Finding A Designer For Colors, Textures, Cabinetry…Life?

We had been working with our architect for about a year on initial concepts and plans for our Happy Boolo Project, and then we put the project on hold for a number of months, as I wanted to have more experience out on my own as a solopreneur. Once we picked up with our architect in the spring of 2019, his first direction to us was to find a designer to help with the detailed kitchen layout.

Though we’d had a great experience with Cabinets Plus in Palatine in remodeling both our existing bathrooms in years past, we felt the magnitude of our project — not just a kitchen, but an entire open kitchen/living/dining space — required us to find someone who wouldn’t be tied to any particular cabinet manufacturer.

We really needed someone to help us envision our whole home, especially as we were keeping the original footprint, some the original layout, a couple full rooms, and much of our existing furniture. We needed someone who was skilled at blending the old and the new.

And once we found that person, we learned that there was a whole lot more to design than optimizing layout of furniture, colors, textures, and finishes. We got behavioral!

In this 18-minute podcast, we talk about our experience of finding our designer Julie Ondo, what we now appreciate even more about the role of a designer, and what we would have done differently in our approach of finding and on-boarding our designer if we were to do it over again.

Enjoy!