Resources

If you are competing please have a look below at all of our documents and feel free to use/modify them. We know that the competition can be overwhelming/confusing so we are happy to share what worked for us.

Our Pinterest Board

Feel free to have a look at our Pinterest board. We put this together immediately after reading through the prompt, but we'd like to point out how ultimately the pinterest board looks nothing like our project. This was fully intentional, as we wanted to design something that had never been done before, so obviousely we couldn't find photos that displayed it. What you will see is inspiration for different furntiure pieces, currations, and color schemes, rather than entire rooms. We stronly encourage you to do the same, as this will really help to build your skills as a designer.

The Checklist

Please don't be put off by this, we know it's a lot but it will seriously help you as we designed this list to check off every point on the rubric and then some. Read through everything once at the beginning, then only look at the section you are currently working on. Then, a few weeks before competition look back over the entire thing to ensure you didn’t forget some small detail. We can almost guarantee that if you are able to check of every box you will do well at competition (It worked for us). Do note that we seriously mean you need to check every box, as the reason we got 5th at region was because we didn't check 5 of these thinking we did good enough and that mistake almost cost us everything. 

Furniture Selections

Ok, here we will admit that this step is definitely overkill (Cary thought it was stupid but Camden insisted on it as it is used in industry). What we did was on our furniture plan we gave every piece of furniture a unique label and then in a spreadsheet, we listed every piece and wrote the dimensions of it. This way when we went to make selections we could see exactly what we were looking for and knew what sizes everything needed to be. I (Camden) will admit that there are plenty of more efficient ways to do this but I know from working in the industry that many firms do this exact method. You will notice however that we didn't end up finishing this method, we merely used it as a starting point which I would recommend you do if you choose to go this route. 

Furniture Brands

Most people seem to have a lot of trouble with finding unique furniture, which is what results in everyones designs looking similar. I (Camden) am happy to share a list of unique brands that I have learned from being in the industry to help you find some more unique pieces. Do note that most of these brands will not have CAD files for you to use in renderings so you will have to either model them yourself or find something similar to show. Additionally, many of these are to the trade so they don't have prices listed and they might not be willing to give you the prices (They will be insanely expensive BTW). To get around this, we have found that if you claim you found these pieces on sites like FaceBook Marketplace and Craigslist nobody will bat an eye. Alternatively, you can simply take a gamble and hope the judges don't recognize the brand names (They probably won't) and therefore will have no idea what these pieces cost. 

Invoice

This is an extremely important aspect of the project and for some reason, though FCCLA provides a template, many of the judges still find it insuficient and will count points off if you only follow it directly. Because of that, we took the time to make our own invoice (modeled after real invoices used in industry), which has ton's of extra information that really shows your attention to detail and helps your invoice stand out. Please feel free to copy our template and modify it to fit your own project/brand.

The biggest thing to note is that every time I (Camden) competed, the judges took points off because they didn't feel like my invoice accurately reflected the price of my design (even though the prompt says to only price five items). Due to this, we opted to add total prices for each room so that we could then give a total price for the project which seems to satisfy the judges. You don't have to be accurate with your pricing, just quickly add up your best guess for each piece of furntiure on your furniture plan (Feel free to lowball everything). 

Our Planning Process