PART 1: The main office interior design

My office - 

I decided to turn the room at the front into my office. Former owner of this house has constructed some partitions between huge spaces and the structure is still strong and I hate to see it going to waste. My budget is limited, thus using plaster ceiling is a huge no no,  so I decided to use plywood for ceiling and feature wall design to cover up the ugly water pipe, dirty wall and all. Yeah most people would have thought that would not last long but I actually found a carpenter shop that sells sturdy plywood usually use to make cabinets and these plywood have some beautiful wood pattern that could transform the look of my office.

  

But plywood would not stick to concrete.

So to make the structure more solid, a 2"x 2" wood frames were constructed first.

Only then the plywood can be installed on. The plywood size comes in 8' x 4' size each panel and it only cost RM38 ringgit. The problem with this size is that if you nail it, you can see the connection so use nail gun and polish the wood after installation.

I opted for the squared LED downlight and designed it along the black stripe in the middle, which I intetionally design as such to make the room feels bigger. Considering the dark coloured plywood, I painted the partition wall and windows frame with white to ensure the contrast in colour. 

Then the final touch to the office comes in with; 

A DIY door design. I keep the old door as it is still in good condition. I thought of painting everything white but then it got too boring of course. So I take up a strip of wallpaper and bought a few wood frame to make up this look. 

There goes the final looks for my office. The total cost for the ceiling, lighting and feature wall is only at RM606 including finishing, compared to the price of installing plaster ceiling, estimated to be RM2025 per room, that I have surveyed  

In the next post I'll show the next room to be upgrade that is the meeting room. 

Read More

The beginning - Office renovation DIY

Hello there!

Decided to start with this blog to documented my journey in renovating my own office. I wanted to do the design myself and try outs many new things while being hands on with this project.

So I'll start with the background of everything. I'm 26 years old Landscape Architect with 3 years experience of working in the field. But in that short amount of time I gradually lost my passion in the field of profession that I love so much since I'm 12. I love the beauty of nature and would like to participate in showcasing of it but as I realized in my country this profession became a victim to the uncontrolled economic growth, it became a money centered field rather than design field. There is no more design or conceptual discussion, there is only chasing after plan submission and endless construction meeting that usually ended up about money concern and cut down of design in favor of saving budget with no proper design planning. There is no design for the user anymore, whats left is just do the minimal requirement for the developer and municipal.

This drives me to my decision to quit my firm and start my own, where I aim to revitalize back the design aspect of this field with a touch of arts, with that my journey begins.


The office
It's a shop-house built in the 1980s that my parents bought almost 10 years ago but found no purpose for it yet until now. So you can say the condition is icky. But nevertheless, the size of it is enormous. Since it was built in the 80s, the  minimum  requirement shop lot/housing standard size at that time is 102' x 52' compared to today's minimum 70' x 20' in my country. This 2nd floor lot that my parents bought actually has 6 rooms, 2 toilets, 1 kitchen, 1 dining area, 1 living room area. All things considered despite it's poor state, it is a huge space to utilize.

With this starting point I started to design and search for the suitable materials.

I'll tell about it in the next post.

Read More