Home sweet work

I’m not sure how many other wedding videographers out there work out of a studio away from home, but from what I’ve gathered here and there, I’m one of the few. It all started about a dozen years ago, when after welcoming an umpteenth couple into my house to the sound of a dog barking and pots clanging, and then asking them to follow me up the stairs to my “studio” in a spare bedroom, I suddenly realized that I just didn’t feel very “professional.” Nothing they hadn’t experienced with other vendors, I’m sure, but my desire to present myself in a more professional manner and differentiate myself from my competitors led me to move the business out of the house. After a few years of paying rent (ah, overhead – THAT’s why I was working from home!), my wife and I finally purchased a small office building from which I have operated since 1998, and I haven’t looked back. It’s been a great situation – two other tenants have essentially made the mortgage payments for me, and I’ve been able to continue keeping home and work separated.

That is, until this week. There have been moments when I have actually missed the comfort of dragging out of bed and walking straight to my “office” down the hall, or getting some editing done on those nights when I can’t turn my brain off. On a few occasions over the past couple of years, I’ve unplugged the PC and brought it home for a day to escape the growing mountain of paperwork and just focus on completing a project. Focus was especially hard to come by last week, since as I’ve been telling most people, my brain was still in Hawaii. So for the first time since who knows when, I decided to camp out at home this week to work on a couple of weddings, and so far it’s been pretty fun. It’s been nice to run to the fridge to grab a snack, or to hang out with the kids while a video file is rendering. Best of all, I’m finally caught up to where I wanted to be editing-wise. I’m starting to get a tad anxious to get back to a real office environment now that I have my focus back. But this has been a fun experiment, and I’ll look forward to camping out here again sometime, perhaps on a few miserable snowy days this winter.

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