Some of the most difficult things in life involve deciding where to live. Most of the time you start living where you work or close to it. While the home decor is always fascinating, I always liked calm soothing spaces with bursts of color which are cozy, don’t require high maintenance, and are not excruciating on the pocket. You also need people to distill what you want, to what you need in that space. They listen and don’t bulldoze you.
Here’s a sneak peek into the home getting ready to welcome our family.
Elegant Interiors Kolkata is a home decor shop/solution/store under one roof. Mr.Sandip Roy and his team with Mr.Nitai(designer )and Mr. Ranjit(Project manager), helped us get our home together while we lived outstation. We have been in talks since 2020 when the pandemic delayed everything. Luckily we could get started in 2022 finally. The best thing about them is they provide home decor services for clients from all over India and the world. Depending on requirements they send videos and pictures and Whatsapp to share project progress with clients. That’s very helpful as it’s not easy to visit the site every other day if you are out of the station. Even if you want to choose every single thing for your first home, sometimes that’s impossible. I found that out early on. That’s why you need a trustworthy interior decorating partner who has survived the ups and downs of the economy.
We faced a few hiccups on the false ceiling work with POP was double trouble and the design was scraped twice and radically simplified. The curtain rods were all of the wrong designs and wrong location.
The mandir canopy front was an asymmetrical design which took away its charm. Other than these minor hiccups all looks well. The final finishing touches are being given. They have a 30 years guarantee of service and quality and that’s something I will update you about. We booked our home in 2014 and got it in 2018/2019. I wrote about budgeting for a home. While having a roof over the head is one thing, planning real estate investing is another. I did the second one only after the first was paid for. I will share more updates from the home front as things unfold in the next few months. It’s a good time and a crazy busy time too.
The handover is awaited and then we have one year of free support and replacement and lifetime service available for a charge.I am happy to pay for quality. So this blog post will have updates and offshoots depending on what happens next.
It was a problem getting things started for various reasons including financial. Taking time going slow, and feeling the space helps. The storage stuff I wanted inbuilt and the furniture I wanted to see and feel before buying. That’s why we only ordered the bed custom-made for our home, the rest we wanted to buy bespoke or from furniture shops.
What other options did we consider?
Several freelancers.Checked out the Home Town and Livspace.Both do a lot of advertising. But the reviews about poor support and quality made me worried. With independent contractors, there would be a lot of micro-managing which we simply didn’t have the mind space to handle. We wanted someone to manage it all, maintain quality and send us regular updates. Nothing works like word-of-mouth advertising and I knew three people who had contracted Elegant Interiors for their home decor in Kolkata. Two of them had no complaints. The third one had a minor complaint about the quality of curtain rods and even that was taken care of.
A few more things we are winding up
1. Furniture
We had two shops in mind. Fab India and Dugar. Unfortunately, we couldn’t visit Dugar’s main shop in Topsia. Sunday closed and we only had that weekend) and ended up in Fab India Home Solutions. More about that in the next post.
2. Furnishings
3. Lighting solutions
4. Art and decor pieces.
5 . Green friends
6. Appliances: These are the ones I absolutely must have around
This is a post written with friends from BlogchatterAtoZ and the Ultimate Blog Challenge.