 

now we are on the 5th day of painting and we are all sick and tired of it.  luckily i haven't had to do too much...one of the other guys has done the bulk of it but i am pretty sure it's about to push him over the edge!  we have one long red wall throughout the whole space, being the good painters that we are we primed it first and then had to do 5 coats of red paint!  what the heck????  isn't that what primer is for!?!?!? 

today, while trying to get finished with painting, we realize that some of the phones aren't working.  we call the phone guy he comes out punches a few buttons, says we are ready to go and leaves.  oh, we asked him how much it would be to set up voicemail.....his answer $1200!  what the heck?  obviosly we will pass on that and continue to forward our calls to our muskogee office when we are out.  whatever.  probably about an hour after the phone guy leaves we get a call and i need to transfer it...i do the standard transfer and it says it won't work.  i call the phone guy again and tell him he needs to come back out.  he tries to tell me he can explain it over the phone which i quickly inform him that he can not and he needs to do it....he begrudgingly (sp?) agrees.  after an hour of him punching thousands of buttons on our phones {remember, he thought he could tell me how to do this over the phone} we are all set up....again.

so far it has been 2 weeks of "expanding" and i am about expanded out.  one would think that with the carpet done and paint 95% complete, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel....until i tell you that we are purchasing a uhaul full of ikea furniture this weekend that will need to be put together.  yea...no light yet! 

we will get there and we have lucked out quite a bit, i got all the carpet tiles for the new space donated and also two desk chairs donated, so that is awesome!  and i will have a much prettier office once completed.  it will be soon and i will post pics to prove it! 

here's to growing pains!!!