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How to Create a Mood Board For Your Home Decor Ideas – Back to Basics

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Today we are sharing how to create a mood board for your home decor ideas. 

We’re back with another monthly installment of our Back to Basics Series, which we hope has helped provide some inspiration for your own homes! Typically before we totally change a room’s decor, we like to create a mood board to help narrow down what we’re looking for. We, along with some of our blogging friends, are sharing our ideas of how to create a mood board.

Where to start?

The first thing we like to do is gather inspiration from magazines and Pinterest. Pinterest can definitely become a rabbit hole, but there are so many great ideas on there. Especially if you are in a design rut. Typically we create a Secret Board to save our design ideas – in this case we simply titled it “Living Room Ideas”.

We recommend starting with what colors you are wanting to bring into the room. Then, the rest will fall into place. Color selection is the most important, and in our opinion, the hardest part of the design process.

After you have the color selected…

You can then take inventory of what you’ll need. Do you need to paint the walls? Get a new rug? New curtains? Etc. And this is the most fun part of the design process. Knowing the things we will need to re-decorate the space, we can search online for the items that we’re drawn to. Some of our favorite sites for this are RugsUSA, Online Fabric, World Market, and Pottery Barn, just to name a few.

When we see an item we like, we save the image as a reminder. Otherwise, we’ll be racking our brains trying to remember the fabulous pillow we saw that we now can’t find.

Once we have a bank of images saved up, we get to work with creating our mood board. Last week we shared our mood board for the start of the One Room Challenge, which you can see HERE. Some people use photoshop or special design software, but we use Publisher. Or, if you don’t have this, you can also use PicMonkey, which is another great resource.

How to create a mood board

You may have two or three rugs that you love, or a paint color you can’t quite decide on. This is a great way to put everything together to see what works and what doesn’t work. There may be a piece of art work that dictates the entire space. Or there could be a rug that you fell in love with and can’t live without. We’ve definitely been there before! Just keep adding all of your home decor design elements until you are happy with the look.

When we did the One Room Challenge for the She Shed, having a mood board was so incredibly helpful. It puts the entire space into perspective and helps to show you what items you are missing for the room. This also helps you come up with a time line of when you want to have space ready by and create your to-do list.

I did this mood board with Publisher just as an example and it took no time at all. It’s a fun way to spend the afternoon and gets your creative juices flowing. 

We hope this helps you when you tackle your next design space. If you’re not in a rush, as you see things you like, just save them and then when you’re ready, you can create your own mood board. Or, you could be out shopping one day and see a piece of art that makes you want to go home and completely change the decor of a room. Just have fun with it! 

Don’t forget to Pin this to your Favorite Pinterest Board!

Be sure to also visit our friends below for their ideas on how to create a mood board.


4 Comments

  1. These boards feature some of my favorite projects ladies! I love how easy it is to put things together with PicMonkey too. We use it all the time. The living room board is perfection! Hugs, ,CoCo

  2. Your design boards are SO pretty, I can’t wait to see your One Room Challenge space!

  3. Sherhonda says:

    This is so helpful – thank you for this post. When I read last week’s on the one room challenge, one of my first questions was: I wonder how they “get the vision” for a room? I’m a newbie at this and will tackle my first real home décor project this summer. Your blog is great encouragement!

  4. Beautiful mood boards…..I haven’t tried using publisher, but your step by step makes it seem easy enough. Thanks for sharing you process with us.

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