Mallory: The Share Space from IKEA

I love social networks. I also love IKEA. You can imagine my delight when I stumbled across this post on Making It Lovely about IKEA’s new design-centric social networking site called The Share Space.

If you’ve ever longed for a website where you could upload photos of the inside of your IKEA-filled home, tag the items in your rooms and see inspiration from other IKEA fans’ interiors (with links to each actual IKEA product), then Share Space is for you.

Once you sign up or login via Facebook Connect, you can upload up to three images of each room in one of several categories. Right away I used some of the photos I’ve taken for this blog to share my living room and bedroom. You can earn “kudos” when other uses save your rooms, share your favorites on other social networks and build a wish list of items you want to pick up on your next trip. I didn’t realize how much IKEA I had in my rooms until I started tagging away:

I always swoon over the showroom displays set up on the floor of IKEA and they seem to be updated each time I make a trek to our local store, so inspiration abounds. I’m limited, though, to photos I snap on my iPhone which just send up sitting in my photo album and I can never truly capture the correct colors of the paint in most of the rooms that I fall in love with. And while the room displays they come up with to showcase their products at the store are gorgeous, I’m more intrigued about how *real people* mix and match their modern, contemporary and traditional pieces in real life.

I love seeing our white HEMNES dresser in a room that is completely different from ours, with pastel walls as opposed to our deep blue ones. I get excited to picture our KARLSTAD sofa in new surroundings and think about how we can rearrange our LACK shelves on blank walls that await us in our next abode.

Are you already on Share Space? Where do you get inspiration for your IKEA goodies? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!