I honestly don't know what possessed me to think that acting as the general contractor for our new office space was a good idea, because sitting here now in this "ultra-modern" industrial box, I can hear the sales team chewing their lunch from fifty feet away. We fell for the hype of open plan office acoustics being manageable with just a few baffles, but let me tell you, it sounds like a high school cafeteria in here during lunch hour, and no amount of expensive noise-canceling headphones can fix the fact that we can't have a private conversation without booking one of the two meeting rooms that are always occupied.
And don't even get me started on the budget... we thought we were being smart by skipping the raised flooring, but now we are living in a cable hellscape because the commercial cable management ideas we found on Pinterest didn't account for the fact that concrete trenching is expensive and messy - so now we have these ugly rubber humps everywhere that people trip over daily. It's just ridiculous that we spent nearly half our budget on glass partition walls cost just to make the managers feel special in their fishbowls, only to realize that the HVAC circulation doesn't work in those rooms so they turn into greenhouses by 2 PM every afternoon.
I swear, next time I see a rendering with cool recessed lighting I'm going to scream, because nobody mentions that if you don't calculate the lux levels correctly for office lighting ergonomics, you end up with a team that has chronic eye strain and migraines within the first week of moving in. We tried to fix it with floor lamps, but there aren't enough outlets because—surprise, surprise—the electrician decided to put them behind the heavy filing cabinets instead of where the desks actually are. If you are planning a build-out, do yourself a huge favor and look at a proper renovation checklist before you sign anything, or you'll end up like me, staring at a patch of peeling paint that was supposed to be "high-durability" while listening to the receptionist complain about the drafty front door for the tenth time today.
