This is the story of a most lovely young couple who hired a designer to design their family room as well as give their kitchen a “small facelift.” Though their budget was pressed from the start given their total job scope, the couple continually increased the size of their project as new thoughts struck on their wish list. Like most people, they were seduced by the promise of more. In fact, they pushed the scope of their project to grow so that the kitchen facelift turned into a nearly complete kitchen redo! But the redo grew in drips and spurts and without a clearly or cleanly planned budget or action plan, and without involving their designer.
The real problem came at the end of the job (which is also not uncommon). To save money on design service, the couple decided to shop solo at a tile store on two different occasions to design their own back splash, one of the newly added parts of their job. Faced with endless options at the tile stores and lacking the know-how to easily sift through it all, not surprisingly the couple became confused and frustrated. On two different occasions, they paid their designer to meet them at their home to review their confused tile store findings, things that were not complete, not ideal or in some cases a bad clash or a bad move. Each time their designer politely tried to work with what they presented. Ultimately, the client abandoned this piece of the project.
In reality, they had invested hours and hours of their own travel and shopping time, plus a couple of hours of time with their designer at their home to review their uneven findings. The reason the lovely couple had initially hired the designer was because they recognized in the first place that they lacked the skill to be able to design their project on their own in order to get the outcome they really wanted.
So what had changed? Nothing. Their budget was too small for their project in total and this created pressure for them. And because they still didn’t have the skill set to pull it together, they decided to try to short hand their designer’s involvement. They still ultimately paid for a few hours of design consulting time at their home to review tile selections, but they ultimately got nowhere and nothing happened on the back splash. The lovely couple had nothing to show for the invested cost of their designer’s time – something they paid for.
A wiser use of their time and resources would have been a single shopping trip with their designer to knock out the tile selection. In an hour or less, their designer could have guided them through some viable choices. After a quick trip back to their house to check the colors in their home’s lighting, they would have been done.
Next time: 4 Things to Know BEFORE You Begin an Interior Design Project
About Donna Hoffman, The Interior Design Advocate™
Donna is a former top QVC Show Host and now one of the country’s foremost consumer advocates in interior design in addition to being an award winning designer herself. “I help people avoid wasting big dollars and unnecessary frustration when furnishing and decorating their home by offering clear strategies for finding the right products, professionals, contractors and services.” The results are that people get what they want, spend smart, eliminate the stress and get that beautiful home of their dreams. Known as The Interior Design Advocate™, Donna is here as your advocate, making sure you get wise in design so you can get what you want.