Happy Monday folks! We hope you had a restful weekend – ours unfortunately was filled with laundry, chores & a few of the other things we’ve been putting off for the last several weeks. And sadly we didn’t even get through it all. Sigh…

But on to more exciting things…  Last week we promised that today we’d reveal our choice from the short list of interior designers we met with.  So let’s not waste any more time (since if you’re reading this post, you already know who we chose – we kinda gave it away in the title, lol).

World, meet the newest member of Team Dreamhouse…Lisa Lev Design!

There. Now that we’re past the formal introductions can we just say that we absolutely without a doubt made the right choice?? Cause we totally did! And that’s not to say that the other 3 ladies weren’t fantastic in their own right. It’s just that Lisa is awesomesause!

When we set out to find someone and happened on Lisa’s Houzz profile, we immediately fell in love with her portfolio. It was obvious that she has an incredible design sense & the ability to transform a space not just with beautiful furnishings & lighting, but by infusing a little creativity.  We love modern design, but we don’t want our home look like an art gallery. Lisa’s designs play with different colours and textures to create vibrant spaces that exude personality.

Going into our consultation, we were leaning toward Lisa being the front runner, our main concerns at that point were:

1. Was she the right fit for us?
2. Could we even afford her?

In the first 3 minutes of our meeting, #1 was no longer a concern.  Lisa was so warm, sweet and personable; she very quickly put us at ease. She had a draft furniture plan for our main floor that immediately solved our ‘what to do with this huge open concept all-encompassing space’ question and even made some suggestions for a few tweaks to our floor plan to make it function better for our needs. Win.

Being able to afford her was a little trickier since ‘technically’ we didn’t have a cost for interior design worked into our initial budget.  Again, though Lisa was able to put our minds at ease.  She assured us that she would be able to tailor our design to suit whatever budget we were comfortable with, and also offered us ways to keep her costs down by taking on some of the sourcing ourselves, taking care of most of the back and forth via email, and providing her with clear direction as to what we’d need her for, vs what would be taken care of by Kevin to reduce overlap, etc.  The clincher however, was the proposal she sent us a couple of days following our meeting where she outlined all of the services she’d be providing us, and the (high-level) estimate involved.  WHO KNEW hiring an interior designer was so affordable??

All in all we’re super happy with our choice, and working with Lisa thus far has been a dream.  We’ll be keeping you up-to-date with all of the design decisions we make together as we go through the process.  And who knows – maybe you’ll even get to weigh in on a decision or two when we can’t seem to figure things out for ourselves!