Searching for inspiration

week 3

We've got to a point where we're pretty set on the overall strucuture of the work we want to do. Walls are set in stone (do you see what I did there); doorways are decided; dormers are defined; rooflines are... OK, I'm struggling for a synonym of decided that starts with an R, but you see where I'm going with this. Now we can start indulging our imaginations a little and thinking about what we want the space to actually be like, and how we might live in it.

Let's recap the areas and rooms that are changing:

• Large kitchen/dining/living room on the rear of the house, open to the garden.
• Convert existing living room at the fron of the house to a playroom for the kids.
• New utility room at the back of the house.
• New cloakroom at the back of the house, off the utility.
• Removal of current cloakroom to make the study bigger.
• Extension over the garage to make a new master bedroom and adjoining en-suite.
• Conversion of the existing 4th bedroom to a dressing room off the master suite.
• Combining of the existing en-suite off the 2nd bedroom with the family bathroom to make a larger Jack and Jill bathroom.
• Extending and landscaping the garden.

That's a lot of rooms to kit out, and a lot of decisions to make. We'll be working through each of these rooms in later posts to discuss what we want to achive; the looks we'll be going for; etc. but for now, let's talk about sources of inspiration.

There ar a proliferation of property renovation sites on the internet, and shows on television, which we tune into or visit for some ideas but increasingly we find ourselves drawn to one place when looking for ideas. We use Houzz for everything from layouts ideas to colour combinations and find it incredibly useful when talking to suppliers to be able to point them at some high-quality, often high-definition imageray of the kind of effects we're tryiong to achieve. We've created ideabooks (Houzz's version of scrapbook of images) for most of the rooms we have to work on, to keep track of interesting things we come across or that reflect the kind of looks we want. We've also found that sharing these ideabooks with suppliers (when engaging kitchen designers, for example) has been a great way to give people a broad view of the style that we like, and the specific designs, colours and textures that we'd like to incorporate into our renovated spaces. They've even started adding additional tools to help with the design process, including a moodboard, floorplan designer (we'll talk about floorplanning in another post soon) and now a browser extension to allow you to clip ideas from around the web and not limit yourself to just images on houzz.com. All in, a super useful collection of tools and in particular millions of images to help get the creatinve juices flowing.

We thought it might be interesting to share our ideabooks here to allow you to follow along as we add new items, or just to get a general feel for the kind of things we'll be thinking about when it comes to designing the interior of each of our 'new' rooms.