Your home lighting is a major influencer on how comfortable and homely your home will feel. This is why you must hire a skilled, experienced and creative lighting professional when setting up your home.
Now the question is how will you choose the best lighting professionals amongst the multitudes of options you have flying around? Look no more, I have curated a step-by-step guide to help you choose.
- Talk to your friends and family: over and over again, it’s been proven that our immediate circle is the best place to get referrals. Seek the audience of those who recently had their home lighting done by professionals for recommendations. Also, check Cotterell homeware website for quality lighting.
- Make a simple google search on the best home lighting professionals in your city or the areas nearest to you. Add the companies provided by your search enquiry to the list of recommended lighting professionals by your friends and family.
- Now you should proceed to check the online footprint of these shortlisted professionals. Start by looking up their portfolios, any competent lighting professional should have a portfolio of lighting designs they have done in the past. Strike out those ones whose work you don’t find impressive.
- The next thing to do is to contact these professionals: endeavour to ask them some important questions in your discussion with them. Some of the key questions you can ask are, for how long have they been in the business, whether they work alone or along with other relevant professionals, their pricing policy and so on.
- Now you should check out the customer reviews: Every business is the best but the best way to find out is by what their customers are saying about them. Google search will reveal the truth. Check the positive reviews against the negative ones and on that basis compare with what the lighting professionals told you during your meeting with them.
- Is your project another job to them: The best way to find out if your project is another job to them is through their handling of your project. Do they care to understand your lighting needs or they just jump into discussing the details of the contract?
- What after-care services do the lighting professionals render: Before settling for any professional, ask them if your contract extends for a certain period after the completion of the lighting designs. Professionals that stick around after completing the contract to see if you like the job are preferable to those who do not care.
- Have a budget but don’t settle for the cheapest: You may not have an excess budget to play with but this does not mean you should choose the lowest priced professionals. Consider the possibility of designing a convenient payment plan that will allow you to spread payment and still get the most effective professionals to help you.
- Ask for their policy on poorly executed jobs: In the case where the professionals deliver a poor lighting result, ask them how they usually manage such cases and how they will manage such situations if it springs up in your relationship? Make a decision based on how convincing you find their answers.
- Put the agreement into writing: Once you are satisfied with the scope of work provided by any of the shortlisted candidates the next thing to do is to sign a contract to bind both parties to the agreement. This should include deadlines, materials used, costs, schedule of payments and anything else agreed. Where the professional does anything contrary to what is stated in the contract, the contract gives you sufficient grounds to sue for breach of agreement and claim for damages.
