Low Cost Interior Designer

If you are one of those people searching for a low cost interior designer to help you with your next renovation or construction, you might won\’t to reconsider.

I will tell you why!

My name is Engy Samir. I am a certified interior designer from the National Design Academy in England, and founder of ES DEXIGNS, a Design & Build firm mostly working on residential interior projects, with numerous years of experience in interior design, project management and contracting business.

So back to the low cost interior designer, here is the story. A couple of weeks ago, I was installing expensive marble flooring for one of my clients, in a space of around 115m². And with the last couple of meters installation it happened that I wasn\’t around, and to my bad luck there was a glitch with the drawings!

You can guess what happened! An area of around 5m² was all a mess! and to make the situation worse, it was by the most apparent place, the house entrance!

So let\’s rework, easy right?

Not really!! .. Not enough marble left for the redo job.

Then let\’s try tiny fixes with whatever marble we have.

Mm no, not looking good still, some bad-looking connections were still there.

What other options we have? Demolish the entire area, repurchase and reinstall.

If you are new to the business, you would think it\’s easy to do. Well, you are right about the demolition, but unfortunately not as much about finding the matching marble!

One whole week of scanning the market with no success and I was about to give up and consider using different material for the entrance, may be patterned tiles or something. Just before giving hope, and with my last visit to my supplier, I found it, the light emprador marble, with exactly the same color.

However, believe it or not, the supplier refused to sell, and he had all the right!

Well, it is quite often that marble tables are sold in sequence by a coded serial number. The marble tables I wanted were actually in the middle of sequence, with all the preceding tables still available for sale. Suppliers who work this way, never change their rule!

So I left with a promise that they will call if preceding tables were sold, which, to my luck, is what they did the next morning.

So it took me two weeks of work, more than 10K EGP (around 650USD) of losses, and good share of stress and anxiety, to fix such a tiny-winy mistake in execution, that can very likely happen during renovation. And that\’s what makes a reliable interior designer expensive to hire.

So, before you get excited about the low cost interior designer you are about to hire, ask him how he handles similar situations? Who would bare the cost of any issues caused by the sub-contractors, because, believe me, they are unavoidable!

Did you face similar situation while working on your home renovation? Did you have a designer? How did he handle it? Share with us your story.