The First Thing HGTV's Ty Pennington Does When Designing Floors

For someone who has been renovating homes for more than twenty years, it's a given that Ty Pennington already has a structured routine for the flow of work that needs to be done per project. When it comes to floor design, specifically, that routine doesn't start with looking through samples, listing pricing, or even measuring dimensions. For the HGTV star, who is known for his budget-friendly home decor tips, it always begins with mood boards. "Designing your dream space is like working with a blank canvas. So when it comes to choosing a floor, I always create a mood board," he wrote on Instagram, noting that he uses free chip samples for his mood boards.

For the uninitiated, a mood board is a visual tool that lets designers define the style and direction of a project by bringing together images, colors, textures, and whatever items that can serve as an inspiration for a cohesive, finished product or output. In home design, this visual collage pretty much helps establish the overall aesthetic of a space even before the real work begins. Knowing that Pennington starts his flooring projects by crafting mood boards shows that the celebrity carpenter is very meticulous with his craft, much like design expert Bobby Berk, who is also fond of creating inspired decor mood boards. The difference between the two is that while Berk's mood boards may focus on a room or a specific area inside a home to style, Pennington's flooring mood boards likely cover the entire square footage of a house, taking into consideration the transitions from one room to another.

In an accompanying video clip to Ty Pennington's Instagram post about creating mood boards while choosing flooring, we see him mixing and matching chip samples along with some fabrics. He examines a flooring brochure for more options that can match a chip he is holding. By laying all of the samples on a flat surface and arranging them in close proximity with each other, the "Ty Breaker" star gets a good view of how different materials may harmonize or clash with each other. Considering Pennington himself likes to give depth to spaces using texture, it makes sense for him to do so with such careful judgment on what's likely to work after weighing all the options.

If you are in the process of planning a makeover or a remodel, you need to know that there are ways for you to maximize mood-boarding to its full potential, so you can guarantee a beautifully crafted and curated space in the end. The first and most practical tip, as shared by Pennington himself, is to get free samples and use them to visualize the aesthetic you are going for before you even start shopping for the real thing. The next tip is to never plan a room around one piece, and instead carefully select the floors, wall colors, lighting, and other elements on the mood board, so you can ensure harmony in the space.