Whenever you look at an interior design magazine or expensive homes on the internet, it’s common to feel like your place pales in comparison to those beautiful properties and thoughtfully designed houses. As such, you may consider the idea of decorating your home (or at least parts of it) to make it look a bit more interesting, unique, and fun. But before you do any kind of decorating, one of the most important steps that people often skip over is getting inspiration.
No matter what kind of creative projects you get up to, gathering inspiration and ideas is an extremely important step that you don’t want to skip. While it’s completely possible for someone to make ideas from scratch, it’s far easier to look at designs and decor ideas that somewhat resemble the final result that you’re looking for. This helps you establish a general sense of direction that will make it much easier for you to pick what items to buy, how to place them, and what you want to get rid of in your existing decor.
So without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the most important tips to consider when searching for inspiration for a future home design project.
Have a purpose for your home design
Home design is something that you do with a purpose behind it. For example, it could be for the purpose of making your home look more expensive, or you might be looking to create more storage options. Whatever your reasons are, you need to solidify them in your mind so that you can make decisions more easily. If there’s no purpose for your home design, then it’s common for people to leave their projects before finishing and this could end up creating a rather boring and rushed look in your home. If you’re going to go all-in with home design, then it’s best to do it properly so that you have some results to show for your hard work.
But with that said, it’s rather common for people to not have a purpose for their home design. Or rather, they don’t really have an excuse to change up their home outside of “because I want to”. So to help convince and motivate you, here are a few common reasons why people decide to transform their homes.
- Add more storage space to your home which involves replacing furniture.
- Transform a bedroom that one of your children will be sleeping in.
- Upgrading your bedroom with new colors and design choices.
- Breathing new life into an otherwise boring and old-looking home.
- Using your home decor as a form of creative expression.
- Preparing your home to be sold in the future by making it look nicer.
- To uplift your senses whenever you come home from a long day at work.
- Practice decorating skills for when you move into a new home in the future.
These are just a couple of ideas that you might want to consider when looking for a reason to try something new with your home design. At the end of the day, you can always just decorate your home because you want to, but if you have a purpose behind it then it’ll make some decisions a lot easier and you’ll have something to drive and motivate you to see the project to the end.
How to use the internet to search for inspiration
How to use the internet to search for inspirationThe internet is one of the best places to search for inspiration when designing or redesigning your home. This is because there are millions of beautiful home design images on the internet and there are so many different places to go if you want to search for them and find something unique and beautiful. But how exactly do you get started? Do you just search “home decor ideas”? That could work, but it’s also going to give you many websites and images that don’t really follow a consistent theme.
So here are some tips on how you can narrow down your search.
Start with an idea in mind
The very first search you perform can be as simple as “modern home decor” or “rustic decor”. These initial ideas are where you can start. It’ll give you general ideas for the various home decor styles that are commonly in use, and it’ll also help you narrow down the types of home design ideas that you prefer. Everyone has their own tastes when it comes to home decor, so don’t be afraid to pick and choose something that personally resonates with you.
Once you’ve found search terms that follow the type of design choices that you like, you can start incorporating those terms into your research.
Choose colors that you think look good
Everyone has color preferences that they can incorporate into their home decor. However, you should be aware that not all colors tend to mix well together and you can unwillingly create some odd clashes if you’re not careful. The key here is to focus on colors that complement each other, or color themes that you know will work well. For instance, neutral colors are a great choice for most home design projects because they work well with basically anything. Neutral colors are typically very soft in their tone and a lot of furniture and existing decor elements in the home are likely neutral in color.
So once you’ve chosen a color theme, you can start adding it to your searches. For instance, a “red modern home” search will reveal lots of modern home design ideas that use red tones as the primary color of choice. Similarly, “pastel decor ideas” is another valid search term that will show plenty of colorful decor ideas.
Look for local contractors and designers
Another approach to home design is to actually look for local contractors and designers for various elements. For example, if you’d like to completely change your front entrance, then looking for different entry door installers can help you learn more about the choices you have and the names given to different styles of doors, but also various entrance designs that you can pick from. There are so many different choices available that they can often be overwhelming, and this is where it helps to hire a designer to help you cut through all of the options to help you find something that truly resonates with you.
Designers are also a great option if you find yourself wanting to offload most of the work to a professional. There are many benefits to working with a specialist, such as being able to tap into their wealth of experience and connections with vendors. Another perk to working with designers is that they usually have some kind of portfolio to look at. This allows you to check their latest work to see if they’ve done something that you actually like.
What about interior design magazines and books?
We’d also consider looking at various books, magazines, and other physical publications that cover decorating and interior design. This type of media is excellent when looking for home design ideas because they’re full of unique ideas that might not be published on the internet. It’s also nice to have a physical piece of media to read because you can take it with you and read it wherever you are. So whether it’s a top interior design book from Amazon or a magazine that you picked up, these are all great choices to look for inspiration.
However, one of the issues with physical publications is that it’s a bit harder to gather up the inspiration and record it. The most practical solution would be to photocopy things, but you can also take pictures of the book or publication. Sometimes, you can go for a more traditional method of organizing inspiration like scrapbooking, but this typically involves cutting out magazine pages.
Organizing all of your inspiration to make it easier to search through
Now that we’ve shown you some of the best ways to search for inspiration, we should talk about how to organize things so that they’re a lot easier to search through. For starters, we recommend creating a folder that is designed to hold all of your inspirational images, but you can also further organize this by splitting up your ideas.
For instance, you might have some ideas for a modern bathroom, but it can clash with the ideas that you have for a rustic kitchen. You can sort these by creating folders for each of your rooms, and then you can create folders for the different styles that you want to try. This is a simple yet effective way to gather up all of the images that you liked.
You could also save your images in online folders, such as using Google Drive. This allows you to share those images with other people on the internet (such as sending them via email to a designer) and you can access them anywhere without needing a computer. This can be a great option if you’re working with multiple people or have different devices that you browse the internet from.
Home decor can be a difficult thing to tackle, but with the right inspiration, you can create some beautiful homes with relative ease.
