Tag Archives: loft

Best laid plans of monkey and men.

kaboom

Well… Uhhh…. Urrrrrrr….

How can I wrap this up in a nice easy to digest info-byte.

The Friday after they took the powerbook away. I’m crippled – but still have my old G4 I can work on…

9:30am
Got to the office to find out that out landline was down. Apparently the switch over from land to cell is not as painless as they had suggested. We’re waiting for SWB to do whatever it is they need to do to release our old number to Sprint. This could take a week. No huge one – call the clients and make sure they all have the other cell number.

10:30am
Our landline went bye bye and with it – the DSL…. It’s being transferred to our house, but we have to wait for SWB to do whatever it is they need to do which will allow our ISP to set us up.

on-the-fly problem solving
OK… No sweat. I can still work, albeit on a dinosaur. We just figured we’d pack up the systems and take them to the loft and tie them into their T1 that afternoon. We changed our packing priorities and started packing up the computers.

1:15pm / shit hits the fan
Our friend with the loft calls from L.A. – “Hey Jim, I’m sorry to tell you this but I’ve had it with the building owner (tedious, yet valid issue here)…. I’m closing that office down – you can’t move in”.

(long pause for dramatic effect)

Voila… We’re fucked… Here, a week out from the switch over – the “moving ball” has already started rolling and can’t be stopped…

So.. Once again, when we’ve decided to embrace change, the universe has seen fit that we jump directly into the deep end instead of shimmying into the pool via the kitty end.

The intention of the loft was to serve as a buffer while we continue to slim down the company’s operations, get Kevin on powerbook, etc. By the fall, I wanted us to be in a position of ZERO-reliance on a physical space to work.

Wonderful intentions aside, our friend with the loft has a horrible track record for botched deals and bad luck. I was gambling that they’d be stable enough to get us to that “ZERO RELIANCE” period and THEN later, (which I expected), something to go wrong or go squirrelly – we’d simply be able to slip our Powerbooks in our briefcases, grab my files and step away.

Alright… Fine.. Note to self: don’t play the stock market or bet on horses.

So… Nowhere else to go – we’ve started throwing stuff in the carport of the house. (oh yeah – in the biggest winter storm of the season).

We’ll work out of the house for now…

We were just starting to get a hold on the house and now it’s popping at the seams with boxes.

The textbook scorp in me demands control – and in situations like this I feel completely powerless and overwhelmed. Kevin, my rock, is exhausted trying to keep my mental state from completely deteriorating. Mr. “nothing stresses me out” Chad is also keeping me sane with hugs and hourly installments of: “it’ll be fine”.

We’ll be having a huge garage sale in Spring – but until then will just need to deal with the chaos.

Good things: Going to save a bundle on office overhead (and billable hour overhead).

I should blog about this so later after it’s all said and done and we’ve morphed into whatever it is we’re going to be I’ll be able to look back and say – “Wow – remember when the rug was yanked from underneath us professionally and I spent a week digesting my own internal organs?”

nomad

room with a view

Well… It’s official… We’re moving our studio. The talks with our friends with the loft downtown were successful and they’re going to let us set up shop in the corner of their HUGE space in exchange for design services.

Technically, for a myriad of bureaucratic reasons, we’re not really there. We’ll simply be vendors working on-site for a client… Our “official” business will be nomadic… (yes – there’s a way you can actually do that – and it requires carrying your business license in your car… The city of St. Louis is tedious when it comes to working with small businesses.

view overlooking Washington Ave.

The building is mid-restoration. Still dirty and funky… A welcome change from the dry-walled, drop-ceiling cave we work out of now. The building is primarily inhabited by photographers, artists and other designers and sits at the corner of the newly revitalized “urban-hipster” part of town. (St. Louis’ latest, mega-expensive, effort to gentrify downtown.) The area is peppered with lofts, night clubs, boutique stores and restaurants.

While anything dictated by someone else as “cool and hip” generally makes me snarl – I think the change in environment will be stimulating.

We’ll be taking over my friend, Jeanette’s old space. She gave us permission to box up her stuff which still sits frozen in time from when her and her husband moved to LA. It’s a corner with a great view but I’m afraid of heights so I’ll probably sit back from the window a ways.

I’m really nervous.
I’m really excited.
I’m really not blogging.