Wallet-friendly ideas for a sweet office renovation
Rather than moving office, many small and medium businesses solve space, comfort, and productivity issues by effective renovation. When compared to moving or buying new property, remodelling is both less expensive and less disruptive to business operation. In addition, even with a tight budget, there are ways to bring in some serious change.
Re-do the floor plan
Offices are known for their dynamic pace, with employees, clients, and visitors coming and leaving round a clock, while working conditions may change day after day. If your current arrangement is functional, it doesn’t mean it will remain forever as such. Reinventing the floor plan often includes dispensing with unnecessary furniture and outdated technology which is already past its replacement date. At the same time, use this rearrangement to clear out the clutter, throwing away the excess and storing the remainder in a designated area where it will be out of the way, but still easily reachable.
Recycle instead of buying new
If you can, reuse the existing workstations, as this not only cuts the renovation costs, but also reduces the environmental impact of taking them to the landfill. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to simply reorganize the office furniture. There are going to be some dismantling costs, refurbishing the desktop surfaces, and ultimately new fabrics. However, even combined, all these costs amount to much less than purchasing new furniture sets. Now imagine how much can you save for an office 100 workstation-strong.
DIY whatever you can
Even if you have them custom made, standalone desks and drawers are always less expensive than built-in cabinets. But you can save thousands of dollars if you purchase materials from manufacturers and build the desks yourself. Even companies with unfathomable budgets often resort to sustainable ways of economizing on office design. That’s how the coinage ‘Amazon desk’ came about. Instead of purchasing fresh desktop boards, they took solid-core wooden doors and attached pillars as legs. Renovation projects such as painting the walls and ceiling can also be DIY-ed, which minimizes the disruptions in the work schedule.
Don’t skip the floor
A choice of flooring has a big impact on the look and feel of the office space. A new floor will throw a subtle hint of what goes on inside the building. Still, many companies are price-sensitive when it comes to the choice of flooring materials. The abundance of fairly cheap ceramic tiles from China has made them a highly sought office commodity. However, the advantages of versatile vinyl tiles go beyond mere affordability. Apart from patterns that realistically mimic natural wood and stone, vinyl tiles are much softer than ceramics and wood laminate, providing both excellent slip resistance and noise reduction.
Consider home furniture
If your new arrangement still requires new furniture pieces, you should consider some of the home collections. Office furniture is often overpriced, and comes with too little personality. Why should you splurge on quality chairs and tables designed for business environment, when there’s no regulation telling you need to have proper office furniture in your place of business? So, for example, instead of purchasing a set of matching hard chairs for your reception area, choose a big sofa. Unlike hard chairs, bean bags allow for much more informal arrangement, especially in staff rooms.
Include lush greenery
In the age when people spend 87% of their time indoors, plants are a welcoming sight in any business environment. When compared to other ‘furnishings’, plants are relatively inexpensive and require little care past regular watering and dusting. In addition, big plants help break up the office space and make straight lines and surfaces less imposing. Among the best office plants is the devil’s ivy, also known as pothos, the weeping fig, and Zamioculcas zamiifolia, more conveniently abbreviated as the ZZ plant.
Office remodels needn’t be neither expensive nor time-consuming. Using a combination of recycling and repurposing the existing furnishing, affordable and durable flooring ideas, and a bit of DIY craftsmanship, you can come up with a reborn business environment at a fraction of the cost of a new space.
As a senior business strategist, Lillian Connors believes that business must be more than the maximization of profit through different money-grabbing ploys. Ethical principles should be at the core of every commercial venture, paving the way for more balanced distribution of wealth on a global scale.
