Happy New Year! The Christmas decorations are down and rooms are looking bare. At the same time festive and sale items are being moved aside in the shops to make way for Spring Summer 2017. If you are a decorating addict like me, it's this time of year that gets me all twitchy and wanting to completely revamp the house! Less 'New Year, New Me', more 'Same Old Me, New Room'. Being able to plan for a custom wardrobe, custom bedding and all of the exciting additions to your bedroom can allow you to create a space that really counts for you and your comfort. You can use mood boards to help you to plan correctly.

In the first few weeks of January you'll therefore find me feverishly huddled over a computer cutting and pasting screen grabs of SS17 trends, colours and desired home items to create mood boards for potential room vamps.

But just what are mood boards? How do you create them? And why should you bother?

A mood board is a collaboration of paint and fabric samples, furniture cut outs and inspirational images which provide a coherent picture of just what your room will look like once finished. A mood board will present to you how all your chosen pieces work next to each other, and will highlight what might just not work. You know how you buy stuff, get it home, then it just does not work in the room? A mood board should stop that happening, saving you time and money in repackaging and returns! It will also convey to you if you are getting the look you want 'right'. Say you've seen an image on Pinterest of a room you love, and you want to emulate. You carefully select paint colours, furniture and homeware that you think will create the same look, but put it all together on your mood board - do you get that same fuzzy feeling as you did with the original inspirational Pinterest pic? If not, you may need to edit some choices, or re-start altogether. Re-starting your mood board will take ALOT less time than re-painting your room if the new sofa and new wall colour don't work well together!

SO, WHAT'S THE EASIEST WAY TO CREATE A MOODBOARD?

I used to cut out pieces from catalogue and magazines of images that I loved, then Pritt stick them on a piece of card. Yet what with being a digital age and all that, you can simply create a mood board online. I work on a Mac and use Powerpoint Online which is free to use. I create a new blank presentation and then screen grab images online that I want to add to my mood board. I insert these images via 'Insert', 'Picture', then lift the screengrab from my desktop. The good thing with Powerpoint for mood boards is that it allows you to overlap images from front to behind, so you can group the images together nicely (like putting an image of a cushion on a sofa). It also allows you to crop the image you are inserting within the programme, so you don't have to crop the image outside of Powerpoint.

In my moodboards, I also add in images of items in the room that I already own and am going to keep, so that I can see what new purchases may look like with existing items. If you cannot find the product you already own online, simply search for an image of something that looks like it (such as walnut desk), and the effect will mostly be the same.

Don't forget to add in important items like curtains, switches and sockets, as every element contributes to the look of a room as a whole.

Are you re-vamping any rooms in the New Year? If so what? Do you create mood boards already? If so what platform do you use to do it? Let me know in the comments section below!

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