Customer Reviews

Rearrange It! - How to Start an Interior Redesign Business

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was one of those people who almost took an expensive seminar to learn how to do this business. How fortunate I am to have run across this excellent book on the subject instead. It was much larger than I expected it to be and packed full of just the kind of information I was hoping to find from how to get started, how to conduct appointment, how to set up and so forth. Not only does the author share her knowledge and experience generously, but she provides access to many additional resources she also provides to give you a well-rounded education to do the business with confidence. This book is filled with practical guidance and I will refer to it often, I'm sure.

As an interior designer, I was looking to expand my business into the home staging arena, but wasn't really interested in spending thousands of dollars on one of those 3-day courses. After ordering and reading the reviews from the author's Home Staging for Profit: How to Start and Grow a Highly Profitable Home-Based Staging Business, I stumbled across this book and am very thankful that I found it. As a designer, it provided knowledge that I already was trained in, however I thought it was a good refresher, because it reminded me of things that I had forgotten. I thought the author did a great job again in providing an in-depth guide about interior redesign. I found this book as well as her other to be quite informative, easy to read and chalked full of great tips and examples. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in running their own interior redesign business.

This book explains the art and business of interior redesign in a completely understandable manner. Barbara Jennings left no stone unturned in this pratical guide. Her detailed advice enabled me to a become a more professional designer. I found the book enlightning and I saved money by purchasing this book, as opposed to attending an expensive time consuming seminar away from home.

Thank you Barbara!

As an Interior Designer, I became curious about the Redesign business.
I picked up Barbara Jennings beginning book and felt that it gave practical business advice. For example: pay yourself when you receive money from a client. Most people forget to do this and put all of their fee back into the business. Also her arrangement samples are excellent. She does mention her other products but I feel that the average person gets enough from the book to use in there own business. Joanne Wright

I bought this book along with her book, Home Staging for Profit. Both are excellent resources for starting a redesign or staging business, particularly if you want to combine both businesses into one. Sure beats taking an expensive seminar. Highly recommend both books because it seems foolish to do one business without doing the other one too. Jennings is a very good writer and very personable. She really makes everything very practical and easy to understand. Her advanced section on marketing a business is outstanding.

Jennings has a number of excellent books for the interior redesign and home staging business that fit together and build upon each other into a cohesive whole so that anyone can start and build a business from the ground floor up. This is her basic manual, which is filled to the brim with great advice and guidance, and she also has an advanced book called "Advanced Redesign", along with a couple more books geared for the home staging market. This book, however, shows you how to start up and set up your business, how to get clients, how to do consultations and price your services, how to market and promote it properly, and a good deal of excellent training on the design end of the business - the kind of stuff you won't get from others. For instance, at the end of the book she literally shows you the most common furniture arrangements used by professional designers. In most situations, one of these should be suitable for a typical room a person would work in. She makes the process easy to understand and gives readers the tools and examples to understand what to do, but also why they work so well.

The other books she has written show you how to add related products and services to your business to get the most out of your business that you can get. Since most people want to make profits from their business venture, the book gives you an excellent picture of how to go about doing just that, all in a clear, concise step-by-step analysis. All the books by this author are excellent and well worth the investment.

The furniture arrangement configurations in the back of the book are powerful examples of how to arrange furniture no matter what the shape or size of the room. This is worth the price of the book alone. In a nutshell, I can see the most common ways furniture should be arranged. All I have to do is select one and I should have a winning combination for any room I have to tackle. This is reassuring because I don't want to get to a client's home and not have an answer for their problems. And that's one huge gem at the end of the book, which I haven't found in any book out there.

From start to finish I found this book to be very practical, very thorough and very useful. It focuses on the single topic of starting a redesign business and doesn't get sidetracked. It also doesn't try to cover the subject with broad generalities and filler, like other books I've read. So it delivers exactly what it promises with the kind of details and thoroughness you would expect to get.

All the standard stuff about setting up a business is there, but it relates all that to a redesign business specifically. The author goes indepth on how to interview a client, how to start a project, questions you'll need to ask and the whole step by step process, including taking before and after pictures, collecting the fee and so forth. There are a generous supply of photos showing how it really is to be a redesigner (not studio pictures that are not the norm). So it accurately depicts the life of a redesigner and what we all face no matter where we live and work.

The author's style is easy to follow and conversational, which helped me stay interested throughout, even in the marketing sections that typically are less fun than the design parts. I mean, I'm a creative person, and it's harder for me to concentrate on the business side, but I know that's where I need to improve my knowledge and skill.

I enjoyed this book immensely and appreciate the tools and visual aids the author recommends. It's an excellent read.

When you really want specifics on a topic, this author delivers. You should find yourself immersed in the kind of details and guidance you were hoping to get. It's really thorough. I highly recommend it to anyone serious about starting a business in this field.

Rearrange It! - How to Start and Grow a Profitable Home-Based Redesign BusinessThis is a great book! It gives the reader an excellent overview of what it takes to successfully run a redesign business. It briefly covers all areas of your business including the legal side. I'd whole heartedly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the interior redesign as a business.

I am not a designer nor will I ever have a design business; however, I am doing some home remodeling and thought that this book might give me ideas on how to "redesign" some rooms using the furniture I have. After reading through the book, I realized that it's geared more towards the design professional -- so I gave it to my sister-in-law, who is in the home design business, and she was absolutely thrilled. She was so excited, that she's now helping me "redesign" my rooms for free ... so the book was well worth the price I paid ;-)