How to Determine if you Need an Interior Designer

Your home should be a reflection of your personal style, lifestyle and attitude towards life. If you look around your home and it is lacking life and personality you may need to hire an interior designer. If you once liked your space, but now you and your family are at a different place in life and need an outsider’s view and touch, an interior designer can help. Some people have the time and know how to put towards choosing décor, colors, and finishes together while others get overwhelmed with the number of available color choices, and styles.  Read on to determine if you need to hire an interior designer.

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• • Is your home reflecting you: Anyone can buy furniture, paint colors, and move furniture around a room. An interior designer on the other hand will sit down with you and discuss what your personal style is. They will determine by your family and lifestyle what finishes work best and what will fit your budget. An interior designer can help you plan a space to fit your life, and layout the necessary components to bring it to fruition.  If you cannot say your space reflects you, you should consider hiring a designer to take away the stress.

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• • Do you enjoy recreating your space: In your spare time can you visualize how you would like your space to look like? If you were given an all white room with no furniture or finishes, could you pull together the space and be pleased with the results? Many people are good at visualizing in their head, then transposing to paper to articulate, and into the living and breathing space. If you enjoy these exercises and process, you may not need an interior designer. For you may have all the ammunition you need to seek online design inspiration to get started.

• • Expertise can outweigh price: If you’re weighing the pros and cons of hiring an interior designer, remember the expertise that an interior designer can bring, can outweigh the price of the physical service.  Remember your home is probably the most expensive asset you have. The time, energy, trips back and forth to home improvement and furniture stores, and not to mention stress could all be handled with an interior designer. While on television it appears that you can remodel a room in a weekend, the factual truth is there are countless designers, trades people and crew to pull this off. In your home, you may have a few friends, and yourself – make the decision for the right reasons and not only financial.

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• • Talk to an Interior Designer first: Most designers will offer a free consultation to come to your home and assess your design dilemmas and walk through your options. Some designers will have tier pricing where you can do work yourself and then utilize them for a few options, rather than the entire project. This is good for a do-it -yourselfer that doesn’t want to take on everything.  If on the other hand you want to sit back and relax, there are always great options for you!

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The decision to hire an interior designer can seem difficult, but in reality is not. It will require you to figure out how much help you want, and what you enjoy doing yourself. If your budget permits then hiring an interior designer can be the most rewarding decision you can make for a quality design job of your living space. Use these tips to guide you in your decision, it’s now yours to make!

Freshome readers tell us what you think are the pros and cons are of hiring an interidesigner for your home. We’d love hearing your feedback.