Interior Designer or Renovation Contractor?

Interior Designer or Renovation Contractor?

Renovating your new or existing home can be rather stressful. First, you need to know what type of design concept you want, the colour theme you prefer, the scope of work you are looking at, the calculation of budget to spend on renovation, furniture, furnishing and the list goes on. Most importantly, the person whom you are going to engage and work closely with; Interior Designer or Renovation Contractor?

But before we choose, we have to understand the difference between Interior Designer and Renovation Contractor, what they do and the pros and cons of both:

Difference Between an Interior Designer and a Renovation Contractor

Interior Designer

An Interior Designer’s role is to understand your preferred Design Concept and Lifestyle preferences in order to develop into good flow of space planning and creative design of house interior. This is done usually through sketches, mood boards, 3D rendering drawings and 2D detail technical drawings so that you can have a better visualization of the home before the actual construction.

Besides that, interior designers usually are well educated in foundation art which has deep background in studies of basic art such as colour, furniture, interior space planning and different type of medium technique. These created a strong foundation of design sense in Interior Designers. They will advise you on the type of materials to use, where to source for the materials, the matching colour choices and furnishings such as furniture and decorative ornaments. On top of that, they are specialized in improving the functionality and aesthetics of your home.

Interior Designers also assist to project manage your home renovation. This includes selecting the reliable contractors and sub-contractors, coordinating closely with them on timelines, ensuring that the renovation schedule is smoothly arranged and executed, dealing with renovation hiccups and most importantly, updating you on the process of the renovation.

Renovation Contractor

On the other hand, a Renovation Contractor’s job is to carry out the work instruction made by you, the home owners. They typically don’t really advise on the design ideas or aesthetics. However, experienced Renovation Contractors who have been in the trade long enough would also provide workable design flow. Sometimes they would engage the service of interior designers to assist them in developing creative ideas and 3D rendering drawings for presentation to home owners.

Renovation Contractor can be categorized into General Contractor or Sub-Contractors. A General Contractor usually work with other sub-contractors such as carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters, hackers and so forth where they help to conceptualize the entire renovation project. Sub-Contractors would mean you have to handle more people and oversee the whole renovation project yourself.

The decision between Interior Designer and Renovation Contractor

Now that you understand the difference between both, following are some of the questions you should ask yourself.

1. Your budget?

Obviously, Interior Designers provide more professional services as compared to Renovation Contractors and are therefore, usually more expensive to engage. You are paying for more of their knowledge and design sense in interior design, their expertise in space planning and time spent in drafting realistic and technical drawings. Additional to that, their time to manage the entire renovation project and coordinate with all parties involved.

2. Your Involvement in the renovation project?

To engage an Interior Designer would mean you only deal with one person during the whole renovation process. However, if you decided to choose a Renovation Contractor, be it a General Contractor or Subcontractors, it would mean you have to be personally involved in the supervision of the renovation work yourself including managing the timelines and deliverables.

Unless you really have a lot of spare time to spend, overseeing your renovation process is no walk in the park and can be more stressful and challenging than you think. Not only do you need to source for your own Sub-Contractors which can be quite a tedious process as you need to do filtering and background check for those contractors in order to select the reliable ones, but you’ll also need to plan a schedule for all those who are involved, arrangement of the work, who’s responsible, when it has to be delivered and so on. All of these would require your time commitment, experience, knowledge, patience and time spent in doing research and survey.

3. A functional well-designed home or standard basic renovated house?

You may have spent a lot of time Googling interior design ideas or reading through tons of related design articles, but the real thing is an entirely different matter.

To design your home isn’t just about the design concept, or the well-matched colour theme. To have a good understanding of how to make the space functional and better work flow are equally important. The type of materials used, the detailing in customized furniture, the lighting effect affecting each and individual space, and also the accuracy of all the measurements and dimensions are all essential factors in contributing to a functional and well-designed home.

If you don’t have the knowledge and the right experience, it’s important to engage an interior designer so that you can make good use of their professionalism to create your dream home. Remember, Renovation Contractors may not have the necessary design knowledge or to be responsible for the design choices that you make. This would mean that you’ll need to be accountable for any design faults and solutions of how to solve them.

4. Major or Minor renovation?

To renovate only on small projects such as bedroom, install or replace minimum carpentry work, replacing tiles, or minor installation work, you can consider hiring a Renovation Contractor as it’s not necessary to spend more to engage an Interior Designer for minor renovation work. However, if you are going to have full major renovation work for the whole house, then an interior designer will be more preferable.

Conclusion: Who to choose?

To summarize, if you have a tight budget or only want to have minor renovation work done, choose a Renovation Contractor. If you are a first-time home owner or home owner seeking for great interior design and a smooth and worry-free renovation process, with ultimate peace of mind, engage an Interior Designer.