Gather Helpful Home Inspiration (31 days to Love the Home You Have)

This post is part of a 31 day series – 31 days to Love the Home You Have.  I am blogging through the 31 day challenge in the back of the book “Love the Home You Have” by Melissa Michaels of The Inspired Room.  You can read all the posts in the series so far here.  And to make sure you don’t miss a post you can sign up to have every post delivered to your inbox , or follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram to get even more home decorating ideas and inspiration to help you fall in love with your home.

When working on creating your home you love, you are probably like me and need inspiration!  I think we all need inspiration when it comes to our homes.  Thankfully in the world filled with technology that we live in today – that inspiration can be found EVERYWHERE!  You can find books on home decorating or home design, pick up a home magazine  – my favorites are Country Living and Better Homes and Gardens, browse blogs online, even browse Instagram using a hashtag like #homedecor or #homdedecorating, and there are numerous websites such as Hometalk. Houzz, and of course Pinterest.

The first thing I do when I start working on a room, thinking about decorating a space, or even painting a piece of furniture is to browse for inspiration.  I usually do a search on Pinterest or even browse through my board related to that topic.

  I know when Pinterest became popular we all sort of did this….

Right?   We sat on our computer or phone at night and browsed through our feed and it was like a race to see who could pin the most things and create the most boards…  We pinned anything and everything we saw – whether that kitchen was our style, or even practical in our lifestyle, it was pretty so we pinned it!  Then we realized we had hundreds or even thousands of pins on Pinterest boards and there was no way in our lifetime that we were ever going to make all 300+ chocolate recipes we had pinned nor the 150+ fall wreaths we had pinned either.  Right??  Tell me I am not the only one!     I even did an entire 31 days series devoted to tackling 31 pins I had pinned to my boards – but I still haven’t even scratched the surface. 

So let me encourage you to use Pinterest in a bit of a different way. Use it as sort of a style board or a home inspiration notebook.  If you are working through decorating or remodeling or renovating your home use it as a way to gather ideas.  You can visit my Pinterest account to see how I have my boards set up but I have a board for each room in my house.  So I have one named Rooms: Kitchen, Rooms: Living Room, Rooms: Master Bedroom and so on.  When I am reading a blog or see something on Pinterest that it is my style or has a element that I would love to incorporate in that room, or an idea I could use, I pin it to that board.  I don’t just pin every pretty Master Bedroom I see.  And I have been trying to make notes on the pin so if I see a beautiful master bedroom with white bedding that I love – I will pin it and add in the description what I love “Master Bedroom – love the look of white bedding in this room – want to add white bedding in my room.”

Pin with purpose!    I loved this quote from Melissa’s book. 

I have actually been going back through my boards as I look at them or work on a room and deleting pins that aren’t my style, things that won’t work, maybe a pin that I have no idea why I pinned.  Then when I am left with only pictures of what I truly LOVE it is easy to determine my style, my vision for the room, and takes a lot less time that weeding through 300 pins of kitchens.

My kitchen board is a good example of this – do an overview look at my board and then see where I am going with my kitchen in the before/after pictures I walked through in this post.    Some of you may have a love/hate relationship with Pinterest and I encourage you to go back to this post and see how I didn’t let the pretty kitchens discourage me or make me envious of them.  I found ways I could incorporate things I loved about those gorgeous, expensive kitchens into my small/builder basic/remodeled on a very small budget kitchen. 

I do carry a few paint chips and sometimes a swatch or two of material in my purse along with a small tape measure.  And then I have measurements of items or spaces I am working on in the notes of my phone.

These are just some things that work for me… I would to hear how you gather inspiration and how you use Pinterest to help you create a home you love.  Do you keep torn out pictures from magazines or do you compile all your inspiration online on a site like Pinterest?