Michele Van der Veen
Hood Ideas That Turn Up the Heat
No longer content to blend in, today’s range hoods take center stage and give kitchens a bold new identity. It’s time to find the perfect hood design for your next project–and trust me, this is a must in today’s kitchen design. A bold, stylish hood instantly gives any kitchen that ...
Create cozy comfort or dramatic impact with natural lighting and statement fixtures. How you light a home can make or break your project’s overall look, but with so many factors at play in every project, it’s easy to see how this crucial component can be overlooked. Put simply, illumination is ...
Design With an Outside-In Strategy
Sticking to a home’s essential elements will help you create a more salable product. Designing a house for investment purposes must be planned well. Every interior element must be purposefully selected to create a balance with the home’s exterior features; in other words, the home must be designed from the ...
The right tile style and color transform any space, seamlessly blending interior design with the architectural essence of your home. With the growing variety of tile options available, choosing the right one for your next project can feel overwhelming. Key decisions like selecting the material and size must come before ...
Creating Solid Designs With Natural Stone
Natural stone transcends temporary trends to offer timeless elegance and durability in interior design. Strong, stunning, and timeless interiors come from the materials you include in your design. Although there’s an endless selection of trendy options available, incorporating nature by using natural stone can help you keep your design timeless ...
The Secret Role of Interior Designers in Spec Home Success
Interior Designers Can Ensure Style, Functionality, And Profitability From The Ground Up. With big shortages of housing across the country, investors are increasingly building new spec homes from the ground up rather than flipping houses. But given current inflationary pressures, building new homes or custom-spec homes is becoming incredibly challenging ...
Metal finishes impact the overall design of any home—and ultimately bring the design together. Every house has it—metal! From metal on door handles, cabinet hardware, light fixtures, plumbing finishes, and more, metal seems to be everywhere. Choosing the right metal finish involves answering many questions: Do all metal finishes work ...
Your choice of cabinet doors will have a big impact on the overall design of any kitchen or bathroom design. Shaker? Raised panel? Recessed panel? It may feel like cabinet door styles are endless, but choosing the one that ties your overall design together is a vitally important design decision ...
Make Your Next Renovation a Real Splash!
Whether you're building a new kitchen or renovating an old one, you will enhance any kitchen design with your choice of backsplash. With kitchens earning upward of 70%-80% of ROI when selling a home, making sure your next kitchen renovation is a splash is a real must! That’s “splash” as ...
Countertops can make a statement in any kitchen or bathroom remodel, but remember to balance looks with functionality. With so many solid stone slabs on the market to choose from, making your countertop selection for a kitchen or bathroom remodel can be overwhelming. Countertops can be expensive and can make ...
Creating the “Wow” Factor with Your Home Renovations
To achieve a dramatic before-and-after feel, consider these five tips. Everyone loves to see the great before-and-after photos of homes. Even major networks like HGTV, DIY, and the new Magnolia Network have made millions off the fact that everyone loves a great “before and after. Witnessing the makeover of an ...
With so many potential buyers looking for outdoor amenities on the properties they are considering, think about how you can “take it outside” with your next renovation. With the popularity of outdoor living spaces on the rise, it’s no wonder more buyers are looking for homes that provide outdoor amenities ...
5 Ways to Give Your Investment Property a New Look
With remodels on the rise, you want to give your property an updated look without breaking the budget. With whole-house flips slowing down, remodels are becoming more common. Kitchen and bathrooms are usually the focal point of these remodels. But the problem with trying to give any property a new ...
Cultivating Your Creative Ability
Everyone knows that for the design side of any renovation, the sky’s the limit when it comes to what one can spend! Becoming familiar with creative alternatives allows you to design eye popping renovations without busting your budget. Turning a great profit is, after all, the end game! Getting Comfortable ...
Extreme Makeover: Creativity Is a Must!
Almost all extreme makeovers require one thing: creativity. How creative you can ultimately be determines whether you can pull off a project as large and as complex as an extreme makeover! Getting creative means more than coming up with great designs, however. It also means being able to work outside ...
Do You Have What It Takes to Be an Interior Designer?
Have you ever thought about being an interior designer? With HGTV and the Magnolia Network making design such a hot topic, it seems a lot of people are asking, “Do I have what it takes to be an interior designer?” Let’s answer that by asking a few more questions: Do ...
Understanding the Power of Color
Any time you take on a renovation, remodel, or flip project, the one inevitable question everyone will ask is “What color do we use?” Certainly, you will need to make color decisions related to your project. Even if you’re simply staging a home to put up for sale, the question ...
Taking on the challenge of flipping or remodeling an investment property can be daunting when it comes to the design side of it. Whether it’s your very first investment project or your hundredth, being creative can be a challenge. Luckily, we live during a time in which home design ideas ...
The Stage and Sell Partnership
Preparing a house to sell takes teamwork to do it right! With all the “Home Buying Televisions Shows'' having such a big influence on how people view homes now, it’s no wonder more real estate agents are teaming up with staging companies to help market their clients’ homes better. However ...
Renovating homes for a living is of course a numbers game. Buy low, have a reasonable renovation budget to work with, and hope to turn a profit in the end. The buying and selling are reasonably simple. It’s the in between part that can get tricky for investors! What, where, ...
Connecting Past and Present Through Design
Every state, every city, and every small town has a past or a history in which a potential home buyer may perhaps be in love with enough that they are considering moving there. Why not capture that history in the design of your next investment? Designing a beach-themed home at ...
Sometimes that next great home to renovate may just be the home other investors are passing up. Often these are the homes that have bigger problems than kitchen updates or a new roof. It may take creativity to solve these more difficult investment property problems. As a real estate investor, ...
As a real estate investor, I am always in search of homes to renovate with potential for added profit! As a designer, I am also always in search of investment homes with great repurposing potential. These types of homes are often just the projects that offer greater opportunity for more ...
From the Designer Growing up assisting my father building and investing in strip malls, it was clear at an early age that real estate investing was a natural path for me to take. I received a formal education in design from the Interior Designers Institute of Newport Beach, California, and ...
From the Designer Growing up assisting my father building and investing in strip malls, it was clear at an early age that real estate investing was a natural path for me to take. I received a formal education in design from the Interior Designers Institute of Newport Beach, California, and ...
