The start of my career: The Internship

I'm back! I figured since I have to write a weekly journal for my internship, I would share it on my blog! :)

(This was last week's journal)

 This week I started my internship at Creative Home Consulting in Urbandale, Iowa. I was really excited about this because Des Moines a is great area that I could see myself locating to, at least semi-permanently. The business I am interning for is actually three companies that are currently combined. The first company, Creative Home Consulting, is the interior design business. The second business is Designer’s Edge Showroom which allows other designers in the area to access our large sample library and check out items to use in their client meetings. The third business is called Furniture Handlers which is basically a receiving port for furniture orders for designers and the public. They also rent out furniture for home staging. The owner of this company is Scott Dean. Other employees include Megan Baccam, the office manager, assistant designers Alison and Cassie, two graduate interns; Jillian and Jen, and two under graduate interns; Rachel and I.

This week has been such a fantastic week! I was feeling hesitant leading up to the start of this internship because I have been so set on not doing residential design. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed to give it a shot before I decided I didn’t like it. I had created a stigma for myself in relation to residential design because I was so tired of hearing everyone say, “Oh cool, you can come decorate my _____ when you graduate.” I felt like it degraded the realm of design that I have learned about at UNI; that residential was easy and only required picking paint colors.

The more I am in my professional environment, the more comfortable I feel about it, thankfully. Even though I’ve been doing the normal “intern” work such as updating the sample library (more on that later) it has been great to be in the environment and get a secondhand experience of what the other designers do on a daily basis. The first three days Scott and Megan were at a conference so I got to know the other interns and assistant designers. All of the other interns had started earlier in the month so I jumped in with Rachel to continue updating the sample library. This library includes approximately four rooms of floor to ceiling bookcases full of samples (window treatments, fabrics, trims, wallpapers, etc.) This will be an ongoing project throughout my internship because there are so many samples and it is a tedious process. We have to contact the company for each brand we sell and get an updated list or discontinued list on their products. From that list we have to discard the pattern/product/entire book so designers aren’t trying to use products that are no longer carried. (by this point in the week I have blisters and feel like I have arthritis!).

 The silver lining to the library update is definitely the chance to get to know a LOT of manufacturers and products in such a short amount of time. I have been given little projects from Jillian who is working with clients. Her clients have requested example images of pieces of their project; ‘would this color of flooring look good with this color trim’ or ‘what back-splashes look best with white cabinets and a black counter-top?’ My job has been to find examples of what the client could do in their project. This actually requires a lot more research than I had approximated. This has been fun because I get to take their style into consideration and find what I think would be a best fit for them.

One of the most rewarding moments this week was being a fly on the wall in one of the sample rooms while a customer was looking over some custom chair cushions she had ordered. There were no designers around and it was her and her husband and she was just THRILLED at how great they turned out. I couldn’t help but smile to myself and think “That’s what makes it worth it.” Another reason I didn’t want to do residential is because I heard you deal with a lot of difficult clients with whom the design is personal. This may be true, I have yet to find out, but I know that making these people happy is an amazing feeling!