DIY Office Renovation
When we first took on our offices in Stockton, it was a big step forward for us as a business and it meant having a lot of vision and doing a lot of work, to get it to where we wanted it. A tip for anyone taking on an office or commercial premises, it’s not like doing up a home, it’s much harder.. Well, one thing we can certainly say is it has certainly been a journey for us, which we’ll cover below.
Finding The Office
At the time of searching for offices, we looked high and low and we were always torn between being in an area we knew, Middlesbrough, or branching somewhere different in the Tees Valley. We used to scour Rightmove, Zoopla and PrimeLocation, as well as a million other sites every day, trying to find something that fit our requirements. We spoke to a few agents independently, hoping they might have a little black book, but many seemed darn certain to push us into a shoebox office, with their only being two of us; not understanding how our business worked or the environment we were wanting to create for both clients and our own growth. The attitude was pretty much, “well when you need somewhere bigger, you can just move”, which didn’t fit with our vision.
Honestly, we never thought finding an office or commercial space would be so hard, and we certainly came across many circumstances of non-regional landlords, trying to charge what can only be described as disillusioned rents. Searching for commercial property has certainly helped us understand why so many properties sit empty in the Tees Valley and why the ones charging Northern Rates, get snapped up so quickly. It happened to us twice on our search, falling for a property and then being beaten to the post. So you might be wondering how we found our current office, well desperation, lead us to Facebook Marketplace.
Now Facebook Marketplace might not be place you expect to find commercial property, but we were surprised by how many people actually advertised properties on there and that’s when we spotted a space that could work for us, but let's just say it need a bit of TLC (and that bit of TLC, soon turned into a lot of TLC, but we’ll cover that later). We visited the property twice before agreeing to take it on, a month's free rent certainly helped to sweeten the deal. Lets just say at the time I had visions of grandeur and Mike couldn’t see past the blue painted on the walls, let alone the foam wallpaper that the same blue was painted over.
So, on the 18th of July, we officially signed to take on what is now our current office space in Stockton-on-Tees. One of the reasons we chose it, was purely because of size, it came with 3 main rooms, large kitchen area, toilets and dedicated parking.
Getting Started On The Office Renovation
Well if you know me personally then you’ll know I've always had a flair for design and decorating and DIY comes easy to me, so it was easy for me to see past the dark and dingy space, lets just say getting Mike onboard with the plans was the most difficult part, but at the end of the day he knew we needed offices and they ticked a lot of boxes. So, we got to work stripping the place as bare as we could, removing old breakfast bar desks and clearing out any furniture that had been left behind and removing the dark grey blinds that certainly went out of fashion 10 years earlier. Once the space was empty, we could really see the space for what it was and it was certainly much bigger with everything taken out, giving us a blank layout to work with.
Next up was the stripping of wallpaper, this stuff was on every wall and ceiling. So off we went, armed with two wallpaper steamers and a lot of DIF wallpaper stripper by Zinsser. We were actually surprised by how easy the wallpaper came off the walls and ceilings, however stripping wallpaper in the Summer was certainly hot work. Not only that, much to the delight of our neighbours, we managed to set off the fire alarms twice due to the amount of steam and heat being generated. We initially planned a week to strip all of the wallpaper from the ceilings and walls, and that easily turned into 2 weeks, including the weekends. When we realised that it’s actually quite hard labour intensive work stripping foam backed wallpaper (especially the ceilings, it’s fair to say we felt like acrobats hanging over ladders to try and stretch that little bit further, whilst balancing between a scraper and steamer, without falling off).
Our aim was to have the offices fully re-plastered from top to bottom, and we did get some quotes for this before stripping the wallpaper, but once we had the wallpaper off, the walls were actually in much better condition than we first thought they would be. So we decided that we would give it a go sanding and filling. Well the filling was the relatively easy part, within a few days we had filled every hole or crack in the wall and the place wasn’t looking so bad now. The sanding was a laborious task that felt like it took aeons to complete, even with a hoover connected to the sanders, the amount of dust that spit up into the air was unbelievable. (And let's not get into the dry bogeys that seemed to form every night because of the dust up your nose).
We didn’t start any work on the property until August and by the end of the first month, we felt like we had completed quite a lot of work. After a lot of hard work, we decided to take a week or two off, although we wanted to get it completed as soon as we could, we also needed a break, balancing the renovation, the business and working weekends, had taken its toll and the last thing I wanted was to give Mike another heart attack. So next up was one of my favourite things shopping.
Shopping For Office Furniture
So we spent most of September shopping for office furniture, from the usual office websites, to more homey places such as IKEA, Dunelm, B&M, Home Bargains, Homesense and even Facebook Marketplace. The last thing we wanted is to work in a stifling office environment, we’d been there, done that and got the t-shirt. Trust us when we say design, colours and the items of furniture you use to create spaces in the workplace, impacts your mental health and motivation much more than people think it does.
Two weekends in a row, we hired a van to head out in search of items for the office, driving to everywhere from Leeds to Manchester and then up to Newcastle and everywhere in between. Within the month of September we had pretty much managed to tick off everything we needed to fill the office, from cabinets to sofas, desks and much more. And believe it or not, we didn’t spend as much as people might think doing up the office, we are always keen and proud to do things on a budget. So, as it was approaching October, we knew we needed to get back into the office and get cracking again.
