Using Pinterest for Home Renovations
“I want to update my _____ but I don’t know where to start.” Words I hear often from clients, friends and family. My answer is always, “Have you started a Pinterest board?”
I freaking love Pinterest. I use it literally every day, for both work and personal. It’s the best tool to gather inspiration, ideas, and tips for just about anything. When it comes to interior design, I think it’s especially amazing. When you are thinking about starting a home refresh, renovation or even building new this is a great place to start to gather ideas to hone in on what you really like and want to achieve aesthetically in your project. Let me break down how I use pinterest for design work for both my clients and my own home.
If you’ve ever been on pinterest or used it, you probably get the idea that there are “boards” that you create and name, and then you “pin” ideas to these boards, like a digital moodboard for literally anything. That’s the gist of using pinterest. When it comes to using it for interior design direction, here are some tips.
Set up your board.
Create one board titled the room you want to upgrade. For naming purposes, the more specific the better. For example, let’s say you want to renovate your kitchen. So your board could be titled, “Kitchen Renovation.” When I do this for a client project, I will use their last name as part of the title (ex. “Knapp Home Kitchen Renovation”). When I do this for my own home, I use my initial as part of the title (ex. K | Kitchen Renovation) to keep my boards more organized so I can easily find it later on. If you want to share this board with someone else (your partner, your designer, your mom, whoever), you can make it collaborative so that both of you can pin ideas and save them all in one spot. If you want to keep the board private and hidden from public view, you can make it secret so that only you and any collaborators can see and pin to it.
2. Organize your board.
Once you have your general board, you can create sections within that board. This helps you to save ideas more specifically so you know what exactly you like about the image you are saving. For example, within your Kitchen Renovation board you could have groups titled, “Backsplash,” “Countertop,” “Island,” “Cabinetry,” “Hardware,” “Faucet,” “Sink,” “Lighting,” “Flooring,” “Decor.” Then when you save an image, you can select the board, and the group within that board that you want to save it to.
3. Start Pinning
Use pinterest as a search engine, like you would Google. To get the ball rolling, you can just type in something general like “kitchen renovation” into the search bar and see what pops up and you can start saving pins that you like to various sections within your board. You can also search for specific things if you know what you like. For example, if you know you really want marble countertops, type in “marble kitchen countertop ideas” into the search bar.
4. Be specific about what you like
To take it a step further, you can edit the pin to add personal notes that only you can see so that you can describe what exactly you like about the image. Maybe you really like the veining of the marble but not the cabinet colors. These notes will be a good reminder later on when you go back to your pins to start specifying products & materials.
If you are familiar with how the internet works these days, it’ll be no surprise that the more pins you start saving, the more your home feed will start to resemble a similar aesthetic (aka, the algorithm). This is especially helpful if you really don’t know what your style is or how to describe it. It also will be beneficial in showing you new ideas that would align with what you already like that you maybe haven’t seen or thought of yet.
Another useful tool is the image search button which is used to find additional images with similar products/materials and/or shop product you see in the image. Let’s say you pin an image of a beautiful kitchen and you love the marble veining, or maybe there’s a cool seafoam green cup you just gotta have. To find out what the product is or find other images with a similar look, click on the image on your board and hit the image search button on the lower right corner of the image. Then, crop the viewport down to the item you want to search for. This will bring up both products and other images with similar, if not exact, products or materials that you are searching for.
Pinterest boards are incredibly helpful to share with your designer or builder when bringing them onboard the project, or when you yourself start specifying products and materials. Once you start pinning, it can be so much fun and really get you excited about the project. It’s also just a great sense of relief to have some direction on what you want your renovated space to look like so you can start planning for costs and lead times, and work on gathering material samples so you know exactly what you want to specify & order. Or just let your designer handle all of that and you can just enjoy the finished product. Happy Pinning!
