Your Vision
If you do not have a vision for your kitchen, you will have a great deal of trouble trying to get the technical aspects of your project moving. A professional cabinet designer will have more of an inside track as to modern design. If you want something more traditional or even a throwback, a pro designer will have experience in these styles as well. It is much more efficient to have a live conversation about style and vision with a person than it is to try to search out templates in a style book.
Style Matching with the Rest of the House
When you use a professional cabinet designer for style matching, you also get a better opinion on how to make your new cabinets match the rest of your home. This can be a touchy task. Even if you want to DIY the actual building of the project, you may want to consult with a pro for the vision. You have many things to consider, including how your new style will affect your overall home value and if your vision is so trendy as to be outdated in six months.
Lowering the Cost (Time)
The cost of mistakes on a cabinet structure can be quite high. This includes more than building mistakes – it also includes the time lost in vision structuring as well. The longer that you take to get the buy-in from all interested parties as to design, the more money you lose. The last thing you want is to get in an argument with a client because you are already over your time estimate in the first week because choosing cabinets bottlenecked three other processes.
Lowering the Cost (Money)
Hiring a pro cabinet designer can also save your building project money in a direct way. Why do you think your client hired you instead of doing everything himself? At a fundamental level, your client believes that you will actually save money in the long term. He is willing to trade an upfront expenditure for long term ROI, and you should be willing to do the same. However, you should be able to save money in the short term as well with the right designer in tow.
Woodworking Experience
You probably have someone on your team that has general woodworking experience. Does this person or people have the specific experience to create a completely professional looking cabinet design? Keep in mind that you are being hired because your client believes you to have the ability to outpace a DIY effort. If your custom cabinets look like a DIY process, then you will probably end up with an unhappy customer. Your cabinet designer will have specific experience in buying and prepping the right kind of wood for a custom design. This is also good for templates as well – your designer may have better ideas than the template book.
Changing the Room Structure
In order to get a new cabinet style in your kitchen, you may need to tweak a few things about the structure of the room. Small changes in wall space or countertops may be more demanding than taking out a wall completely because an inch or two will make a huge difference in the way your kitchen looks and feels. This is definitely the territory of a seasoned professional who knows his way around the details of a design.
Finding Infrastructure Experts
Designers often work with specialized contractors that may take a bit longer for you to find on their own. There are definitely designers and builders who work well together, and you may want to consider hiring both ends of this process together in order to get the best work for the end client. Take the ego out of this decision – make an informed decision by looking at the work of designers and infrastructure experts that claim to come as a team.
Higher Precision
A pro cabinet designer will have the ability to give your project that precision look. Precision is something that occurs from the beginning of the process, not during the finishing stage. If you really want something that you can put in your portfolio to show future prospects, then one project with a pro designer may be well worth the initial investment.
The Finish
Giving a professional finish to a cabinet structure is a project within a project. You may or may not have the expertise in house to get this accomplished to the level of the client. A cabinet designer will probably have more expertise in getting this done, whether the designer does it himself or outsources to a colleague.
If you are looking for a quality cabinet designer in or around the Lower Mainland, give the dedicated experts at Kitchen Art Design a call. We are the custom designers who can bring your ideas to life. We pride ourselves on upgrading building projects with great interior design, and we would love to show you exactly what we can do for you with our initial consultation. Book now below!