I love home improvement projects. As a designer, I’m constantly aspiring to beautify my spaces with special and meaningful pieces. Whenever I embark on a new home project, Pinterest is my go-to guy for ideas and inspiration.
Pinterest helps me to catalogue visual ideas that resonate with me, organise them according to what tickles my fancy. It encourages me to strive for ambitious DIY projects.
It is easy to get caught up in the world of Pinterest Inception: you immerse yourself in related pins’ related pins’ related pins and before you know it, you will have been confronted with a million beautiful spaces, all of which are a far cry from your own home.
Let’s face it, we all have two homes. Our Pinterest home and our real home.
My Pinterest home is incredible. It contains mid-century furniture, succulents in ceramic pots, Maine coon cats and a vintage turn table. From my bedroom, I have a view of the Eiffel Tower. Other features include a claw foot bath tub and a marble kitchen.
My favourite feature is my self-installed herringbone floor made from salvaged timber sourced from an ancient ship. There is also a piano in my living room but neither my husband nor I can play. My Pinterest house is populated with everything from Country Road, including the children in the catalogue.
My real life home is quite a different story. It is south facing. My neighbours are constantly cooking boerewors, I have a burgundy and purple coloured front gate which complies with my complex’s code. I have two rescue cats, one of which is not too photogenic (@loosesealcat on Instagram).
A grey and white pigeon craps in my front yard. Everyday. I have several empty terracotta pots from the cactuses I killed and a free lanyard from a race, that I haven’t the heart to throw away.
It doesn’t take a much to see how reality and Pinterest differ. How does one get that Pinterest home? I realised that on face value, Pinterest homes are not the full picture. I mean, I’m pretty sure Maine Coons get sweaty in summer.
And that a claw foot tub has to drain somewhere. I also know that salvaged timber rots and a vintage turn table can stop working at any time. I’m certain that in that marble kitchen drawer, there is a cheap and nasty key ring and some tomato sauce sachets from last week’s takeaways.
My Pinterest home has ideas that can influence my new home, but what it doesn’t have is the memory of that time our DIY shelf fell from the wall at midnight, the sound of my neighbours singing along to treffers in their braai area, my cats cuddling us in Winter, the vintage chairs we bought in Queenswood, the coffee tasting event we hosted to educate our friends and the peeling melamine kitchen counter that gives us the inspiration to want to renovate.
Pinterest is a wonderful influence in revamping, but what we bring to our home in memories and stories are so meaningful that it cannot be “pinned”.
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