How To Create A Clear Vision For Your Home
WHY YOU NEED A CLEAR VISION FOR YOUR HOME
Often times, our homes and closets fill up with clutter and unwanted items because we don’t have a clear vision of how we want our homes to look, feel, and function for our family. Then we get influenced by pictures of other people’s homes and end up buying furniture or decor that isn’t cohesive with our own home, style, or specific needs. When you create a clear vision for your home, you empower yourself to resist impulse buys that don’t align with your vision and to remove the things that are no longer serving you or your family well. When you know what you want in your home, you also know what you don’t want.
“Your home should tell the story of who you are, and be a collection of what you love brought together under one roof.” -Nate Berkus
HOW TO CREATE A CLEAR VISION
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GATHER INSPIRATION
The first step to creating a clear vision for your home is to find and gather inspiration. Pinterest is a great tool for discovering rooms, furniture, and styles that inspire you. Create a specific board for your home (maybe even a board for each room in your home) and start pinning spaces that you love to that board. The goal is to gather a collection of pins with styles, colors, and rooms that move you or that you feel drawn to. You don’t need to think a lot about this step, just pin whatever you love and could envision in your own home.
NARROW DOWN YOUR FOCUS
Theme
After you have a good size collection of pins or inspiration pictures, look for themes in what you’ve pinned. Did you pin pictures of rooms with clean lines, white walls, black window frames, and minimal furniture? Or pictures of rooms with cozy brick fireplaces, overstuffed couches, warm tones, lamps, and colorful rugs? Do most of your living room pictures have leather couches and mud cloth pillows? Do all your kitchens have warm white walls, white oak cabinets, and gold hardware? Did you pin coastal rooms with sea grass baskets, organic objects, open shelves, and linen couches?
Repetition
What colors are consistently in your pictures? Do you like neutral colored walls or bright patterned wallpaper? What kinds of furniture? Once you start to see repetition in what you’ve pinned this brings your specific style into focus. Take notice of anything that you see repeated over and over in your pins.
Style
Spend some time looking through your pins and see if you can narrow them down to what you truly love and can see working well in your home. Can you name the style… such as farmhouse, rustic, cottage, modern, traditional, coastal, etc. Often you may have chosen a mix of two styles, like “modern farmhouse” or “coastal cottage”. If you can’t name the style, don’t worry it’s just a helpful tool, but definitely not necessary.
CREATE A FEELING
Now that you’ve narrowed down your style a little more, begin to think about how those pictures made you feel. What feeling do you want to create in your home? Cozy? Inviting? Calm? Happy? Do you want to create a calm, un-cluttered, “less is more” vibe with neutral colors? Or a cozy, inviting room with a couch you sink into and warm colors on the walls? Write down what you want your home to feel like. For instance, “I want my home to feel cozy, inviting, and calm.”
Linen Bottom Sheet / Linen Top Sheet
CLARIFY THE VISION
Next take all the information you’ve gathered and use it to clarify your vision for your home. Write it down so that you can refer back to it whenever you’re shopping or editing your things. Include the style you’re drawn to, the colors you love, the wood tone of the furniture, the feeling you want to create, and any other specifics you see throughout your pins. Study your favorite pictures that really incorporate how you want your home to look and feel.
Having a clearly defined vision is an important step because it will keep you on track and focused. It can be easy to get sidetracked by all kinds of other styles and pretty homes, but once you know what you want to create, you can stick to your vision when you’re out shopping.
For example, my vision might say, “I want to create a calm, coastal, laid-back, minimal home with white walls, clean lines, warm wood tones, neutral colors, organic objects, and natural textures like linen.” Then, one day, when I’m walking through the Magnolia Hearth and Hand section in Target and I see a cute side table that I’m drawn to and tempted to buy for beside my bed, I can stop and think about my vision and ask myself it the side table fits with the style and feeling I’m trying to create in my home. After thinking about it, I decide that wood tone on the side table is darker than what I want in my home and the style is more clean and traditional, rather than natural/organic, so I can confidently walk away. Even though I liked the side table, I knew it wouldn’t go with my vision or help me create the look I really want for my home.
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DEFINE THE FUNCTION
Now that you know your overall style and vision, you can begin to define the function of each room in your home. Do you watch T.V. in the family room, in the bedroom, or in the basement? Do your kids do their homework in their rooms or at the kitchen island? Do you have young kids that need a place to do art projects or teens that need a hangout spot?
List the different activities that are done in each room and begin to decide on what furniture will be needed for those activities. Maybe your daughter likes to do her homework curled up in a beanbag, but your son likes to sit at a desk to build his Lego sets.
Take these into consideration when you’re buying (or removing) furniture or decor for your house. You want to make sure you’re designing for how your family actually uses the space, not for how you imagine they should use the space.
CREATE SPACE
After you’ve decided what you want your home to look and feel like, you can begin to let go of any non-essential/un-wanted furniture and decor that don’t fit within that vision. Many times, you can sell these pieces on Marketplace of OfferUp and then use the money to get the things you do want or need. Sometimes when you’re feeling stuck in a space, removing uninspiring decor/furniture creates the space to figure out what you actually want to do in a room. Clinging to things that are done serving their purpose and time with you weighs you down and prevents someone else from receiving a blessing when you let it go.
Sometimes it’s the things we’re holding on to that are keeping us from creating a home we love.
STICK WITH THE PLAN
And finally, stay committed to the plan and vision that you’ve written down. Don’t be sidetracked by other people’s homes or Instagram feeds. You will be most happy with your home if you know what you want and stick with it.
