et voila: ze human nature zamboanga branch!

after days on end of being forced to smell of eau de varnish et pintura, the construction is now over. well, a little fixing here and there, but at least, i can go home without smelling like i took a bath in turpentine. so this is how the store/office looks like now:

never have husband and me collaborated on a project as much we did on this. well, with the exception of our best projects of course, our children. those however are works in progress, construction on-going E-V-E-R-Y single day. unlike this Human Nature Branch, which i intend to keep as is for at least a year.

we had someone draft a design but we sort of modified that in a major way starting on the second day of construction. the designer had to keep up with us, instead of the other way around. you could say i am a designer's worst nightmare. my husband wanted to strangle me around seven times during the course of the two-week construction.

my husband was the contractor, you see. the original plan was to get someone else outside the marriage to handle the construction but we figured if we did it ourselves, we'll save more.

my request was pretty simple and straightforward i want everything to be white. and of course the workers fought me every step of the way for that:

yen: todo lang white manong.
manong: este door jamb?
yen: white.
manong: este molding?
yen: white.
manong: este shelves?
yen: white.
manong (panicky): nah! white lang todo? umalin se sale ma'am!

manong eventually got what he wanted, some colors, maskin poko lang. but i made him suffer for it a little pa, bad me. when everything was painted immaculate white, i asked for a light blue ceiling. the paint center delivered the very wrong color -- do you know there are seven hundred kinds of sky blue? -- so pintors and husband conspired to bring me to the paint center to supervise the custom mixing. they figured that way, i can only blame myself if the color was "umalin".

the room behind that wall is the mini office. behind the mini office is the mini conference room. most everything is mini because this is just a 40 square meter space. beside the conference room is the storage room.

they were so happy to show me this cubby in the mini-office. my instruction was one large shelf to serve as my desk and one narrower one above it to serve as a, well, shelf. then they thought, why don't we give our &^%$ task mistress more than what she asked for? let's give her a cubby with lots of cubbies!!!

i didn't have the heart to tell them i didn't like it. sigh. i need to sell a lot of stuff to justify a new desk.

then i requested them to threw in a little green here and there, the exact same green of the leaf on the wall accent above. that's a bulletin board actually but why settle for cork board of rubber matting when you can just wrap styropore in great but cheap cloth, di ba?

this is the conference cum meeting room. i love the table. it folds down the middle so you can tow it around.

this is the shelves in the storage room. this is not how it looks like now, thank heavens. our first major inventory is coming in this weekend.

and this is the working table in the storage room, where we can prepare orders: get them from the shelves, package them. this is how i wanted the mini-office to look like. sigh. blue and yellow is always good, no?