It began when I was digging through old posts for a link and stumbled on a long-forgotten mood board from around 2010. I made it a month before we moved into our second house and wrote, “we have no idea what our future living room will actually look like, but today this is what I’m loving.” That early inspiration struck me as strangely prophetic when I revisited it recently.
Twenty months later—after completely forgetting the mood board existed—we ended up with a lot of the same elements: gray and green tones, a large gray sectional, a green rug, and even the exact zebra pillows I later found on clearance at West Elm. It’s funny how a handful of visuals can imprint on your taste and surface again in your decor choices.
Of course, not everything matched the board. We never updated our old media cabinet (we still daydream about finding a thrift-store dresser to repurpose), and we chose a padded ottoman for the coffee area rather than two wicker tables. Small differences, but the overall vibe stayed consistent.
Our curtains also turned out to be a subtle white-and-gray print instead of green—probably a relief, since pairing a big green rug with green curtains might have been a tad too Kermit green for our liking.
One of the most surprising connections was spotting an old DIY art project from 2008 where I blew up color copies of two graphic green wool rugs, cut them into strips, and framed them to create complementary patterns. I had forgotten that until a reader reminded me. It was uncanny to realize I’d later buy a rug nearly identical to the one I’d used for that framed art years earlier.
I ripped pages from a rug ad, enlarged them at a copy shop, and framed them back in 2008—only to encounter a very similar rug four years later. I never would have connected the dots without the reader’s memory jog. It’s a great example of how small creative acts can echo back into real-life decorating decisions.
Our mood board also included a deer head that looks a lot like “Ramsey,” a decorative piece that used to hang in our bedroom until it suffered an untimely end during book photoshoots. Rest in pieces, Ramsey.
We also have another faux-horned creature that I picked up from Hobby Lobby and hung in the kitchen during a renovation—hence the scuffed paint around it. It even doubles as an impromptu fascinator in a pinch.
In another planning post written shortly after we moved into our current house in 2010, we shared a series of inspiration images that included a page from a home decor magazine. That page featured a quatrefoil mirror that turned out to be remarkably similar to one we eventually found at a home improvement store and hung above the sink in our main bedroom. A reader pointed out the resemblance, and once we looked back we realized how closely our choices mirrored that original inspiration.
That same magazine page also showed a dark teal accent wall, which later influenced paint choices in our house. We ended up using a similar tone on the back of our dining room built-ins (Benjamin Moore’s Dragonfly) and in our guest room (Martha Stewart’s Plumage).
Another amusing coincidence involved two oak trees that anchored the left-front quadrant of our first house. When we moved into our current home, we discovered two oaks in nearly the same positions. They were hard to notice at first because the yard was overgrown, but once we cleared the brush the familiar placement jumped out at us—even though this yard also features a large magnolia.
So what do you think? Can mood boards, clipped inspiration images, and framed DIY art subtly shape the decisions you make about color, furniture, and accessories years later? You could argue that people simply like what they like, and that early tastes naturally guide future choices. But it felt uncanny to find a forgotten mood board, a DIY rug print, and a magazine tear sheet all quietly echoing through our house’s final look.
Have you noticed similar echoes between your first home and your next? Some people seem to buy the same layout repeatedly—my best friend and her husband, for example, moved from one three-story townhouse to another with nearly the same floorplan. Others seek something completely different after a move. We tend to gravitate toward mid-century ranchers, so we keep finding ourselves in similar homes—right down to comparable tree placement. Maybe we’re creatures of habit, or maybe our early inspirations simply find a way back into our lives. I’d love to hear if your past mood boards or old inspirations have shown up in surprising ways in your later homes.