The Boss and I have spent a not insubstantial chuck of this week wandering around the same two blocks of the city looking at offices with our friendly real estate agent Paula.

It�s actually been quite pleasant. It�s far better to be wandering the city on a Spring afternoon than stuck in the office. And poking around in empty offices mentally spending thousands of dollars of the Boss�s money on fitout options, and planning where my new office would be is fun.

While we don�t absolutely have to move from our current offices, a confluence of events means that it�s probably time to do so and while there are some hassles involved with that, it�s actually not too much of a problem.

In fact in my case it could be a giant bonus. Currently I have a fairly large office, but its only window is opaque and looks out into the well between our building and the apartment building next door. It provides some natural light, but not much. And the office is configured badly with the desk facing into the corner wall, whereas I would much rather have my back to the wall and look out into the office. Which would also allow me to have meetings in my office, which I can�t currently do. But I can�t change the configuration here, not least because one wall of the office is all built-in cupboards which house all our stationery and other supplies and anything we need to store. And I have five large filing cabinets which wouldn�t fit if I moved everything around.

Add to that the fact that the office is also the defacto pre-storage room for the whole company � all the old files and project materials get boxed up and stored in here until there are so many archive boxes that I can make a two storey luxury cubby house, and then they�re shipped to off-site storage and the whole cycle starts again � it�s kind of a mess.

And that�s before you add all my crap. Piles of paper, files, books, shoes, promotional caps and t-shirts, rolled up posters of shows I�ve worked on that haven�t yet been framed, old journals, etc etc.

So I�m ready for a total clean out and a new office with a proper window and proper light that�s not a storage shed, and when my desk doesn�t face the wall and I can have meetings, and get my posters framed.

And planning that is fun. We�ve seen some truly crappy offices that we just walked into laughed and turned around and left again. We�ve seem some pretty, brand new offices that may be out of our price range, but also may not. And we�ve got to spend Spring afternoons wandering the streets and stopping for coffee on the way back � in order to discuss the options, of course � instead of working.

Tomorrow we plan to do it all again. And start the really fun part, speaking to our architect about proper fit-out plans. The closest architect in me is really looking forward to that bit.

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And speaking of Melbourne, any of you out there who are fellow Melburnians and interested in blogging about the city, I�m going to be adding my two cents to the Melbourne metroblog and we�re looking for a couple more bloggers to get the Melbourne version up and going. If you�re interested, you can apply here. And of course, take some time to trawl around the other city blogs.