Everybody wants to save time, but no one wants to sacrifice quality. Bill Simone, president of Custom Design & Construction in Los Angeles, has found a way around that.
Trying to coordinate his clients' busy L.A. lifestyles with Simone's remodeling schedule left Simone tearing his hair out. Now, there's no need for appointments. Clients go to the company's Web site and with an assigned user ID and password can review all current design work.
“They can look at it in their living rooms in their underwear at 2 o'clock in the morning if they want,” Simone says. Viewers can't print or make changes, but they can comment via e-mail or phone (preferably not at 2 a.m.).
For a nominal fee, Simone's Web host posts his designs — floor plans, elevations, 3-D drawings, all with or without color — on the company Web site, www.remodelwithus.com.
The service is available to all Simone's clients, and, he says, “most of them really enjoy it. In the six months since we've been doing this, I've only had one client who didn't like it and wanted to see a piece of paper.” (She works with computers all day.)
The only downside Simone sees is that you could “potentially lose the warm and fuzzy feeling” because of lost face time, but “a lot of that is solved by speeding up the process.”
