Home : Interior designers or contractors?

31 October 2013

The search for an interior designer was much trickier than I envisaged. We took almost a month and one full circle to decide on using one. 

We started off certain that we needed an ID, for that collective, complete kind of look we wanted for our home. The husband shortlisted a couple of IDs based on the designs they showcased online. Out of the few that we consulted (or many - depending on your standard), some were really nice but so high end that their quote was way above our budget, some simply unreliable that you wouldn't dare take the chance with, and some who could promise us everything in terms of timing and budget but who we were either not comfortable with (read: gangsterish) or who didn't give us the comfort and assurance that they could deliver the style that we wanted.

You see, the husband and I both had a very strong idea of how we wanted our home to be like. Down to the kind of sofa we wanted, the clean lines of the feature wall we liked, to the color scheme, theme and more. And we both were not the super-easy-going-anything-is-fine kind so we had to make sure that we communicated our ideas across and have at least some assurance that the ID could pull off the look we wanted. We certainly could not afford a major FAIL here. 

So after about 3 weeks of scouting and finding no one close to what we wanted, that's where it led us to think.. MAYBE just maybe we could pull this whole thing off by ourselves using a contractor. So we started a concurrent search for contractors, tilers and carpenters. Major underestimation of the work and details this would entail, by us. On hindsight, I'm sure it would have failed miserably if we had undertaken the whole project ourselves. Just the time factor alone would have killed us. 

Thankfully, somewhere towards the end of the third week,  I remembered Russ. I recalled his home many years back and liked his style and so we quickly called and met up with him. And voila, end of story! We finally had a designer. Yay!

It was still somewhat a leap of faith, how do people actually decide on an ID? You would never really know if both parties were totally aligned in terms of taste and style and so there is some element of instincts and gut feel that you just have to .. trust. And of course there were all the budget hiccups, problem lying mainly with us, perhaps a bit unrealistic, plucking a number from the air and wanting to do so many things with the house. But we move on.. hehe, by increasing our budget. 

So it took us almost a month and one whole round, but yeah finally we have Russ to call our ID!