What Happens After You Say Yes to the Sofa?
The behind-the-scenes work of furnishing a home
Choosing the sofa is the fun part. Then someone has to order it, confirm the details, track production, coordinate shipping, figure out where it will go when it arrives, inspect it and deal with it if something is damaged. And that’s just the sofa.
Furnishing an entire home, or even several rooms at once, can involve hundreds of individual line items arriving from different vendors, in different parts of the country and on completely different schedules. The dining chairs may be ready while the table is still being made. A rug may arrive months before construction is finished and a lamp may show up with a cracked base.
Some pieces have an even longer journey. A vintage dresser may need to go to a restoration expert before it’s ready for the bedroom. A chair may travel from the receiving warehouse to a local upholsterer and back again before it ever reaches my client’s home.
Keeping track of all of that is part of my job, not my client’s.
What happens after the design is approved
Once my clients approve their furnishings, I move into a very different part of my job. I call it the Timeless Sanctuaries Experience, or TSE. It is my full-service management of furnishings from ordering through installation.
I manage orders, communicate with vendors, follow production and coordinate shipping. Furnishings are sent to a receiving warehouse where they are inspected, inventoried and safely stored until the home is ready. If something arrives damaged or incorrect, I coordinate the repair, replacement or claim.
There are a remarkable number of details involved in getting hundreds of individual items from a design plan into a finished home. Each piece has its own vendor, lead time, shipping method and arrival date. Some are made to order, some travel by freight, some arrive early and some are inevitably late. My job is to keep the larger picture in view while all of those individual pieces are moving through the process.
Why everything doesn’t just arrive at your house
Furniture rarely arrives in the order you would choose. Having individual pieces delivered to your home as they become available can mean months of delivery appointments, boxes and packaging, with furniture sitting in rooms where it doesn’t belong yet. It can also mean discovering damage at your front door and trying to figure out who to call about it.
Receiving and storing furnishings off-site allows pieces to be inspected when they arrive and held until the project is ready for them. It also allows me to plan installation around the whole room, rather than the schedule of whichever sofa, lamp or dining chair happens to be ready first.
When installation day arrives, I coordinate the local delivery and the people needed to put everything in place. Depending on the project, that may include furniture installers, art installers, window-treatment installers, handymen and other trades. Furniture is placed according to the design plan and I’m there to make adjustments and attend to the details as the rooms come together.
The TSE is what turns a design plan into a finished home. It’s the behind-the-scenes work of getting hundreds of individual pieces ordered, received, inspected, stored, delivered and ultimately into the right place.
When the house itself is still coming together
For new construction and major remodels, much of this is happening while the house itself is being built. Furnishings are being ordered, tracked, received and stored while cabinets are going in, walls are being finished and floors are being installed.
The timing matters. I coordinate the furnishings process with the progress of the home so pieces are ready when the house is ready for them, without arriving at the jobsite too soon.
The idea is that when the last floor is swept clean, the furnishings are ready too. Installation can follow, and my clients aren’t moving into a finished house only to begin another long process of furnishing it.
It’s still part of the design
The Timeless Sanctuaries Experience certainly makes life easier for my clients, but convenience isn’t the only reason I manage furnishings this way.
A furnishings plan is made up of pieces that were selected in relationship to one another. Scale, color, proportion, placement and function have all been considered along the way. How those pieces arrive and are ultimately placed in the home is part of seeing that design through.
I want my clients to enjoy making the decisions that make their home personal. They don’t need to spend their time tracking freight shipments, filing damage claims or wondering where six dining chairs are going to live until the table arrives.
That part is my job.