What are you waiting for??

I’m SO HAPPY this morning! I’m sitting in my SUNNY YELLOW new office and I can’t believe how amazing it feels in this space!

We are fully back to work and operational in here thanks to our amazing team that helped us to take our entire office “down” and put it back “up” in just 4 days! You have NO idea how amazing Paul Martino is!! Our office used to be home to racks full of IT equipment (servers, routers, and G-d only knows what else). Years ago, at one point we had 14 servers/computers in here….and a lot of that was STILL in here.

Paul worked tirelessly for about 12 hours straight to take it all down, redesign a new IT infrastructure for our company and everything we do and put it all back together in a streamlined new configuration that takes up about ONE cube in our new cube shelving system! G-d he is SO brilliant and amazing!!!

I’ll tell you, you know I believe in working with PROS and this quick-turnaround office makeover was a great example! With only one day to shop and four days to do the actual transformation, Paul and I were STUCK on how to configure ourselves differently in this office.

There were so many things about our office that we strongly disliked, and for 12 years we’ve been working in here every day, it was not easy for us to think about this as an empty room and come up with a new space plan and furniture options! So we reached out to our dear friend and brilliant office makeover specialist, designer Catherine Avery from ResovateOfficeDesign.com.

In 24 hours, using only a Skype session to see our space, Catherine designed a new space plan and gave us a complete furniture layout and shopping plan for one trip to Ikea to get it all done!!!! Working with Catherine was such a delight! I love watching her in her unique brilliance…it’s beautiful to see her brain “see” things that I just can’t see! That’s why you work with a pro! We love Catherine’s design!!! (check her out…she does remote home office makeover services now and she charges WAY too little for her brilliance…go get yours done!)

Then our amazing concierge and treasured team member Kelly Schaefer of TaskComplete.com brought in her entire team to actually execute an office makeover in 4 days!! From cleaning out, packing up, assembling everything from Ikea (in one day), bringing everything back in and putting it all away….Kelly’s team rocked the house!!!! Thank you to Kelly, Val, Pat and Cliff!!!! Paul and I could never have done it without you all!!! AMAZING!!!

Did you read the blog I once wrote about why you always work with a PRO?!?! (read here) In that blog I talked about the lesson that Carl the painter taught me about always working with a PRO to do what needs to be done! Well, of course we brought Carl & Bob from First Place Painting in to paint our office! This was no simple painting job. But Bob & Carl knocked out the entire job in just 6 hours!!! They took us from a color I affectionately refer to as “pencil eraser pink” to a bright sunny YELLOW in just 6 hours. To think, for 12 years I sat in this space that did not do anything to lift my energy (or even match it!) and in just 6 hours Bob & Carl created a bright sunny yellow happy space for me!!!! AMAZING!!!!!

So why do I share all this with you??? Well, partially because so many peeps have asked us about our “last minute” office makeover. But of course, you know me, there’s a teaching opportunity here. In fact, it’s two-fold.

Lesson Number One, WHY WAIT???

We sat in this room working for 12 years, with just a few feet of open space to walk from desk to desk, piles and piles of stuff all the way to the ceiling, sitting back to back (yuck) and surrounded by a dingy color and blah old wood.

Now we sit in a bright, exciting, fun, sunny yellow room, with clean white trim everywhere, turquoise Ikea cube shelves with DOORS so you don’t see the clutter, bright color boxes and baskets on the shelves, a HUGE square bistro table with two leather chairs to collaborate and brain storm and our two desks, side by side, facing the openness of the room…with all the cubes and shelves behind us so we don’t even see it all day!!!! It’s SO bright, open, clear and FUN in here…..anything is possible!! WHY did we wait so long!!!!

I see people do this all the time with their homes. They wait until they need to put their home up for sale before they replace the carpet, paint, etc. Why Wait!! Do it now and enjoy it!!

Lesson Number Two: It’s NOT insurmountable! Don’t over-chunk it!

Sitting in this office for 12 years, with all that STUFF, and all that IT equipment…it felt like it would take 12 years to get out of it! But it didn’t! We cleaned out in two days!

And I thought it would be thousands of dollars to redo this office. But it didn’t!

We have a HUGE space and needed to buy absolutely everything new (we had 3 flatbed carts at Ikea full)…and we still did it all for about $1,500 at Ikea! (I think I spent $900 10 years ago on the desk I just threw out!)

And I thought I could never STOP our business to actually do this! Actually that was always my biggest block to doing this. I’ve been wanting to PAINT this office for 10 years, but to get to the walls, we would have to take “down” our business and I just couldn’t wrap my head around it! When Paul mapped it out for me, he showed me how we could do it in just 4 days over a weekend, and we would only be “down” for the weekend. Suddenly it seemed very possible! That’s why you work with a PRO!

If your space isn’t “rising up to meet you,” just DO IT! Paul and I got this makeover done (with our team) in just about 5 days! It doesn’t have to be BIG or EXPENSIVE or take a ton of time. Just do it!

So your “thing” might not be an office makeover, or a home project…maybe your “thing” is making that phone call you know you need to make, writing that article, or doing that program you know you need…my lessons for you today are “WHY WAIT” and “Don’t over chunk it”!

Once you JUST DO IT…you are going to get to enjoy it…so do it! And don’t over-chunk it…it’s keeping you stuck! Just take the first step!

Post in the comments below and tell me….what’s your “thing” that you are going to JUST DO this week??

Sending love,

Stacey