Decorating your home can be a great way to get creative and refine your interior design and DIY skills. But there are so many different designs and trends it can be hard to know which ones to go with.

It is important to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve before you get started though so that you don’t end up with a mess of half-finished projects and mismatched styles.

Here are four of the best ways to get inspired before decorating your home, or any space.

What to consider before starting a decorating project

Before you even start looking for decorating inspiration there are a few things you need to cover to help guide your projects:

• Do you have the money and the time? Decorating projects always take longer and cost more than you realise when you start out. Even with a lot of careful planning, it’s difficult to stick to a budget and time frame. So, consider whether you’re prepared for the room or area you’re decorating to be a work in progress for weeks or even months.

• Small changes can make a big difference: you don’t need to start over from scratch to refresh your home. If you’re struggling with the budget or time, think about changing up your furnishings, adding cushions or throws, or an area rug, rather than completely redecorating.

How to inspire yourself before decorating your home

Think about what you want from the room

The first thing you need to do is think about exactly what you want from the room that you’re redecorating. Consider the following:

• What is the primary function or purpose of that room?

• How do you want the room to feel when you’re in it?

For example, if you’re redecorating your bedroom it needs to have somewhere to sleep and probably storage for your clothes. This will help guide you with the furniture and functional items that you need in the room, which is a good starting point for inspiration.

But as well as the practical requirements of a bedroom, do you want it to feel cosy and warm, or open and airy? You want it to be a relaxing space where you can rest, but do you want to make it more personal as well? What colours and textures do you think fit with what you want from the room?

Considering these points will give you an outline of the kind of things you’re looking for so that you aren't completely overwhelmed by all the different design and decor ideas out there. It’s important to focus on what you want and need so that you’re not swayed into the latest interior trends that won’t work for your space or you’ll want to change again in a few months.

Follow interior design blogs

It’s easy to find hundreds of different interior design blogs and magazines that will not only help with some decorating inspiration but also provide insights and advice about how to actually achieve it.

Sign up to the mailing lists for a few different blogs and just keep an eye on the things they cover. It’s a good place to find out about the latest interior trends alongside high-quality images that will give you plenty of ideas.

Choose a few general interior design blogs that cover a range of different homes and styles, a few great examples are:

• House Beautiful
• Ideal Home
• Apartment Therapy
• Hunted Interior
• The Inspired Room

You can also find more niche bloggers. For example, once you’ve decided on a particular style you can find a blogger who focuses on that, or if you’re working with a strict budget then follow bloggers that share decorating money-saving tips, or someone whose focus is on a similar house type to yours.

When it comes to furnishings, you might want one or two main pieces that inspire the rest of the room. It’s a good idea to take a look at furniture websites — they often have great blogs for inspiration, and you can find out what’s available and what would work in your space.

So if you’re decorating your dining room, somewhere like Furniturebox has good examples of a huge range of dining room furniture that can provide some good inspiration. Or if you’re starting with your living room you could look at rugs for a focus point in the space.

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Start a Pinterest board to organise your ideas

Pinterest is a great place for creative inspiration, and it can help you to keep your decoration ideas organised. There are millions of images and interior design tips for any room that you can search through on Pinterest to give you some pointers towards different styles, colours, and furnishings.

However, it’s easy to get swept up with some of the beautiful images on Pinterest and lose sight of what’s actually achievable in your own home. Use it as a starting point, but don’t expect to be able to perfectly recreate all of the images you find.

You can set up a new Pinterest board for each room that you’re going to decorate and it’s a good place to bring together all the ideas you’ve found in other places as well. For example, you can add Instagram images, website images, articles, and product pages as pins so that can come back to them later. Arrange your boards into separate sections for colour scheme ideas, furniture options, and DIY projects that you want to add to the room.

Search for images on Instagram

Instagram is another great place for decorating inspiration. You can follow all the interior design bloggers and magazines you’ve already discovered on there to see more images from their projects and recommendations. They’re likely to share more behind the scenes insights so you get a better idea of the process to achieve the finished result.

You can also search for relevant hashtags to find even more inspiration. You’ll find lots of real-life examples of different trends and DIY projects so that you can get an idea of what they might look like in your home. While professional interior designers and decorators can make these look great, it’s always good to see what it can actually look like in a real home.

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You can find inspiration for decorating your home anywhere, but these are four of the best places to start so that you can get a clear idea of exactly what you want to achieve.

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