Submitted by Katie Hellmuth on | 0 Comments
Back in January, while ruminating on 2016 Resolutions, I let myself say out loud that it was maybe time to take an office. Tin Shingle has been run from the home offices of myself and my former business partner, Sabina Hitchen for 8 years. I personally have been in business for 11 years running InHouse Design Media, and now A Little Beacon Blog as well. With the addition of a husband and two kids since the beginnings of those businesses, it began to get a little crowded up in the home office, despite my dedication to always carving out and decorating a room in my NYC apartment, and then my home in Beacon, NY.
Being business partners with someone in a different town makes having an office tricky. Which one is the headquarters? Which address do we put in MailChimp footers and so forth? Do both partners even want an office? When Sabina and I realized our paths as leaders of different businesses, and officially ended our partnership in May, which included an announcement on a TuneUp webinar, something happened to both of us: new possibilities started opening up.
My casual statements out loud of wanting and office led me to believe it was possible. A friend of mine in town had bought a building that had a small retail space in the bottom of it. Small enough for me to experiment in with an office that I could also rent out as a event space for PopUp Shops, since we promote them on my local blog, A Little Beacon Blog. However, my friend decided to keep the space in-house, and do something with it herself.
Sabina and I meanwhile had begun discussions of our partnership ending, and how Tin Shingle would continue. One weekend, as I was fulfilling one of my 2016 Resolutions of actually attending one of the events I blog about, I was walking to the going away party of one of my favorite businesses on Main Street - Nixie Sparrow - who hosted crafty DIY workshops. Their office space was beautiful. Just steps away from the door, the idea hit me - I could take it over, and continue to run workshops out of it, as well as rent it out to others for business workshops and PopUp shops, and finally give Tin Shingle and A Little Beacon Blog an official home.
After hugging the girls and learning about their next endeavors (they outgrew the space and needed more room to construct amazing designs for weddings and other big events), I Instagrammed-commented their landlord with my interest in the space. What followed was a month of visiting the space, pictures, learning about required insurance to take the space, and dreams about what would fill the space, and how I could decorate it on a shoe-string budget. I had big shoes to fill with those Nixies!
While I'm a stickler for consistency, it is for this reason that I have taken the Tin Shingle TuneUp on a 2 week vacation. Yes, my kids have graduations, and we do have a family vacation coming up, but I like you all to know what you can count on at 12pm each Wednesday. The PR Challenge will continue without interruption. I moderated my first PR Challenge last week - before the cable guy could come and install the cable! I was tethering on my phone, and thank goodness AT+T services is awesome and ran GoToWebinar smoothly with no issues for the 8 of us in our new accountability group.
I recorded a little Periscope about it for you, to give you a sneak peek into the space. If you're not following Tin Shingle already on Periscope, please do, because more announcements, tips and sneak peeks are always to come. Plus, you never know which expert I'll run into in town, like when I sat next to a columnist for GQ, Sarah Crow who writes "What She Said", and we chatted on Periscope about editorial calendars.
Thanks for your patience everyone, as we get through this minor phase of construction! So far, we have been:
- Arranging the cable guy (check!)
- Hanging new wall art (tricky! my landlord is pictured here, challenging herself to drill into the wall...but the drill-bit wasn't sharp enough and we had to push it a few days until after a trip to Home Depot)
- Picking up neat furniture at my local flea market, The Beacon Flea, and taking pieces from home. It's refreshing to actually have a sunroom that doesn't double as my office!
- Getting to know the new systems in the building, like security, and the best food composting program! My landlord is a participant in Zeor 2 Go's composting program, which means I get to take my trash down to the lower floor and separate food for composting, plastic for recycling, and garbage for the landfill.
Back with more updates soon! Meanwhile, hang on Tin Shingle's Instagram.
