Sometimes the decision to start a business requires a step in a new direction.

Kelly Kellogg said it was more like a jump.

The former pub waitress always had a bent for art and design, but waited nearly 20 years before taking it up as a full-time business.

“I decided about seven years ago to go up to Malaspina, while I was a single mom and working full time, to take interior design,” she said.

“I took the two-year course over three years. Because I was single mom I ended up working back in the pub again, but I decided last year if I wasn’t going to jump into it and change it around I was never going to do it, so I jumped. It’s good.”

Kellogg got her business licence in July and opened Kelly Kellogg Interior Design. The phone is ringing and work keeps coming in.

One organization that helped get her business up and running is Business Futures.

“If I hadn’t gotten into that I would have been stumbling a lot more than I did,” she said.

Kellogg is an artist as well as a designer. Her works, a variety of abstracts and scenery, are hung throughout her home’s interior of which bears the results of her proliferation of new ideas and experiments.

“I love it,” she said. “I love doing it. I love making things look good. I love people saying things like, ‘Wow. I never would have thought of that.’”

Kellogg designs and carries out most of the work herself.

The jobs can be simple or complex.

She recently did the interior design work for the new location of Sandra’s Ink on Norwell Drive.

The elaborate project included a raised plaster wall copied from a photograph of an ancient Egyptian scene on the cover of a National Geographic.

The finished work is a collaboration between Kellogg and Sandra’s Ink co-owner Maria Leoczko.

Kellogg spent hours researching ancient Egypt, the artistic style of the region and period and hieroglyphics.

“It was great because it was doing art that I love to do, but it was big,” she said. “It’s a whole 8×10 wall.”

That project has translated into more commissions for Kellogg.

Kellogg is also one of the consultant designers for the Benjamin Moore Nanaimo store painting and decorating team.

“I’m there to please you, not tell you what I think you should have,” she said. “I’ve met people who have lived for years with stuff that they’ve hated.”

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source : www.nanaimobulletin.com