# How Much Does it Cost to Hire an Interior Designer?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-does-it-cost-to-hire-an-interior-designer/273492>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [November 7, 2004, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-does-it-cost-to-hire-an-interior-designer/273492 "2004-11-07T13:55:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2004, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-does-it-cost-to-hire-an-interior-designer/273492/1 "2004-11-07T13:55:25Z")

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I know there’s going to be lots of variation in this answer, so I’m going to define my terms.

City: Springfield, Illinois. A city of 110,000 in the Midwest US.

Home: A 1,400-square foot ranch. Prototypical lower-middle-to-middle-middle-class house.

Rooms: Living room, kitchen and master bedroom.

Ideas: Nothing too exquisite or over-the-top. I want my rooms to look more appealing than the haphazard mishmash of (pre-makeover) decorations that typifies what I see on design shows like _Trading Spaces_, but I also want design in keeping with my somewhat humble surroundings. Furniture from Sears; that kind of thing.

So, yeah. What do designers typically charge? Do they buy all the furniture, hire the painters, and send you one bill? Do they charge by the square foot? Anything else I should know?

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**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2004, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-does-it-cost-to-hire-an-interior-designer/273492/2 "2004-11-07T14:13:35Z")

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In all honesty given the scope of the job (decorating a middle class home with Sears type funishings) I don’t think most professional interior designers are really going to be interested, and if if you did commission one, the ideas would be probably fairly cookie cutter given the limited budget. This is normally the kind of job a wife or girlfriend takes on in typical heterosexual man’s life.

Decide which of your friend’s houses is best decorated to your tastes and offer his wife or GF (or boyfriend) a few hundred dollars to make the dream come true in your abode. Quite frankly, this is often something talented amateurs _love_ to do. If you drop a few subtle hints I imagine you’ll get all the assistance you need gratis.