Movin’ on up!

Welcome to my new office! Over the weekend, as you may know from my previous posts, our department and several other people moved to our new offices on the newly renovated floor. I’m movin’ on up — from the 8th floor to the 11th floor, the highest I’ve ever worked!

The new offices are definitely a major improvement over our previous offices, with nicer carpet, warmer wall colors and classier (and more updated) decór. All day yesterday, people from the other floors were touring the new office space, admiring the new look.

To appreciate the improvement, I have to take you back to my old office, with it’s gray walls and worn out, stained carpet…

This is the old office. Nice, huh? (Detect the sarcasm?) I know it looks a lot junkier than my new office, but part of that was that I didn’t have much drawer space to store stuff, so it ended up on top of my desk, and once the piles start, they grow a life of their own. I also had several boxes being stored in my office that didn’t make the move to my new office, which helps a lot with how much cleaner the new office looks. Here’s another view of my old office…

You’ll notice my old desk in my old office. That desk actually was the desk we bought for my office several years ago when the company I co-owned moved into bigger office space. It didn’t make the move either. I wanted newer, more professional office furniture that was more appropriate for our office space. Here’s that new furniture when it was moved into the new office before our big move…

The picture really doesn’t do it justice. Take my word for it. It’s much nicer. The furniture in an empty office isn’t quite as impressive as when you see it with everything set up after the move…

You like my work “cockpit”? I sure do! Nearly everything I need it within arm’s reach. And it looks cool — at least to me! Actually, others thought so too. I had several admirers stop by my office and “oooh” and “ahhh” when they saw my new office. Of course, the start contrast between my old office and my new office helped quite a bit and so did the great artwork that adorns the walls of my office, which looks much better with the new wall color.

Because of where my office sits, at the end of a long hallway, which you can see in the above photo, people can see into my office from the entire length of that hallway. So, when I first realized that, I knew that I had to put something nice on the part of the wall that can be seen as people enter the hallway on the far end. So, I put in that spot the photo by David Fitzgerald of the interior of the Oklahoma State Capitol, which is a pretty cool, dramatic shot. You can see how it looks from within the office in the top photo in the post. Here’s how it looks from the hallway…

Again, the photo really doesn’t do it justice. It’s cool enough that several people specifically commented on how cool the photo was, especially as they walked down the hallway. What’s even cooler is that the matte in the frame nearly matches my wall color and the frame goes perfect with my new walls! That certainly wasn’t planned since the photo was framed nearly three years ago for our office space at the last building the company I co-owned occupied. (If you don’t know the story, we closed our company down at the end of last year when we accepted a generous offer go work in-house for our largest client.)

One last thing I want to note. If you look at the top photo, you may be questioning my judgment in my artwork placement. Well, I did think of that. But it was very important for me to put that Capitol photo where it’s at so that we got that perfect placement for the hallway view. So to balance it, we will be hanging a wall-mounted bookshelf in the space to the left of the Capitol photo, so it should balance everything out. I will also be adding a few more pieces of artwork in the coming weeks.

So, there you have it. The big move is complete. Yesterday, we were settling in, getting back into the swing of things. I certainly like it much better — not only the nice new offices, but my office location closer to my colleagues. I’m glad it’s over with because I hate moving, but it was well worth it.