EP33 It's Time To Step Away From The Pinterest Boards!

 The addiction they don’t talk about - Interior Doom Scrolling!

I know, I know, it’s all very nice and ‘inspirational’ to spend hours drooling over other people’s homes on Pinterest and Instagram, trying to imagine what your home renovation could one day become.
I’ve been there… you look up your from your phone and an hour and a half has passed…  I mean, who knew drug dealer Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad would grow up to have SUCH good taste!? 

But here's the truth: too many options, and too much inspiration can stall your renovation progress. In this episode I’ll chat about how overwhelm and design fatigue can creep in when faced with a sea of endless Pinterest images. The dreaded paralysis by analysis, where overthinking every choice can grind your project to a halt. 
And too many options can cause overwhelm, resulting in inconsistency and making it  difficult to communicate your design vision with your team.

Tune in and stay to the end for The Fix;  practical advice on narrowing your focus to a few key inspirations and empowering you to make confident decisions and move forward seamlessly with your home reno project

Other episodes mentioned:
EP28 How To Avoid Decision Fatigue

Masterclass mentioned:
MASTERCLASS How To Create Strategic and Intentional Style Boards

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Hi I'm your host, Tash South I'm an Interior Designer and Renovation Consultant.
Each episode of How To Renovate is short, but brimming with practical advice to help you manage your renovation project with confidence and success.

Grab some more renovation advice & free resources and become part of the South Place Studio Renovation Community at
https://www.southplacestudio.com/freebies

Everything I teach about renovation falls within my Five Pillar Process for A Successful Renovation, to learn more about the process, head to
https://www.southplacestudio.com/pillars

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Instagram: @southplacestudio

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:33

Hello, hello everybody, and welcome to how to Renovate. It's Tash here and I'm here to help you with all your renovation needs. So let's get into this episode. It's time to step away from the Pinterest boards, everybody, and in this episode I am going to tell you exactly why. I am going to tell you exactly why. So, as you know by now, everything I teach about renovations falls under my five pillar process, and the information in this episode falls under pillar one planning.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Now, of course, pinterest is great. I love Pinterest. I mean it's great for inspiration. You could just spend hours looking at everyone's amazing homes, imagining yourself living there. I mean, I for one, love Pinterest and I love it for inspiration. But it does get to a point where you need to move on. If you're planning your own home renovation and you'll find that you're just kind of doom scrolling and you can't seem to make any decisions on the style you want or what you want to do with your home, then really it's time to step away from the Pinterest boards and start with your own planning.

Speaker 1: 2:52

So, first reason why you need to step away from the Pinterest boards is inconsistent design vision, and by this I mean that lack of cohesion. If you're spending a lot of time in Pinterest and you're likely creating multiple boards with multiple different styles and you're not kind of really tying down or nailing down that one style that you want for your home that you know is going to work well and then help you make further decisions. Because once you know your kind of base style, your north star, or find something you really love, then that can kind of guide your other decisions throughout the renovation process and make other decisions easier for you. But when you've got these multiple boards it's quite overwhelming. You won't have that unified vision for your finished project or your finished home. And then also, mixing too many styles can result in a disjointed design that doesn't quite flow well throughout the home. And that's really what designers do. We find a style or a look or a way of carrying it through the home in a way that's still interesting, but also in a way that makes the home feel cohesive, more spacious, thoroughly considered. So that is ultimately what you're trying to achieve. And then also that inconsistent design vision can also lead to kind of conflicting inspiration. So it means you might find yourself drawn to kind of conflicting styles that maybe don't quite work together or don't work with a character of your home, so you might also find yourself drawn to conflicting styles or colour schemes. That might make it harder to settle on a consistent, harmonious design for your home or for your space.

Speaker 1: 4:42

And then the next reason to step away from the Pinterest boards is overwhelm. And overwhelm usually leads to design fatigue. So I did do an episode on design decision fatigue not too long ago, if you go check out episode 28,. That's all about how to avoid decision fatigue when designing your home. But back to the overwhelm.

Speaker 1: 5:03

So Pinterest often gives you just too many choices, which can be overwhelming. So having numerous boards filled with different ideas can lead to an overwhelming amount of choices. So and makes it really hard to narrow down and just pick a lane and visualise what you want your home to be, because until you do that, you're going to be unable to really pull together a proper vision for your home. And when you're faced with too many choices, it really makes decision making difficult, which can slow down the whole renovation process and cause quite a lot of stress really. And then, of course, when you're overwhelmed and you're presented with all these different options, this really does result in indecision. You start second guessing your choices that you may have made before. So really, there is a point where you need to just take a step back and really narrow down and start focusing on just one or two images that really represent what you want.

