Just a touch of something more

At the end of December 2011, we moved into a new office space in Hong Kong, not sure if I've shared any of the photos with you, but here are some photos.





Before and During Renovation

If you look at this photo on the left, you'll see two sections of our office. Down the middle of this photo there's a wall that separates the two section - the left of the photo is the Reception, the right of the photo is the back office area.

The view outside, we have floor to ceiling windows letting in a lot of light. :) Everyone was fighting for a table next to the windows.

And after we moved in.....

 My seat is in this photo's bottom left corner... :P

And to make the office more warm and welcoming, a colleague and I potted our own plants for each row of desks and different flower arrangement for the reception area. Nothing extremely stunning, but it  adds that bit of personal touch and also it's different from the usual boring potted plants that we would get if we asked a florist to do them for us. Plus they would charge us a hefty fee for putting them together and also maintaining them.... 

So here are some flower arrangements that we did around Chinese New Year....

And here are the potted plants that we did for the general office area.... I usually water these once a week, and will need to prune them a bit.... it does take time, but it's nice to do something like this and not have to sit at my desk all the time (although there are times when I'm too busy and wish I didn't have to do this... lol....)

Selecting different plants for our office - it's quite fun, similar to shopping for ingredients to make a dish, but also different, because we really didn't think about how things would go together, we just knew we could mix these up in any combination and they would look good. hehe...

 

Just a few of the potted plants, and we even found these water plants that don't need soil. See the plant on the far left? These are called Water Butterflies (in Chinese) and they just float on water...

Using 60lbs (or was it litre.... I don't even remember, but it was one of those measurements! A lot either way!) of soil, and spending about 2-3 hours time, we finished about 10 pots of different plants. The pretty, but exhausted, girl on the right is my colleague, Elva!

Another time that we did something for the office was to take this flower arrangement that our office received for our new office (in Chinese culture, they usually send these HUGE flower arrangements to stand in the doorway of a new store/office - to send their congratulations), and re-used the drooping flowers in new arrangements.... it was quite fun, because we thought we wouldn't be able to get much out of the old flowers, but in fact, we were able to make some impressive flower arrangements and even revived some of them just by putting them in water (as they were without water for a couple of days).

Above: the arrangements using flowers from the flower placard below.... we're so proud of ourselves!

Below: It's like we dissected it.... lol.... we striped it bare of anything that was savable.