The Designer Who Can Start Monday
you want to start when???
We lose a certain kind of inquiry on a regular basis, and it plays out the same way nearly every time. Someone reaches out, the project sounds good, we have a proper conversation about it, and then we tell them the two things they don't want to hear: we can't start next week, and we are not going to be the lowest number on their desk. After that, nothing. No reply to the follow-up, no polite note saying they went another way. They're gone, and most of the time we can guess where they went.
We don't take it personally, but we do think the reasoning deserves a straight answer, because the people who walk over timing and price are judging a design engagement on the two numbers that are easiest to see and least useful for predicting what the project will actually cost them.
On the studio that's free next week
Designers who do good work are busy, for the boring reason that good work gets referred and referrals fill a calendar. A studio with an open calendar right now might be between projects, or might have had a job fall through, both of which happen to everyone. Or there might be a reason fewer people are lining up. From the outside you can't tell which, and nobody volunteers the third option on a discovery call.
What we can tell you is what speed costs when it comes from cutting the front end. A fast start usually means a fast run through the part of the job where speed is most expensive: measuring properly, documenting existing conditions, and resolving the details a builder needs before anyone picks up a tool. That time doesn't disappear. It gets moved to the job site, where it's paid for by the hour by a crew standing around while someone redraws the stair or works out why the ductwork won't go where the drawing says it will. We have yet to meet a designer whose hourly rate competes with a framing crew on pause.
There's also the question of why the project has to start next week at all. Custom millwork, imported tile and specialty fixtures run on lead times that have no interest in when your designer began. Compressing the design process to hit an early start date doesn't make the cabinets arrive any sooner. It just means the decisions about those cabinets get made in a hurry, and hurried decisions are the ones that get revisited on site.
On the quote that came in at half
A low design fee is low for one of three reasons: the scope is smaller than it looks, the person doing the work has less experience, or there's a plan to make the money back later. The third one is where it gets expensive. It shows up as revision rounds capped at two and billed hourly after that, site visits sold separately, trade drawings added on the moment the builder asks for them, and procurement handled with a markup nobody mentioned at the first meeting. You sign the lower number, and then the invoices start carrying line items you didn't know existed.
Then there are the screw-ups, which never appear in a quote at all. A vanity that doesn't clear the door swing, a fridge opening sized off the spec sheet for the wrong model, a shower niche that lands on a stud because nobody checked what was behind the drywall. Each one is small on paper, and each one gets fixed by a contractor, with new material, on the construction schedule, which is where every dollar in a renovation is at its most expensive. The design fee is the smallest number in the whole project. The mistakes land on the biggest ones.
Our position on this is simple enough. We would rather have one uncomfortable conversation about the full number at the start than a string of smaller, more irritating ones over six months. The clients who stick around through that first conversation tend to be the ones who have lived through a renovation before.
What to ask before you hire either one
If a designer tells you they can start right away, ask what they're finishing now and when it wraps. Ask what their process is, typical timelines - they should have a sense/rule of thumb. A dismissal with "oh you know, every project is different", should tell you the experience/confidence might be lacking.
If you're comparing fees, put the same questions to everyone. How many revision rounds are included, and what does the next one cost? Are site visits in the fee, and are trade drawings? How is procurement handled? How are hours billed once the scope moves, because it will move. Line the answers up side by side and the cheap quote has a habit of getting less cheap the longer you look at it.
And if the timing genuinely doesn't work for you, that's fine. We would rather lose a project in week one over a start date than in month six over a mess. Just ask the other guys those questions first.
Want to set your project up for success? Here's a link to our services: www.studio1nine1.com/services