Interior Design Course for Homeschoolers

My husband runs his own graphic design/advertising agency by day. But by later-in-the-day, he's a picker. You've heard of a "picker," haven't you?

A picker is a person who scrounges around old barns, yard sales, and junk piles to find unclaimed treasures to turn for a profit. To be honest, most of the stuff he brings home looks like it should be sitting under layers of trash at the town dump.

A taxidermied weasel in a shadow box? Who's gonna buy that?

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I've had to bake many humble pies after not-so-subtly raising my eyebrows at a few of his picking finds that later sold for top dollar. (But, we can talk about all that later.) It seems there's no limit to the amount of odd and unbelievable things people will pay big cash money for when decorating their homes. The items aren't always displayed in houses, of course. He's sold his wares to collectors, commercial designers, and even Hollywood studios.

A few years ago while preparing for an upcoming junk trunk show, he asked our daughter to help price and display items. One thing led to another and she ended up spending the entire weekend co-hosting his booth--refurbing, restoring, and repurposing. Needless to say, she caught the trash-to-treasure bug.

Shortly after the show, she flipped several pieces of furniture for profit and asked if she could learn more about interior design. She had a growing desire to one day pursue a career in residential design and wanted to get some high school level exposure to the field.

So, for her ninth-grade homeschool year, I put together a half-credit interior design course for her.

Since I'm a firm believer in learning through real-life experiences, using real tools, and working with real mentors and experts, the class include more than just books and hypothetical situations.

She practiced on paper first, but then she had to do the real work.

Here's what the year-long program looked like.

Industry Research

To begin with, she learned a bit about the interior design industry and the training/education that is necessary for an entry-level residential design position. She consulted the following resources:

Interior Design Job Outlook- The Bureau of Labor Statistics is a wonderful resource for college/career bound kids. It provides a summary of nearly any job including the average salary, work hours, employment rate, and entry-level educational requirements.

College Board Majors: Interior Design- This site details the classes and basic coursework that one can expect to complete for a particular field of study (Interior Design, in this case), as well as the pre-requisite classes one should take in high school in order to be fully prepared for college-level classes.

College Board Listing- This site lists every college and university in the United States that offers an interior design degree, or any degree for that matter.

Job shadow/Interview

Throughout the year, she spoke with several industry professionals in order to see the day-to-day pros and cons of different types of interior design jobs. She had conversations and/or shadowed the following types of mentors:

• a residential interior designer
• a show floor owner/dealer
• a boutique/junk show owner

Books/Curriculum

Interior Design Curriculum & Lapbook- This is a very basic workbook and lapbook curriculum that introduces foundational terms, design aesthetics and concepts, budgeting techniques, etc. Throughout the course, students read through the syllabus and then create a lapbook to display what they have learned.

I had her start with this very simple homeschool unit study for the first few months of the school year so that she could get a general base of knowledge.

Interior Design Course- This is a college level workbook that she read for reference and information only. I did not require her to do any of the challenges and assignments included in the book.

Hands-on Projects

To complete the course, my daughter had to complete the following hands-on projects to show she had a solid grasp of interior design:

Create a Design Portfolio

Each week, she had to create a design plan in a portfolio notebook. (I purchased one that had 11" x 14" sheets so that she could sketch her designs on a separate sheet of art paper and then glue them into the notebook. This gave her the freedom to make a mistake without ruining the entire portfolio.)

Acting as a potential client, every Monday, I "hired" her to design a particular room in my house featuring a specific design aesthetic/mood, certain color schemes, and/or furniture features. (I even petitioned some blog readers for help in coming up with unique requests.) For instance:

"I'd like you to design a French Country style dining room. I prefer grey and purple hues. My great aunt gave me this beautiful pie cupboard that I'd like you to incorporate into the design. I do a lot of entertaining, so the table needs to seat a crowd. There's not a lot of natural light in that area of my house, but I'd like it to feel bright." 

Other times I just gave her a few keywords for inspiration.

Multi-purpose family room: mix of fabrics, pool table, western, storage space, no checkered prints 

With those parameters in mind, she created a 3-page plan for her proposal. Each proposal consisted of:

• a planning page with paint chips, fabric swatches, and notes
• a colored sketch of the completed room
• an aerial layout of the room plotted on graph paper

Refurbish furniture

She had to refurbish/repurpose a piece of furniture and sell it for profit. She ended up tackling both a curio/dining hutch and an antique writing desk that she bought at a thrift shop for around $15 each. After investing in a few dollars' worth of paint and a couple hours of elbow grease, she ended up selling them both for over $100 a piece.

Redesign a room in our house

By year's end, she had put her design know-how into practice by collaborating with her dad to redesign both my kitchen and her brothers' shared bedroom. She not only drew up basic plans, but also did large portions of the work.

Like most home renovations, the boys' room is still a work in progress and the kitchen, while complete, continues to be tweaked here and there.

What She Learned

Interestingly enough, after a year of learning the ins and outs of interior design, my daughter determined that while she still enjoys flipping furniture and tackling weekend warrior projects around the house, she has no desire to make it her long-term profession. She can see interior design continuing to be a side-hustle and hobby, but not a job.

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