How to use Houzz to Organize & Inspire Your Home Project
When you’re considering a home remodel, landscape redesign, or even a new color scheme, it’s hard to know where to start. The possibilities are seemingly endless in every direction, and it can feel overwhelming.This feeling is just how home megasite Houzz was born. It’s founders were remodeling their own home, surrounded by a stack of magazines and referrals, but still felt stuck. So they built Houzz, a place to browse and save photos and research local professionals. Think This Old House meets Pinterest. Houzz is a highly visual, online platform for home remodeling and design.
So whether you’re knee-deep in a home project or just looking for a little perspective, Houzz is a great place to gather and organize your ideas. The site is pretty vast, however, so we thought a few tips from Houzz – for Houzz – would be the best way to help you get started.
IDEABOOKS
Ideabooks are the core of what Houzz offers. It’s where you can save your favorite photos, notes, and other details of your home project. Here’s how:
1. Saving photos
As you browse through the site and see something that inspires you, simply hover over the bottom of the photo and click “Save.” A screen will pop up, allowing you to create a new ideabook (or add to an existing one). You can add a comment about the photo at this step; you can also add and edit comments on all photos in the ideabook later. The Houzz website is not the only place to find great photos for your ideabooks. Any website is fair game – just use the Houzz Bookmarklet.
2. Viewing your ideabooks
Click “Your Houzz” in the top-right corner of your screen, then clic “Your Ideabooks” in the drop-down menu.
3. Making changes
In the “Your Ideabooks” view, you’ll see all photos you’ve added. Here, you can add new photos, delete photos and make changes to your notes. To delete a photo, just click the red “X” in the right-hand corner of the image. To add text, place your cursor in the blank box that appears when you hover over each photo, and type.
4. Share it with a pro
You can also use your ideabook to communicate with others working on the project. For example, if you’re thinking about building a new outdoor deck, you can collect photos you like and email your collection to a pro you’re working with to show what you want and start narrowing down your choices.
SEARCH TIPS
With more than 8 million photos on its site, smart search terms will make the difference between finding what you want and going down a rabbit hole. Here are a few tips:
- Use quotation marks to do searches for terms with two or more words. If you’re looking for something specific that’s more than one word, try searching for the entire term in quotes. That will exclude any photos that feature just one of your search terms. Example: “blue paint”
- If you are searching for photos with multiple features, put the plus sign before all the words in your search to find photos containing all of those things. Example: +blue +paint +bedroom
- Once you’ve hit the search button while doing a photo search, try clicking on one of the room links (kitchen, bath, bedroom etc.) in the left-hand column on the results page. You can narrow down your results by room, style and location.
GO MOBILE
About one year ago, Google announced that more than 50% of web searches were done from a mobile device. So of course, that includes home improvement inspiration! House’ mobile apps are available here.
PAINT-SPECIFIC PROJECTS
We would be remiss not to call out some of the great paint-related resources you can find on Houzz. From decorating guides to choosing colors, here is a small sampling of some goodies:
