Managing My Own Home Renovation as an Interior Designer: Before & After

For the past nine months, I took on the role of interior designer and project manager for my own home renovation. Yup. You read the right. And yes, I did often think to myself, “Holy sh*t, this is stressful.” We redesigned two bathrooms, refinished our floors, and installed a new banister rail system. I lived in the chaos of a home renovation first-hand, and I learned a lot. The glaringly obvious truth in the end was this: I wish I had hired an interior designer to complete my home renovation, even though I am an interior designer.

What’s that saying about the barefoot shoemaker? Yeah, I felt that. I’d forgotten – until we started our own home renovation, of course – that this is why I always put my home projects last. Renovating a home is so time consuming and involved, and even though it is literally my job to complete the renovations of other homeowners, it felt impossible at times to keep my head on straight with my own.

Here’s why a professional interior designer wishes she’d hired an interior designer for her own home renovation…

There Didn’t Seem to be Enough Time in the World

If it were any normal project and not my own, I would have taken more time to inspect the sub-contractors working on the project. It’s extremely important to me that the contractors executing our work are precise and pay close attention to the details of your home.

I was so busy pushing out that standard for my clients that I left my own project on the back-burner in this regard.

Additionally, because I was busy running across town to service my own clients, my own project ended up lasting longer than intended. People had to wait on me to make important decisions, which I couldn’t get to until the end of the work day. Some days, I was so tired that I didn’t even have the energy to deal with those decisions until the next day.

It’s Easy to be Indecisive with Your Own Home

When I’m working with a client, I’m the third party onlooker that can clearly see the vision for their home. I can be more objective as an interior designer.

For my own project, I struggled to make decisions for our home. I was too close to the pressure of it all that I got lost in the what ifs and hesitations. In hindsight, I can see that it is wiser for homeowners to hire a kind of mediator (an interior designer) to stop them from second guessing themselves.

In the end, I wish cloning myself had been an option. That way I could let go of control and put the hard decisions into the hands of someone with the capacity to put their foot down on hard decisions.

Living on a Construction Site is Not for the Faint of Heart

While our renovation was underway, we had to live through the mess. This meant no plumbing or water at times. Living a normal everyday life was really, really, hard. I mean, I was brushing my teeth in the laundry sink for months!

This was an emotionally and physically taxing experience made even more overwhelming by the fact that I was responsible for conducting and completing this project. I wish I had someone else planning and managing all of the details so I could just keep calm and figure out how to live on a construction site while working full time.

Despite Everything, We Got Our Happy Ending

So maybe I bit off more than I could chew. But this experience showed me the value in putting the project management responsibilities in the hands of a professional, even as a professional myself!

It wasn’t all struggle, though. Here’s what I enjoyed about renovating my own home as an interior designer:

1. Hiring a stager to stage decor at the very end of my project was a great idea. I used Quinn Mcilhargey-Nicholson!

2. After the chaos settled, our home turned out beautiful and it became obvious just how much our hard work paid off.

3. Renovating our home has been a 13-year-long dream for my husband and me, and it was so gratifying to see it all come together.

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