Working from Home: An Opportunity To Improve

We can make Lemonade or we can just pucker up and stay sour!  I prefer the former – and it is getting easier and easier to adapt to doing business from one’s residential address.  Little or no commute -- from the breakfast table, down the hall to the home office hardly qualifies!  And more little benefits just keep popping up.
 
I can name a few – like being comfortable in casual clothes, gas savings, and so forth.  But the biggest benefit that I have noticed, in my own situation and in that of my clients, is the benefit of the opportunity to get to domestic interior projects that have been repeatedly put off.  Sometimes it is an improvement factor that might only take 3-4 hours, but after work, after a commute and after a nice sit-down to dinner, well, who wants to start even a 3-hour project...    So...Take a look around, and think about some things you could accomplish in all that saved time! 

There are plenty of moving parts in any room of any home! Color, light and function are always waiting for interesting changes!

​The typical inquiries we have been getting have to do with the kinds of projects you can make happen yourself – sometimes with limited guidance and advice from your Interior design professional.  Painting, the most popular project at the moment, can even become a family event.  Young children really like to take ownership of their space in the home.  Painting their own room as high as they can reach (while Dad, Mom or a taller sibling catches the rest) makes for some priceless home videos!
 
Changing accessories and accent features can also be a very satisfying accomplishment.  You can browse the Internet for components, brainstorm ideas about color and lighting with your Interior expert, then, together, search for what fits.  Your Interior design resource is still doing business, full swing, connected to all suppliers!
 
Some tradespeople are still doing installations of carpeting, tile, wall covering, etc., but have stipulations that fit the COVID19 disciplines.  Must work alone, no family members present, possibly one person on premise (masked & distanced) with sanitizing of areas before and after.
 
It’s important to try to see and utilize what IS possible; and, try to move away from filtering every idea through only a negative COVID19 lens.  Plans for a refresh, remodel or renovation project do not have to be shoved to the back of the shelf.  Certain aspects of such projects may be approached in different ways than once were conventional.  But, like yourself – whether a single person or a family group – the Interior design venue has had to shift, modify and innovate!
 
Change often does not sit comfortably – especially when it comes unbidden and by surprise.  But luckily we humans are flexible and innovative!  Speaking for myself, I have surprised myself by being much more adaptable than I had expected to be to the shifts and twists of adjusting!   Doing business in a seamless transition involved different procedures, transformed environments, changed planning and scheduling patterns and new demands on personal energy.   A lot of it, frankly, is FUN! 
 
You know the old jokes about the shoemaker who has holes in his own shoe soles – probably because he is so busy fixing shoes for his customers!  It was interesting to discover that the logistics of placing the administrative aspect of my business at my residence meant re-strategizing my own floor plans and FFE – furniture, fixtures and equipment!  The Interior designer, re-designing parts of his own interiors!
 
As I certainly did, I hope you will look at your essential change patterns as a huge opportunity to improve what you have simply become used to.  Maybe some family groupthink would be fun.  (One family thought it was great fun just to switch bedrooms!)
 
Do it yourself, do it yourself with some professional guidance or work over the Internet with the relevant resources and an Interior designer.  You have heard it a hundred times: We are all in this together, so there is empathy galore to draw on!