Hope's Hints

         

Pinterest & Houzz 

The perfect tools for home design 

(guys you'll love it too... trust me)

By now many of you may be happily pinning away on Pinterest.  For those of you who aren't or who have never heard of it let me give a quick overview. Pinterest is a virtual Bulletin Board where you can take any image you see online and "pin" it onto a board of your choosing.  You can label these boards anything you like to organize them as you see fit.  I, for example, have boards with titles such as "Dream Home" "Kitchens I Fancy" "Inspirations" "Just for Fun" etc.  It's a great way to save something you've seen or to organize your thoughts on a particular interest. You can also see what other users are pinning and repin them onto your own boards.  Just perusing other pins on Pinterest is total eye-candy because most of the images are stunning.  It's like taking everything that is beautiful on the web and collecting it in one spot.  To join Pinterest you must request an invite.  You can do this on the main site:  www.pinterest.com  and when I did it, it took about 2 days to get my invite.

 

The other site I mentioned in my title iswww.Houzz.com  This website is a huge collection of images of professionally designed houses.  Design professionals upload them (to brag and to gain additional business) and anyone can view them and get ideas for their own homes as well as information about the products featured in the images.  You can create ideabooks right within the Houzz website... no invite request needed.  

 

Now I find the combination of Pinterest and Houzz to be a very powerful tool.  I prefer to pin images from Houzz to Pinterest because I can also add images from other sites and because Pinterest organizes the images in a visually pleasing way.  Whether your going to eventually build a home, remodel your existing home or just want to redo a room these sites can be extremely helpful.  Take my husband and myself as an example... and yes my husband is on Pinterest and it is safe to say that he spends more time on there than I do.  So my husband and I are looking to move and we're looking for a home that needs a decent amount of work.  We've been organizing our ideas on Pinterest. We both pin images we see of rooms that we like (mostly from Houzz).  As we pin them we add comments on what it is about the room that we like. Cause he may pin an image of a room that I think is completely hideous and I'm going to wonder about his tastes until I see the comment that he likes the wood beams in the background. 

 

A collection of Pinterest images

 

Once you've collected a bunch of images it's really easy to take a quick gander at your board and you'll start to see some trends.  This can help you decide what kind of style you prefer.  Say most of your images have natural wood beams in them... then you know that in your next renovation you need to find a way to include them because it's obviously a feature your drawn to.  I also find it a great way to decide on a specific feature of a space.  I can pin 20 different pendant lights onto one board in Pinterest and then I can easily scan them all at once to see which one I like the best.  This is way easier than flipping back and forth from different websites or pages in a catalog.  

 

I encourage all of you give both of these sites a try... even if you don't have any renovation plans in the future.  You can collect images now and when there is work to be done you'll already have a go to place to find inspiration.  If you hire an Interior Designer you can share your images with them and give them an instant idea of what type of style you prefer.  Or you can play the "what if I won the lottery game" and dream about how you'll spend your money next time there is a megamillions up for grabs.

 

You can follow me on Pinterest under the name Hope Harsin and see what kind of things inspire me.    

~ Hope