Are you ready to rebrand? We did! (Part One)
Home is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there…
When I started Design Powers in 1996, I was a different person, living in a different house, with a different set of priorities. I’d just quit working as an art director at a downtown design firm two weeks prior to starting my business. This was two months after my husband and I had purchased a fixer-upper that needed a lot of fixing up.
Design Powers office in 2005. My husband sat to the right. In the evenings, after our young children went to bed, he’d do bills or surf the net. We spent a lot of time together in that office space talking, planning trips, or just keeping each other company.
Sounds gutsy but that had been the plan all along. Buy a house that we could afford on my husband’s salary just in case my home-based business didn’t work out. We also wanted to have children so creating an additional income source before becoming a stay-at-home mom seemed easier than the other way around.
A year into my graphic design business, I was doing well so I invested $8k into purchasing custom office furniture to fit out my home office space.
The long, ample desktop counter provided room for two workstations, monitors, printers, a scanner and a fax machine. I had matching wall cabinets, bookcases, drawers and filing nooks to store client files, paper samples, swatch books, Communication Arts, Print & HOW magazines, and everything else I needed to be a successful designer!
When we moved into our current home in 2006, my office furniture came too. Fortunately, my new space was close enough in size to the old one so it fit in pretty nicely.
My nieces and son hanging out in my office in June of 2017. That month I bequeathed my bookcases and wall cabinet to my husband who commutes to a full-time job in Maryland but has a small home office upstairs with no storage.
Design Powers office in 2018. After the bookcases were gone, I hung a lot of art and knick-knacks on the back walls. Both my kids were away at college by then so it made me happy to walk into my office every morning and be surrounded by art, much of it theirs. I sat to the right and Emily sat on the left while she interned with me from 2015-2018 before graduating from GMU. My office furniture has served me well for 25 years and was definitely a worthy investment.
And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?”
In the last 15 years, thanks to the internet, the amount of equipment, paper and graphic design accouterment has steadily decreased.
My fax machine was gone within the first year here and by the end of 2020, I realized I was down to one peripheral… a color laser printer that hadn’t worked in months.
The walls were a tired blue-gray and the dark teal commercial-grade carpet was worn. I looked around and thought “Why do I have all this stuff and do I really need all this furniture?”
It might have been because it was December 29th, my Dad’s birthday. He passed away in 2017 and I was feeling a touch of melancholy.
Or it might have been the McMansion constructed next door that now blocks out some midday sunlight rendering my formerly sunny office space a little less bright.
Or finally, it might have been that we were still in the midst of a worldwide pandemic after an exhausting presidential election.
My husband, who was working from home for the past nine months, had set up his laptop on the downstairs desk not far from my office. He wanted a different room than his upstairs home office to create a mental separation of work and home.
Did I mention that he talks very loudly on zoom calls all. day. long? I was ready for him to relocate to parts of the house further away audibly. He was ready to get away from me too.
Mostly though it was just time. My business has changed A LOT. Everything is in the cloud. I’ve finally achieved a state of paperless enlightenment. Ohmmm….
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”
The excavation begins January 2021—Happy New Year!
Same as it ever was
January 1, 2021, I began in earnest digging out, separating, categorizing, deciding what still sparked joy and what didn’t.
My swatch books went to an artist friend but most of the stuff went to the Vietnam Vets of America who take practically everything.
I was relieved because I hate throwing usable items in the landfill but most of the people I know are also trying to pare down.
My husband said he’d like to have the remaining wall cabinets and the part of the workstation where Emily had sat while she interned with me. She works remotely now.
We discussed breaking up the desk unit in two so he could finally have a real desk in his upstairs home office but that would require some engineering. He also wanted to be able to stand part of the day so it would be nice to have my desktop Varidesk unit too.
The problem was ALL my office furniture wouldn’t fit into his small office upstairs. We’d have to relocate it into one of our kid’s bedrooms. 😳
Hubby’s upstairs office before. His desk was a flimsy old IKEA table. The bookcases have become display cases for all things Washington Wizards. (Yes, he’s a super fan)
Hubby’s new upstairs office with all my office furniture. It fits nicely in our son’s old bedroom and my hubby has more room to spread out and acquire more sports tchotchkes! GO WIZ!
This Ain’t No Party… This Ain’t No Disco… This Ain’t No Foolin’ Around
What our kitchen, dining and living room look like normally….
Our living room during the Whole House, Empty-Nester Rebrand!
A New Year’s resolution to clean my office snowballed into “Whole House, Empty-Nester Rebrand!” (WHENR) as in “Whenr u gonna git all dat sh*t outta the living room, bedrooms and basement?”
My daughter graduated from college in the spring of 2020 and happily lives and works in another city so she only needs a bedroom when she visits.
My son has one more year in college and is on the career path of foreign service. He may be living with us after graduation but probably not for very long.
We moved my husband’s office and all my office furniture into our son’s bedroom. My son’s bedroom went downstairs into what was the guest bedroom. My husband’s old office became an upstairs den and my daughter’s room became a guest room.
All rooms required plaster repair and painting and contents of said rooms were piled up in our living room for two months. But heck, thanks to COVID we weren’t entertaining anyways.
Top Row: It took me from January to March to clean out my office. Middle Row: Friend and client Kurt Lankenau of Pro Line Painting repaired, primed and painted the walls a lovely, light peach. I jerry-rigged a desktop setup until my new UPLIFT desk arrived! Jumping for joy that the carpet would be gone the next day! Bottom Row: Installing luxury vinyl flooring in a beautiful, herringbone pattern. My office is lighter and brighter. Hubby and I put together my new standing desk (see timelapse video below) and I painted my bookcases to be complementary to the fresh, peachy vibe!
Watch out, you might get what you're after
Now that the heavy lifting is over, we’re thrilled with the results. Our house feels lighter and looks brighter. Even my daughter, who was a tad miffed that we’d painted her cool gray bedroom walls a light pink told me she liked what we did after all. Finally, hubby has more storage which makes him happy and organized.
The catalyst for all this change, my office, is much more sophisticated now. Just in time too! Emily and I have been wanting to redo our website ever since Squarespace upgraded its platform from 7 to 7.1. Our current site had only been up for a year when COVID happened so we figured we would wait another year to redo it.
We wanted new photos and to rebrand our online presence and having a professional, minimal office was the perfect setting. But that gets covered in next month’s blog post so check back for “Are you ready to rebrand? We did!” Part Two when Ev n Em become Supah Models! We’ll cover our styling, hair and makeup, and all-day photo sesh.
Check out the time-lapse video below to see us constructing the UPLIFT desk which btw is amazing! It took just shy of two hours but you can see it happen in 10 seconds! Also, my son and me unpacking the perfectly-sized curvaceous couch. It’s really stylish and yet so comfy!
Please leave comments or ask questions... would love your feedback!
Subheads courtesy of the Talking Heads. No better inspo to channel when writing about reinvention! Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-far better!
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