Speaker 1: 6:04

And then the next one is paralysis by analysis. I mean, we've all been there, haven't we? It makes quick decision making difficult If you're analysing every single option, comparing, overthinking. The more options you have, the more likely you're going to overthink every single one and every single decision. And then this leads to spending way too much time weighing up every single option instead of making progress on your own renovation. And then that delayed decision making and constantly finding new ideas and new inspirations can really affect your ability and delay those all-important final decisions that you need to make before you start your renovation, or even during your renovation, because you may push back the start of your renovation because you haven't yet decided which style you want to go with or which layout you want to go with. So you can see how this overwhelm can affect the progress even from this very early stage.

Speaker 1: 7:05

And then the next one is difficulty communicating with your team, so with your contractors, with your architect or with your designer if you're using one if you're presenting them with a whole host of images you found on Pinterest or elsewhere and it's not a cohesive style or one that makes sense to them. If it's, if it's scattered and all over the place, they won't know how to help you because they won't know where to start. So you need to really narrow down and figure out just one or two styles, one or two images that really represent what you are going for, and then, from that point onward, your decisions will be a lot easier, because it can be really difficult to communicate what's in your head to someone that will be working on your project and to clearly communicate your vision to them. They may struggle to understand your preferences or your style if you're just showing them loads of Pinterest boards with loads of images on each one. So, again, that's why it's so important to narrow down. And then, if you're providing all of these images to your professionals on your project, you're then, in turn, overwhelming them because you're kind of overloading them with ideas and they might not know where to take your project because they're not quite sure exactly what you want. So you really need to clarify for yourself first what you're after, or even just a narrowed down version because, yes, part of these professionals jobs is to help you and to assist you throughout your project help you with your design, help you with your layout and so on. But you really need to investigate what you want first, because then, in turn, you don't overwhelm them and, as I always say, their time is money. So the more time they're spending on figuring out what you want, narrowing it down, doing the filter process for you, that's going to cost you money. So what is the solution? What is the fix, you may ask.

Speaker 1: 8:59

So the conclusion here is, whilst pinterest is an amazing resource and a great tool for inspiration, it's important to use it mindfully. Focus on creating kind of well curated boards that really reflect what you want, a style that you've thought about, a style that you know will work in your home and be really selective with the ideas you save and with the ideas you save and with the ideas you share with your professionals on your project. So, to help you narrow down and to really nail down your style, I do have a masterclass. It's called how to create strategic and intentional style boards. You can find it at southplaystudiocom forward slash masterclasses, and this masterclass will help you create really useful style boards. It's not just a board with loads of images, as lovely as that might be to put together.

Speaker 1: 9:53

I really talk you through how you can create an intentional style board so that it provides a resource for you, a really useful resource and a tool right from the start of your project, like this point we're talking about now trying to nail down your style all the way through your renovation. It's going to help you. It shows you how to make it really strategic, how to include things like pricing links, square meterage, how to narrow down your choices, how to narrow down your style, how to create your master palettes, and so all of these things will help you avoid that kind of Pinterest overwhelm, because it will focus your mind, really make you think about what you want from your own project. And then that mood board that you create in this way, following this process, will then be an invaluable resource as you move through your project, because it's going to help you make more and more decisions as you move further and further along your renovation process. So, once it's created, not only does your style board serve as a valuable resource to guide you through your renovation decisions, but it's also a visual reference and an inspiration source so that you can refer to it throughout your entire renovation. And it also serves as a great tool, like I just said, because it will help you to facilitate communication with your professionals. It will also ensure alignment between you and your architect or you and your contractor, just so you get your desired outcome for your project.

Speaker 1: 11:32

And in this masterclass I use real examples, real projects I've worked on for real clients, and I talk you through how I made those decisions, how I put everything together and how you can do the same, so you can really kind of avoid the overwhelm of just doom scrolling on Pinterest. This approach really will help you just stay focused, make decisions more easily, communicate more effectively with the professionals involved in your project and your renovation team and, just overall, just lead to a much smoother, much more successful renovation project. So step away from the Pinterest boards. Yes, it's lovely, but if you're serious about getting your renovation on track and started, then really discover and really investigate what you want from your own home, how you want it to function, what you want the layout to be, what you want the style to be, and then all that information that you gather and put together will only help you as you move forward. That's it for this episode. Everybody, I hope you enjoyed it. This is one of the most exciting parts of a project I find is visualising, imagining what your new home will be like, doing that research and finding some inspiration to move forwards from. But you do need to move forwards. So I hope this was helpful for you to do just that and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now.

Speaker 1: 13:01

For more information on my five pillar process for successful renovation, you can go directly to southplacestudiocom forward slash pillars, where you'll find an introduction to the process which covers each of the pillars and what they cover. We also have a number of other free renovation resources. Go now to southplacestudiocom forward slash freebies. I have created some amazing freebies for you there. There is one on the process, like we just said. There is one on planning permission. There is one on the process, like we just said. There is one on planning permission. There is one on kitchen design. There is another one on lighting planning. Go and check those out. There's so much free information there to help you with your renovation.