Dreaming of a house? Like most of you, we live in an apartment. And we know that we don't want to live in an apartment forever. Someday, we dream of a house. Maybe you want a different dwelling in the future, too. Start saving your ideas now.
Why do we want to live in a house versus an apartment? No, it's not because our crappy windows let all the warm air outside, or because we can hear the neighbors upstairs drop something. It's because we want to own a house. We want to tear down walls and cry when we have to fix something ourselves. We want to paint walls, refinish wood floors and replace hardware.
At this transitory stage in our lives, we will continue to rent apartments. But when we have jobs that we'll stay at for years and years and have kids, we'll want a portfolio of ideas. Trends will change and what you like will change, and your ideas will also change depending on where you live or what style of house you may buy. But if you start narrowing down your style now, you won't feel so overwhelmed when that someday comes.
What You Need
Computer with internet Books and magazines Paper fileInstructions
1. Browse Blogs
We keep a list of our favorite blogs to browse. To find these blogs, we suggest starting with one design blog (such as i suwannee or Decorno and check out which blogs they follow. Design Blog List also has a pretty comprehensive list of design blogs. Also, don't forget to check out Web sites for design magazines, and check out Apartment Therapy's own list, the Homies!
2. Save Images to Flickr
We surf home design Web sites and blogs all the day long, and so we save our images to a photostream in Flickr. (Make sure to write down your password and never lose it!)
3. Browse Books and Magazines
Browse books in a library or bookstore, only checking out or buying the ones you think will be worth reading over and over again. Searching Apartment Therapy for design books will help you start rounding up books that we are inspired by. You can also browse magazines in bookstores, and subscribe to your favorites.
4. Save Tear-Outs in a File
If you subscribe to magazines, and as many as we do, you know that you can't save them all. Before throwing out an old pile of magazines, we tear out the pages that inspire us and save them in a simple file folder in our filing box. Maybe one day we'll put them into a binder, but for now, we'll deal with a file folder.
More: 10+ Magazine Storage Solutions
5. Describe Your Style
Now that you have lots of images and ideas, start playing with words that describe your style. Notice what kinds of visuals you gravitate to, and what styles — and even what words are used in those blogs, books and magazines you like. Describing your style will help you know what you like and focus so that a future home won't be a scary mix-and-match of ideas that don't work together. (And remember, being "eclectic" is so hot right now!)
6. Save Dream Items on a Wishlist
Whenever we stumble upon a chair we love, or a pillow with a fabric pattern we'd love to use for a future project, we save it to our wishlist on Wishpot.com. More often than not, we find cheaper versions of things we like simply because we know what look we're looking for. If not, we know how many pennies we need to start saving.
7. Make An Inspiration Board
If you have an apartment, condo or house that you want to decorate now, make a physical or virtual inspiration board. On Polyvore.com, you can virtually arrange a room, or just put all of your inspiration photos on a virtual board.
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(Images: 1, Ida's Sugar Hill Studio; 2, 6, Lindsey Roberts; 3, 25 Design Books to Add to Your Collection; 4, 10+ Magazine Storage Solutions; 5, How To Describe Your Style in Words; 7, Look! Beautifully Organized Inspiration Boards)
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Keeping a Wish Board is a great way to manifest your dreams into waking life. I even know of an artist who saw the farm house he wanted to buy in a fishing village in Maine but it wasn't for sale. He went ahead and did a painting of it, painting in his own car in the driveway and his name on the mailbox. Within a few months, it was his. I know, sounds incredible, but this is the power of intention and knowing what you want in life is half the battle. Feng shui practice helps you with setting intention. Some people---like the artist Steven Pace---seem to know instinctively how this works.
i just right click and save images with ideas that i like
I have been rearranging my living room on Polyvore for months!
I like to save images, too. But, I gotta say that getting your own home, the funds to decorate it, the time to do it and the spouse who will let you see your vision through without compromise isn't quite as easy as forming a "wish list" -at least in my experience. But, hey, it definitely won't happen without a dream first. :)
I use Picasa (just easier for me), but I save all decor ideas and sources in Evernote. Sometimes it feels silly to do all of this since I'm poor and live in a falling apart apartment. However, it's interesting now that I have hundreds of images to browse through how you'll start to see themes. For example, I thought that I was a bright color person, but most of the rooms I choose (esp. bedrooms) are almost all white, with subtle hints of color.... It's a great way to understand what you like, but didn't know you liked, and start to integrate these ideas in small ways, even when you don't have the money.
Ditto Brockton:
I keep a photo file in my computer called "House Ideas"
I'm getting ready to move and have been logging away all kinds of ideas in a springpadit.com notebook. The system has it's flaws, it's just a beta version, but I can make tabs for decorating ideas, furniture pieces I fancy, household tips. You can make notes, lists, attach images, link to websites and access it anywhere so when you see something great on apartment therapy while you're "taking a break" at work you can still take note.
I just save them to a folder on my desktop, but after a while it got so big, so I recommend having sub folders for different rooms, or different ideas (I have a black & white folder) Then once you decided to renovate the kitchen for example, you can open your kitchen folder and everything relevant will be inside.
My husband and I just made a successful offer on what will be our first house - I assure you, what was exciting in the abstract is extremely sobering in reality.
Still! Once it's a done deal I think I'll be back to the excitement so having a method to organize all these inspirations is invaluable - I intend to work my way through your list - and the helpful comments.
Of course, the catch is that the house in question is a geodesic dome so many of my favorite images aren't all that adaptable to something with few vertical walls. I expect to be asking for AT community input in the near future!
i save favorite photos/websites on
delicious.com
super easy. just paste your link..make a "file name" and youre done. <3
I use Evernote to remember things, is fantastic. It has a handy web clipper to capture whole pages or just selections. You can then tag entries much like a blog using keywords and organize them into albums. www.evernote.com
I really like the ideas of how to save photos here.
There are so many dreamers that browse AT... I'm one of them. I save images too, of every idea that I like, and I'm finding some recurring themes in style and colour that are helping me really identify my personal style.
Thanks to AT for contributing so much to my visuals!
Print interesting pages to Microsoft OneNote. Great tool!
I have a tumblelog where I keep images that inspire me. I find Tumblr very easy to use, but because what you post is public, there is the extra step of linking the images to their originals as often as possible. Advantage to the public aspect is that I can easily share!
I second darin's suggestion of evernote. it's esp. handy when you're browsing from different locations (um, say, reading AT on your lunch break at work while doing other browsing at home), and allows you to tag pages/photos so they're searchable. and it's free!
and no I don't work for them! it's just saved me a lot of paper from printing out different inspiration and having to spend time to file them into a binder, which I never had time to do, so it all just sat there in a pile. so evernote kept me from going insane that way.
um, can't get over this: "Dreaming of a house? Like most of you, we live in an apartment. And we know that we don't want to live in an apartment forever. Someday, we dream of a house. Maybe you want a different dwelling in the future, too. Start saving your ideas now."
that's just really weird. i, for one, aspire to own my own apartment/condo. not house. and nearly there. and after that, another apartment in a different city. not a house. with my family. and that's ok. condos/apts rock. for me.
can't get over it. weird. who edits this...stuff?!
POLYVORE IS AMAZING! Finally, a place where I can save everything I find that I love and keep it all in one place and then actually rearrange pieces and create a room... I have been looking for something like this forever. Thanks AT! This is a whole new world for me now! Please check out my blog DeliciousDump.blogspot.com!
I too use evernote with a tag of "future home". Sometimes I'll tag items with "kids" for when I see something cute that I want to do whenever I have children.