It was almost exactly ten years ago that I first started working at Lakeland College, in our building on Shokuan Boulevard in north-eastern Shinjuku. The school had been there only a few years when I arrived; it was a building with a very small footprint, albeit nine stories tall, and served us well for those years.

But we found it necessary to move, and that process has just begun to end. After months of planning and working things out, the move was completed today; the new building stands full of bare-bones furniture nearly swamped in boxes that will have to be unpacked over the next week, as we make the new building home.

I had to do a lot of work on this myself, mostly in the form of planning the layout. Using Adobe InDesign, I made a to-scale map of the building and every component to be in it–I measured every nook and cranny of every room, along with every piece of furniture to bring it all together. Then I had to figure out other stuff, like how much room should each seat comfortably have for the occupants to work and still be able to push out from the desk, and have people walk behind them, while not taking up so much space as to fill up the building too soon. The color of flooring at the entrance, which furniture would go to which room, how to deal with a mold problem in the basement, and dozens of other issues had to be dealt with. Walls torn down, walls installed, wiring completed–it’s been a huge headache.

But it’s almost finished. We have worked on a tight budget, so we were not able to completely re-outfit everything; as raw as some parts of the building must be, we are getting it done. Our first semester may not look pretty, but it’ll work, while we get everything filled in and fixed up over time.

When I went in to work today, the old building was just an empty shell:

Since our old phone number remains active until tomorrow, we have had to keep a staff member in the empty room, answering phones left on a trolley cart. For some unknown reason, we were not able to keep our long-held phone numbers, despite only moving a kilometer away, and still in the same area code–hell, even the same neighborhood. But that’s the phone company for you.

I’d love to show off the new building, but it’s little more than a sea of boxes right now. Here are a few shots of the new faculty room.

A wider composite shot–I need to get a wider-angle lens for my camera… :

Tomorrow I go in to test computer networks and unpack boxes. Wheee!!