I just signed a lease on new commercial space, and will be going through the build-out through Feb starting tomorrow. The space is a bit larger than my current tiny little office, so I want to build it out right and smart from the get-go.
I'm working with 1,100 square feet including a reception-ish room, kitchen, & a server room (previous tenants converted it from a walk-in kitchen pantry). There are 2 fairly large offices. The larger of which I know will be our main workstation room, which is going to be set up like a 2-op edit bay + tv + client couch / lounge area behind us. For the other room, I think its going to have a couple freelance stations or something in there. I will probably install a long counter in there with 3 workstations, a tv above and a couch behind.
For the reception area, I'm thinking of just throwing a mac mini and a monitor up on a little desk up for clients to sit at and do their thing in private while we continue working. Perhaps a bed for my dog.
The server room thing was an awesome find. The previous tenants apparently installed a ton of ethernet wall jacks throughout the office, stemming from that room and siphoned a ton of AC from the building into that little room. I haven't checked the wiring, but I suspect its cat5e, in which case I will replace it with cat 6 so I can get serious about building a 10GBe network storage solution.
Since I am going to be back there anyway, running cables and whatnot behind the walls, I started thinking of running super long cables of all sorts and housing our workstations in the server. DVI, XLR, SDI, HDMI, USB 3, maybe some stereo audio cable. Firewire and eSata are only used for drives so I can just go connect those in the machine room.
Any tips? Anything you wish your workspace had but would have been a lot more simple to implement while nothing was in there? Any ideas or advice would be appreciated.
( haven't seen you on skype in a while, how've you been).
