What did I do before Pinterest?

I have a few stacks of home magazines around the house. One in the living room and a few more stacks hidden away. They range in age from 2 months to 2 years. Jesse has decided that I can’t make comments about his piles around the house until I address the piles of magazines. (I’ll be honest, although it pains me, he does have a point) But they are my guilty pleasure! I love flipping through them looking at all the beautiful rooms in hopes that one day my house will look the same.

Every so often I decide it’s time to clear a few out. So before I recycle them, I slowly go through each one, tearing out the photographs that inspire me. I have a “house binder” that I started over 10 years ago. It’s not as full as “10 years” would make it sound, probably because the torn photographs found their way into my wallet, checkbook, catalogs, sketchbooks, what ever I had for safe keeping at the moment. I love flipping through an old sketch book to find my torn out inspiration pages…it’s are like my archives! Even clearing out the piles of magazines has become a bit of a guilty pleasure. Every few months when I have a nice slow weekend morning, I love sitting by the fire place and working my way through a stack. I think it really is my favorite kind of cleaning : )

It used to be that I’d go through the stacks, tearing out the inspiration photos only to stash them away for later, or shove them in a pile into a sleeve in my binder…but now that I am a Pinterest“pinner”, it’s different.

Now I sit next to the fireplace with my lab top on the coffee table, and as I go through my “dog eared” magazines, I find my inspiration photographs and then match them to the magazine’s online website just to pin it to my Pinterest inspiration board. I know it sounds like a few too many steps, but it’s almost like a ritual. Each step weeds out the few that are just okay. I love flipping through home magazines and I can’t give that up. I do like the online magazines, but it’s just not the same as the printed ones! They are my guilty pleasure with coffee or wine in hand studying each page, each photograph!

This morning I worked on clearing out one of my stacks…here are my favorites! (I tried to list my sources where I could…some were too old)