Can't access assets on public after setting document root to /public

Hi there!

I've just recently started using Laravel on a new project and I hit a problem.

So, I think I've set up everything well for a new project and began working on it. Everything is fine on my local machine (Windows, running WAMP) and I've set it up on a personal VPS (Ubuntu, running NGINX), which is also working fine. Now, my employer is using Shared Hosting and the access is sadly very limited. I have ftp access and he can access some stuff on a cPanel. I've tried deploying to the server directly from my local project with PhpStorm. It seemed ok, only bump was that it was directing to a file listing, but when accessing serverlink/public it seemed ok. I've asked my employer to change the document root to /public and everything went downhill, as I now can't access my assets (css/images) which are on /public. The generated links are what they're supposed to be eg: serverlink/css/mycss.css but the file returns a 404 which is rather odd.

Here's my htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    <IfModule mod_negotiation.c>
        Options -MultiViews
    </IfModule>

    RewriteEngine On

    # Redirect Trailing Slashes...
    RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

    # Handle Front Controller...
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>

On my views I'm referencing the assets using blade, like so:

<link href="{{ asset('css/button.css') }}" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" >

^^ This doesn't show correctly in the forum, I'm using asset('css/something.css') with double curly braces!

What I get when trying to access the files directly in the browser is

"Sorry, the page you are looking for could not be found. 1/1 NotFoundHttpException in RouteCollection.php line 145:"

Can anyone help me out? Going nuts over this, especially as it works fine on my vps! Will I need to forsake Laravel 5 because of the hosting restrictions or can I get around them?

Cheers, Tiago C.