Is It Time to Hire a Designer Yet?

Choices, choices, choices.  We live in a world where we’re confronted every day with thousands of choices in everything:

what to eat, what to wear, what type of coffee to get at your local coffee shop.  Choice is a good thing right?   Well, yeah, but have you ever gone to a paint store to buy some white paint?  Sounds simple enough, right?  Not really!  There’s like a million different shades of white!!  Now if you’re like me, you’ll spend a half an hour trying to find just the right shade from all those choices.  Then if you need another color to go with it, you could spend hours trying to choose from another million samples, comparing them to your perfect shade of white to find the perfect match.  Then, hey, how about an accent color?  It goes on and on, but if you’re persistent, maybe you finally come up with the perfect colors for your room.  Job done.  You go to sleep with the peace of mind that you’ve chosen some truly great colors, and you’re excited to get started painting in the morning, and you’re already planning to invite your friends over later so they can admire and envy you for your beautiful room.  Morning comes, you take a look at the swatches that you’ve diligently painted on the wall, and there’s a problem.  In this morning light the colors look completely different from how they looked the night before under your room’s incandescent lighting.  In fact, now you don’t like these colors at all!  Crap!  Back to the paint store.

Sounds silly?  Or maybe not; maybe you’ve experienced this dilemma.  Well, I have; my wife and I went through that exact scenario not too long ago.  In fact we’ve been struggling with these kinds of choices for a while now, as we’ve been slowly renovating our 1907 home.  The problem comes down to having too many choices.  With me being a general contractor and she, an artist and tile maker, we could potentially turn our house into the Taj Mahal.  It’s hard to know where to stop, and if there’s two of you involved with the design, it can be hard to come to an agreement on all of the different elements, and the longer you take the more time you have to change your mind, and before you know it you’ve wasted months or even years planning, and designing, and choosing, and nothing’s getting finished!

So what can you do in this situation?  Hire a professional.  That’s what we did.  Fortunately for us, we happen to have a friend and colleague who is a professional interior designer, and I can tell you, that working with her has lifted such a weight off our shoulders, and possibly saved our marriage as well!  So if we had this friend all along, you may ask, why we didn’t get her involved in the first place.  Probably because we’re stubborn; we are both very independent people who like doing everything for ourselves, and we don’t like admitting that something might be over our heads.  I’m betting that that’s why a lot of people don’t hire designers.  After all, who knows your taste and style better than you?  But it’s a designers job to understand and interpret your style, and they spend years studying and perfecting their craft so that they can sift through all the choices involved in creating your design.  From colors to textures, scale, proportion, lighting, trends, fashions and fads, all of that and, in the end, it’s not enough to just look good, it has to be functional too.  That’s certainly more than I want to take on.  So should you hire a designer every time you want to paint your room?  Sure if you can afford it, but for those of us in the 99%, when is it the right time to hire a pro?

Here’s my advice:  If you are planning any major project, such as a complete kitchen or bathroom remodel, get a designer.  You may be thinking you can’t afford it, but I’m telling you from years of experience, that you can’t afford not to do it.  Having a design and working with a designer, can save hours of time for your contractors and for you, and time is money.  Imagine installing a new kitchen, everything seems to be going well, the cabinets are in, the granite countertops are in, and finally the appliances arrive and are installed.  Everything looks great, and the contractors installed it all to your specifications, but as you start loading things into your new kitchen, you realize that the drawer which is perpendicular to the range won’t open without hitting the oven handle, and now you have to open the oven door every time you want access to that drawer!  This really happened to someone I know, and this is just one of hundreds of examples I’ve encountered over the years.  As I write this I know of a commercial building which is being completely repainted because the color they picked originally looked great on a small swatch, but totally garish after they painted the whole building; another costly mistake which could have been prevented by consulting a designer.  The bottom line is:  When you and your contractors are working without a design, you are leaving the door wide open for all kinds of misunderstandings, guess-work, and costly mistakes.

So yeah, I’m stubborn, and it is hard for me sometimes to hand over the reins, but I’ve come to understand I really can’t do everything, at least not as good as someone who has dedicated themselves to a certain field.  It just makes sense sometimes to step aside and let a professional do the job.