October - Restarting The Office Refurbishment
So once October hit, we were spending evenings and weekends back at the office to get it completed. (Yes I’m one of those people that like to do things myself). One of October's main tasks was to get the walls painted, however we did have to get one wall plastered, when we stripped off the wallpaper, we discovered one wall was just plasterboard with wallpaper on top of it. We searched high and low and we could not for the life of us, find a plaster to do just one wall and the one we did find, didn’t turn up on the day. So what did we do? (when I say we, I mean me), I taught myself to plaster. It wasn’t a big wall and it was much easier than I expected it to be. It took me a full day and a lot of swear words, but by the end of the day it was completed.
So, October consisted of a lot of painting, as a lot of the wall was bare plaster. We prepped it first and then put on a watered down base coat of cheap white emulsion everywhere. Once that was done, we got cracking, usually we swear by Leyland paint, but the white just wasn’t given us a nice finish or colour after 2 coats (maybe it was a bad batch), so we switched to a different paint, opting for Dulux Trade Vinyl Matt White, which gave us a great finish and colour and after 2 coats we have solid white walls and ceilings. Every room was going to be white, except the kitchen, we had plans to go black in there.
And then we sprung a leak in fact multiple leaks, by the end of October and coming so close to being completed, we walked in one weekend to a lot of damage and hard work completely undone. After a downpour of heavy rain, the kitchen ceiling gave out and left us with a lovely hole and the main office ceiling turned brown. It’s fair to say at this point we both felt like throwing in the towel, but we’d already put so much time and effort into it, that we couldn’t let it stop us. Luckily for us, our contract put the responsibility of the repair on the landlord and we were sure he was happy when he discovered the building needed a new roof (insert rolled eyes). But that also meant we couldn’t work on the property until the roof had been replaced and the ceiling in the kitchen fixed, so it put us in a long limbo.
Office Limbo to Wedding Nuptials
Well, we knew for pretty much all of November, it was a right off and we finally decided after receiving some personal family news, that now was the perfect time to tie the knot. We did initially plan it during Covid and then we gave up and the business took precedence. So in less than 6 weeks, we planned a small wedding to celebrate with our closest family and friends and then with an expanded night reception for everyone. If you thought refurbishing an office was hard, try planning a full wedding in less than 6 weeks (we had our confirmation of marriage come through about 2 days before we were due to get married). It was a lot of stress, but it was worth it in the end and after tying the knot on the 2nd December 2022, we became Mr and Mr Indiana-Smith (ask Mike about the name, but it was fair to say I wasn’t losing Smith and I had not intention of being a Miller - No offence to any Millers out there).
Getting Back on Track with the Office Renovation
So after the wedding, we didn't really stop, we got straight back on with the office, the repairs had been completed and all we had to do was redo all of the painting again. So once again, we cracked open the tins of pains, got our painting gear on and got cracking. Within a few days the full office was once again a blank canvas of white. Once the main rooms had been done, we got cracking with the kitchen, we had an uneven wall that we got creative with, using tick on foam backed tiles, that once painted black looked great. But, we also fitted our own green wall, which looked great once finished and cost us about £200 to complete and the effect it created was worth it, plus it really set itself off against the black walls.
Before we knew it, Christmas was upon us, and once things quieted down workwise, we took some downtime and enjoyed the day with family, as you do. During Christmas and Year, we took all of the old carpets up and laid down felt back vinyl, courtesy of Cutprice Tomo’s, with the whole office coming in at around £720 for flooring in every room (we aren’t talking a small space either and it was more than 50% off everywhere else we got quotes from) and then £200 for fitting, which was carried out by the landlord handyman. Any by January, we had an office space that just needed piercing together.
Putting Our Stamp on the Office
So, we took the first week of January off and spent the time piecing together a lot of flatpack furniture. And in that week, we managed to more or less have a completed space ready to move into. It felt like it took us forever to get to this point, but it was worth it in the long run and we had the business running alongside doing everything ourselves as well, so we knew it wouldn’t be a quick turnaround. Next up was the branding, since last year, we had been tweaking our branding but had yet to finalise anything, we wanted something modern but more classy, but without being too pompous. And after a few variations, we landed on a design and colours we were both happy with.
We used two local signage companies to help us with the completion of signage, and although we won’t name and shame anyone (lets just say the quality was something to be desired), we would highly recommend the second company we used Colourscreen for price, quality and turnaround time. We installed the signage ourselves, as we had to wait for permission from the landlord to do so. And then that was it, we had ourselves a fully completed and branded office space.
So since January, we have been working from our offices full time and it’s certainly been an experience at times and from February, we were fully branded ready to go.
Supporting Local Businesses
When we took on our offices, we made the commitment to ourselves to try and use local businesses where possible. So from tea to the beer, we hunted for as many Teesside based businesses we could find to use their products instead of the larger brands, our search led us to the wider North East and North Yorkshire. Some products we couldn't get on our doorstep, but we wanted to keep it as local as possible. During our search we came across amazing businesses such as PLAY BREW co in Middlesbrough and Three Brothers Brewing Company plus Rounton Coffee (this is so good, we use it at home now.) Some other honourable mentions are Five House Farm Shop & Kitchen (we found a lot of local products here), Yarm Distillery Ltd, Ringtons and our always favourite gin Steel River.
What’s Next for Duo Digital?
Well, our plan was to level up, increase turnover and hire new staff. But, now we’ve hit a conundrum, well an opportunity we don’t want to pass up on. And although we haven’t been in our office in Stockton-on-Tees long, an office in Middlesbrough, we’ve had our eye on for a long time and missed out on during our initial search, has now been offered to us. So, who knows? Maybe you’ll be seeing us back in our hometown of Middlesbrough before you know it (luckily this one doesn’t require anywhere near as much work).
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