Basement Redo: Part 1
The Flower Cottage basement has been just that…a basement! It’s our workspace, the place we spend most of our time, where all the inventory lives and where all the flower magic happens. But when we first moved in we were so focused on our client experience and making the upstairs beautiful, we never imagined our clients seeing our basement. So we put a fresh coat of paint on the walls and floors and did the best we could to organize with what we had.
Over the past 4 years we’ve outgrown the layout and organization and it has slowly turned into a really overwhelming space to be in. Think of that room in your house that you shove everything in before company comes over.
When the pandemic hit we were given more time to improve upon our space and think hard about how to utilize it in the best way that we can. With this unexpected gift of time we’ve been able to start completely from scratch.
We had 2 goals for our basement redo. First, was to streamline our organization and processes for our wedding business to make it easier and efficient. Second, we wanted to create more working space for freelance designers and workshop attendees. All while making it as pretty as we can to provide lots of photo-worthy backdrop to take lots of pictures of flowers :)
We started by clearing every single thing out and hitting everything with a fresh coat of paint. The ONLY surface we didn’t paint when we first moved in 4 years ago was the purple ceiling in the basement because of how labor intensive it would be. Since then it has became known as ‘the big purple monster’ haha and we couldn’t wait to paint it white to brighten up the space!
Our wedding clients know that we’re big on repurposing items, so a lot of the preparation involved giving a facelift to some of the tables and workbenches we already had. We sold off old inventory and were able to consolidate the items we kept which freed up a lot of our shelving units. We desperately needed a better storage solution for our cooler space, and the shelves that used to hold our inventory were perfect to move into the cooler.
Re-organizing gave us the space to rearrange our workbenches in a whole new way, instantly opening up an entire corner for designing.
While it doesn’t look like we did all that much, this work took months!!! And now we’re starting Phase 2 which is the fun part…making it all so pretty! We can’t wait to show you some of the design choices we made to really turn this space into something special!
Have you been working hard on a project during quarantine? We’d love to hear about it, so please share your projects in the comments below!