It’s all in the planning
Patience is not one of my greater virtues – especially when I get an idea in my head to renovate, and want to see the end result immediately. Fortunately, I have learned the value of enforcing that patience – and good planning.
So once my husband and I had brought together our ideas and “wishlist” for our outdoor entertainment area – as I chatted about last week here – looking for inspiration, things that we love, to create an “idea board” of the kind of look and feel that we wanted in this space, the next step was planning. And the most important part of planning is to see if your wishlist of ideas will work with the parameters of the space, the surrounding area – and your budget.
As much as I would like to believe that I can slip into the role of architect or project manager, I can’t; so we would need an expert in the field to guide us. Finding the right person for the job, someone who has the expertise, knowledge, reliability, and trustworthiness to come into our home and bring our ideas to life, is one of the most difficult and important steps in the whole process. Luckily we knew a very talented, creative and reliable project manager with a bit of an architectural and engineering background. Bonus!
So we set up The Meeting.
And The Meeting was dubbed a Wine & Design evening – our first of many. This kind of setting is great for a more informal discussion, which we found made the ideas flow more easily and gave our project manager a better environment in which to learn more about our family – our likes and dislikes, our personalities, which he would wind into the design ideas along the way.
Over some good food and wine, we pored over our ideas with our project manager. Tablets were out with Pinterest boards flashing; house plans were rolled out and measured for parameters; files of fabric, wood and colour samples were strewn across the table.
A very valuable evening – where the project manager learned more about us, and we learned more about him: his methods, and his approach to a project. He left with some good insights into what we wanted, as well as our house plans (particularly for the outdoor entertainment area) which he was going to copy and then manipulate to work our ideas into and around. We thought this was a fantastic idea, to enable us to see what our ideas would look like in “reality”: would a firepit work? How would an outdoor kitchen counter work with our sloping landscape? Would it be possible to use the same flooring for the indoor and outdoor entertainment areas, to create that beautiful synergistic flow that we were looking for? And then furnishings…but that’s a tale for another day!
Look out for our next renovation blog post, where we take to the town to find the perfect flooring, cladding, lighting, paint colours – and decide on some very interesting extras to make our space just that much more special!
Leave a Comment