Brace Yourself for Installation!
In previous articles, I have discussed the Installation phase of an Interior design project from various angles. This time around, I want to discuss the more personal impacts. The stresses and circumstances that arise when weeks (or many months) of work begin to funnel down into the strict focus and interplay that brings it all together, can feel like a sudden landslide! Everything involving “installation” relates to one or many other things.
Usually, about mid-point of your Interior design project, the process has settled into a familiar rhythm of specific aspects, and consideration-choices-decisions patterns. A comfortable “shorthand” form of communication has set in– between Client and Designer – and among the various specialists, tradespersons and resource representatives. In comfortable ways, the Interior design team and all project participants become able to function in a smooth orchestration of activity – assuming most major wrinkles have been ironed out!
Your Interior design team has scheduled all aspects to fall into place as appropriate, and in carefully strategized sequence. However, to the un-practiced eye it can feel like things are coming apart. All of a sudden, all those selections and decisions morph into convergence activity! The pressure can come at you feeling like chaos.
There are several ways to approach this phase! Ideally? Get out of the way! Let your team of professionals handle it! Take the week or month off and visit the South Seas! Unfortunately, the installation phase is the phase where Clients and their close factions, want the most to be “hands on!” Everyone wants to see it all finally going together. Stress levels can rise unbelievably! “Trying to help” can become your Interior design team’s worst nightmare!
“Organized chaos” can appear to be complete disorder. Just looking at an Interior environment in the last stages of application and assembly can look like everything is falling apart – not coming together. Tradespeople are applying the final stages of everything from wiring and electronics enabling, to paint, flooring, miscellaneous detailing, freight arrivals, checking and re-checking Bills of Lading and item specifications, etc., etc.
In this final installation phase, it would be helpful to imagine an energetic ballet! To you, it may look as though everyone is falling over each other. In fact, each “dancer” is extremely focused. It’s as if each specialist is there alone, doing what they have to do, moving in and out and around the others with mutual care and respect! Truly, the last thing needed in the midst would be individuals who view the scene as out of control – and in need of “help.”
The trust that you have placed in your Interior design team is needed the most as the installation phase sets in. The best help a client can offer is to ask if their help is needed. Trust me, there are many ways your team could use your help where it would really be helpful and not disruptive.
All persons and factions orchestrating this phase have specific tasks and very, very specific timelines. Expressing concerns and asking questions (and other forms of interruption) can stop an installer in their tracks because to them it constitutes receiving “mixed messages.” They have their piece of the installation puzzle to deliver, and their instructions and orders come from the Interior design team.
Confusion can be deadly to a carefully coordinated strategy. When in doubt, ask your Interior designer, not one of the crew!
Robert Boccabella, B.F.A. is principal and founder of Business Design Services and a certified interior designer in private practice for over 30 years. Boccabella provides Designing to Fit the Vision© in collaboration with writingservice@earthlink.net. To contact him call 707-263-7073; email him at rb@BusinessDesignServices.com or visit www.BusinessDesignServices.com or on Face Book at Business Design Services.
