About as much as the Real Housewives live like real housewives? So…no. There’s no team of production assistants, no producers, and definitely no product sponsorships. TV has done most homeowners a disservice by glamorizing how long, messy, and expensive the home design and remodeling process is. Yes, I connect clients with my preferred vendors and contractors when we’re under contract for a project. Once I know what your goals and design plans are I can help refer the right partners to be part of your team. During Consultations I won’t know enough about your project to make these recommendations. Contrary to what is seen on T.V. the process of design is not fast. From planning to completion an entire home remodel can take the better part of several years. Even without construction it can take 3-4 weeks just to reach our presentation phase. This means that a small kitchen or bathroom remodel could easily take six months until completion. Many clients are surprised by how much their daily routine changes during a design project. The rigors of seeing your dreams come to life is not lost on us, and we are available throughout the process to help make your life easier. We communicate primarily via phone calls and emails since these methods provide both fast access and traceable details about your project. In our increasingly busy lives, text messaging can prove essential; but we’ve found that it can create problems in communicating tone and intention. Additionally, if you’ve ever kept a long text chain, you know how annoying it can be to reference further back. For these reasons, we will seldom use text messaging to communicate with you throughout your project. We are available to our clients during our normal business hours, Monday through Friday from 9am to 6pm PST. You can reach us via email at hello@wrenstedinteriors.com or by phone at 562-704-6644. Our clients are busy with their careers or families, and many times both! While our main goal is to reduce the impact that design and remodeling has on your time, we still need our clients to be available to us. Projects of all sizes will have many questions and constant communication from the design team. We conduct weekly check-ins with our clients throughout the process whether it’s a short email, project conference call, or in-person meeting or presentation. Our job is to be responsible with our clients’ money, which includes the time we spend creating your design plan. There are things you can do to keep billable hours from piling up unnecessarily: Retainers are a standard business practice for many professional services. Your retainer is a deposit again the Design Fees to ensure that I maintain the bandwidth and availability for your project and keep it on my schedule. It also ensures that my business continues to operate without interruption should a client decide not to pay their most recent invoice of billable hours. In the case of non-payment, I apply a client’s retainer to their current outstanding invoice and stop all work. At the beginning of your project, we agree on a budget and timeline. A retainer of 25% of the project budget will be collected when you sign your contract. Regular invoices for billable hours will be due every other week. The retainer will be applied to your final invoice and any credits returned to you. Think of consultations like a working meeting. Consultations can either be used as a stand-alone service, or as the introduction to a larger project you’d like us to help with. Whichever goal you decide, we’ll provide you with valuable and actionable advice and guidance for your home projects. If you decide not to have us continue with your projects after this meeting, the advice and guidance is still yours to use on your own. If you decide that you’d like our help with your project, we’ll be able to use all of the information we gathered during the consultation toward your project. This ultimately saves our clients time and money during their project.
