Hi, I am Sherry Millien with TerraVista Interior Design Group, and it is Ask A designer Monday.
So today, for this Monday, I wanted to talk about something that I get inquired about a lot when I’m out talking to people. How to get ready for a design consultation with an interior designer?
They ask what I do, or they might ask me on Facebook or Instagram, you know, I’m a little intimidated I’ve never worked with a designer before. I don’t know how the process works; what should I expect?
So one thing I always tell people is any project I have starts out with a two-hour design consultation. Or sometimes that is all anybody’s looking for is a two-hour design consultation. For a designer to come out to their home kind of look at it and talk about what they want to do, what their goals are, and have us give you advice.
So I thought I would kind of tell you, to kind of take some of the intimidation out of what should I expect, how can I prepare for that.
Before the meeting, a lot of times what I will ask a client to do, once we have set the appointment date, and it has been you know paid for in full, which is one thing that we do expect. We set the date, we send you an invoice, and then the payment is due before we get there.
Once we receive payment, we will send you our welcome package. And in that welcome package, you will kind of get an overview of the different services that we have, of how we work, of who we are, and you will also get a design questionnaire that we ask you to fill out.
Then if you can get that filled out before we get there, we have a chance to go through it, look at your answers, and really get a feel for who you are, what you’re thinking, what you’re wanting, and that helps us to have a more productive meeting.
Also, part of that questionnaire, we will ask you to share some of your inspiration photos. Some photos a lot of people working on a project have searched Pinterest, you’ve searched magazines, and you kind of have an idea of things that you like, or you’re looking for. And along with the inspiration photos, we ask you for your anti inspiration photos. What you don’t like, maybe show us a couple of those, so we get a feel for what you’re not looking for. And you can share those with us you know via Pinterest; you can email as an attachment a couple of photos to us, you can save them if their magazine photos you can save them and show them to us when we get to the meeting. However, anything that you have prior to the meeting, of course, helps us to, again, be more ready and have the meeting be more productive. We’ve done some homework ourselves.
And you can have done some homework, so you’re kind of prepared.
The third thing that we will ask you to do, so you’ll get the welcome package, you’ll get the questionnaire with the inspiration photos, and then we’ll also ask you to do what’s called, you know, what you want to keep, what you don’t want to keep, and what doesn’t matter.
So we kind of ask you for whatever rooms we’re going to go into too kind of have those items kind of prepared ahead of time so that we kind of already can talk about, okay these are the things in the room that we know we need to use, that we want to use, that we have to keep. These are the things that we absolutely don’t want to keep in the room; we don’t like, we don’t ever want to see them again. And these are other things that, you know, if we can use them great, if we can’t, that’s alright.
So it’s kind of good to have those things as well when we get there so again we know what your expectations are, what you’re looking for, what your goals are. Then once we get to your home we’ve got those questionnaires, we’ve read them, we’ve hopefully seen some inspiration photos, we’ll then want to walk around your house, kind of do a quick tour to see some of your main living areas. To see how you live, what your house looks like, how it feels, what the layout is, and then we will discuss your primary room or rooms depending on how long we have.
It is a two-hour consultation; max is two hours. So we’ll go through, and we’ll talk about things that you want to work on in your home, and we’ll give you all the advice, all of our ideas, you know, that we can. We will bring a paint deck with us, so if you want to talk about paint colors we’ll have those, we’ll have graph paper so maybe we need to do a quick little sketch of a floor plan, give you an idea of a layout, we can do that for you and leave it as well.
And then if you decide from there you want to go through with a design project, you want us to help you, we have different services from just five hours five-hour blocks of time that you can purchase to do it yourself. E-design packages, we have two different levels of that, where we give you a design and then you can take it and do it on your own. Or you can also have us, you know, make purchases within certain set amounts, and increments at a time, so if you want to wait for, you know, a bonus or something like that then you can wait and do it that that way as well for our design packages. And then we have our full-service package.
So that is pretty much what it is like to work with a designer and to kind of just meet them, get to know them if you want to get their ideas you know so that you can do it on your own. But I hope that that has maybe kind of taken some of the intimidation, some of the questions out of what to expect at least from the initial design consultation for working with the designer.
If you have any other questions on how to work with us, or what our packages are, or even if you know something I’ve asked about here like, you know, what is a design questionnaire, what does it look like, how long is, it anything like that please feel free to ask me in the comments or DM me and I will be happy to answer them.
