Furnishing Your Home: Hiring a Designer vs. DIY

“I don’t want to hire an interior designer because they’re going to charge me a fortune for furniture!”

“Interior designers markup their furniture so much, I’ll save money doing it myself.”

“I love dealing with customer service and managing shipping, receiving and returns.” SAID NO ONE EVER.

We’ve definitely heard the first two comments before, the third one not so much! Many people are apprehensive about hiring an interior designer because there’s a rumor floating around that designers mark up furniture.. a lot. This leads to people handling all their own furniture and shopping exclusively from retailers. Want to know something? You’re paying for a HUGE markup by shopping retail. Hiring a designer will actually save you money. Yes, that’s right, you will save money on furniture by hiring a designer!

Designers do get discounts from vendors, many of the same vendors used by popular retailers, and designers will share their discount with you! For example, a designer might get a coffee table discounted 40% off MSRP and they’ll share 20% of that discount with you. That remaining 20%? That covers the designer’s time spent ordering the table, tracking it, receiving it and bringing it to you or dealing with any returns or damages. Time is money friends! By shopping retail, you’re paying more for furniture and have to do all the hard work yourself. Wouldn’t it be nice to save money, time and your sanity?

Another great perk to hiring a designer for furnishings? Designers have access to “to-the-trade” furniture and decor which means that they can source pieces that are exclusively available to designers! This allows you to have unique furniture that isn’t available to the public. But maybe you don’t care about unique pieces and you’d rather point to a page in a Pottery Barn catalogue and say, “I want that.” Great! How about we create the same ‘look’ you want but for less money and better quality (and usually faster shipping, better customer service, fewer headaches).

Let’s compare two scenarios below.

Scenario #1: You want this living room design in your home. You shop everything yourself from big box stores and nothing can be totally customized so you pick pieces that are ‘close’ to what you want. Your couch is backordered for 24 weeks but #worthit, right? Your coffee table arrives with a giant scratch in it so you have to deal with customer service and handle the return yourself or live with the scratch because the pain of dealing with a return isn’t worth it. The rug came in perfect, yay! Your leather chairs are scheduled to be delivered on a Tuesday and your delivery window is between 8am and 8pm.. guess you’ll stay home all day waiting? 7 months later and your living room is finally put together, hooray! Your all in cost for just furniture was a little over $20,000 plus whatever you value you place on your time and sanity.

Scenario #2: You hire a designer and show the designer the look and style you want for your living room. The designer sources pieces through their trade vendors and presents their designs to you. You’re thrilled and love it all so you pay for all the furniture, which totals up to roughly $11,000. After paying your invoice, your designer handles everything and you just sit back and relax. Your designer updates you and schedules your installation date for roughly 12 weeks after you paid for everything. You put it on your calendar, pay for install services and eagerly await your install date. If anything is going wrong, you have no idea because your designer is handling everything. Your install date is finally here and your design team arrives with all your furniture! They have a crew of movers who place all the furniture, you don’t lift a finger, and your designer styles everything to perfection. Roughly $17,500 later (design fees, furniture, install fees) and you have a brand new living room!

So which scenario would you prefer, the more expensive or less expensive one?

Hiring a designer really can save you money, friends! Still not convinced? Check out our “Hiring a Designer” series on the blog! We go into even more detail about the ways designers save you money. You can even Google “do interior designers save you money” and you’ll find endless articles with even more information.