Moving with two young children and getting a house ready for move in are not easy tasks and when combined together, has the capability of driving you to brink of sanity, so I decided that I would try to save some time and use an interior designer's services. I liked Anna because she is able to work with flexibility (by the hour or chunks of time) and give us a design direction. Her design help was tremendously efficient and she was able to help us work with what we already have, come up with a color palette for the interior, and ideas for layouts. I appreciated her suggestions and advice immensely and felt that it was completely worth the money I spent. It saved me a lot of time and headache, plus it was nice to have a professional give me a sense of direction as I liked having a plan laid out.
Anna was also excellent at communicating with me using Houzz, printouts, and drawings. She was able to really give me a good sense of direction for how to put the new house together. With her help many decisions were made quickly and with confidence.
Why did I take one star off? Well, I did find her design services so wonderful I decided to also take her up on doing some project management for the interior improvements we needed at the house -- namely painting, new flooring on the bottom floor, a custom cabinet, and stairs and railings. Our expectations were not well aligned on the project management portion of her services with me. I was in a hurry -- we have a month between hiring her and move-in date, I am dealing with two kids 3 and under, trying to vet our preschools and doctors while trying to get our current house ready for sale, and eager to hand off some of the dealing with contractors at the new house. My expectation was that she would have tapped into her roster of contractors as opposed to just contacted one for each item. The world of home contractors is an exercise in consumer intelligence, and I am used to doing it more methodically, (I like to follow FTC and BBB's guidelines for dealing with home contractors). Having previously gotten quotes from contrators myself as a homeowner, I expected to have details in the quotes like labor, materials, hours, etc. Considering a contractor can put a lien on your house, I was not comfortable at all with the nonprofessional and quickie quotes that got passed along. I was completely taken aback by the casualness of the quotes I would receive via Anna. She only met with one contractor to get a bid for each project and they would text her a number or email her a quick quote. The sparse content was also unhelpful in helping us make decisions. Anna's close and familiar relationship with the contractors worked against me in this case. When I let her know how I felt, she mentioned she was working as fast as possible while being busy juggling multiple projects, but it was still not acceptable to us to have such sketchy quotes on top of higher than expected price quotes from contractors. She did then go back to her contractors to get more detailed quote and one did come back with the details that we wanted. I felt that the contractors she used did not offer competitive prices because the request came from her, the designer. I ended up contacting more vendors using Yelp and Angieslist and it turns out her vendors charged $550 (for painting) to $1700 more (for carpeting) than the next highest bid, and much higher than the lowest. Does saving over $2500 on carpeting and painting matter to us? It sure did!
Also, Anna did not inform us that if she stopped being "project manager," that custom cabinet work that was already approved to be done would be dropped without notice. Luckily, I had called the cabinet guy to confirm the schedule and it was during that call that I found out that the guy will not work since "Anna is his girl" and that his "license is under Anna." I really wished that Anna would have told me about this, as I found this to be very unprofessional. Anna said that the guy did this on his own, but this is something that I was unaware of might happen with her contractors. I would take a 1/2 star off for this, but I will take Anna's word that she had no knowledge or control over this.
So in summary, I would use Anna for design consultation and design consultation only. If you want competitive bids, do your own vendor vetting, and do not use her for project management if you are under a tight deadline and a strict budget. read more