Mood Boards and Pinterest

MOOD boards and Pinterest can be a great way to build inspiration for your interior design, but be careful to avoid clutter.

Pinterest

MOOD boards, vision boards and motivation boards have been around for a few years and my clients often use them to show me what they want in their home.

In fact, some of my clients are so organised they put together three or four boards of ideas to show me. I must admit when I walk into that situation even I get a little overwhelmed, so I can’t imagine what the client must be feeling - too much information sometimes can be a paralysing thing!

The next big thing is of course Pinterest (I’m giving it a go, but to tell you the truth I am getting overwhelmed myself!).

It’s a site online where you can ‘pin’ your favourite images and ideas to pin boards, while others can grab your ideas and do the same. It is fun and stimulating and I hear quite a fun time-waster. Putting mood boards together in this way is fun and random, but rarely occurs with an end goal in mind.

Inspiration is taken from so many places when you are doing an interior project, and these mood boards (whether physical or virtual) are a great way to put it all together in one space. But when you are at the stage of using these boards, it is important to keep a defined focus, rather than just randomly grabbing pictures like a kid in a lolly shop.

If you are looking for inspiration for your home, in the beginning go crazy on these mood boards and section them in into colour, shape, and the ‘mood’ of how it makes you feel. When you are looking at your house as a whole, don’t break your boards up into different rooms to start with as you want the ‘essence’ of the house to flow through to all the rooms. Instead, start with about three, this way you won’t get overwhelmed with what you want the house to look like.

I know some people will say ‘oh but I love this and I love that’ and ‘but I really want that chair somewhere’, but the problem is the boards will grow and grow and then guess what you end up with? Clutter! If you clutter your mood boards, you clutter your house.

Once the boards are full don’t make a new one, instead edit the original ones. Start taking things off. You’ll soon find that you’ve put something up just because it’s pretty, and not because it has any real relevance to what you want to do in your home.

When you start editing your mood boards in this way, you will see the vision start to happen, and realise what you really want your house to be.

Check out my Pinterest Boards and The LifeStyle Channel’s Pinterest page

Interior designer Shaynna Blaze from the LifeStyle Channel’s Selling Houses Australia is an expert on home makeovers and can answer questions on interior decorating and design ideas at lifestyle.com.au/shaynna.