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How To Protect Your Valuables During Home Renovation

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When you choose to remodel your home, you are opening your doors to a hoard of strangers who will demolish and refurbish a part of your house. The basic rules of home renovation include:

  • Allowing the contractors access to your house when they need to
  • Each contractor is permitted to make as much noise as needed

But this noisy and somewhat chaotic project doesn’t always mean that you will be losing your mind throughout the process. With proper planning, it is possible to live through your home renovation with your sanity intact. Here are a few ways you can prepare yourself and your home for a very hectic home renovation project.

Move Out Of The House

One of the best options during home renovation is to move out of the house. Construction is a noisy, gritty process and living in a dirty construction area with dust on your bedroom and on other furniture pieces will only stress you out. In addition, you can’t even clean up your home because you will only face the same problem the next day. Lastly, you can’t even function in your house well, especially if they have turned off the water supply. With all these inconveniences, it is advisable to move out of the house for the time being during renovation.

Find An Alternative Space And Avoid The Renovation Area

If you are thinking that it is impractical to move out of the house since they are only renovating one room, such as the kitchen, then you will need to look for an alternative space where you can establish the same function and avoid the kitchen area altogether.

For instance, while the kitchen is being renovated, you won’t be able to use the appliances placed there, such as the stove, kitchen sink, fridge, and so on. With that said, you will need to find another area in your house where you can perform all the kitchen tasks. For example, you can place the microwave, fridge, and other appliances in another room that isn’t undergoing renovation. You can also consider eating out instead and store the appliances and kitchen furniture pieces in a storage area that is located in another location.

Pack And Store Items And Furniture Pieces

Another tip to keep your sanity during home renovation is to keep the items and furniture pieces in the renovation area out of the house. The best place to securely store them is by getting a storage unit.

You need to understand that the room undergoing renovation will be subjected to dust and debris and this can ruin or damage your valuables. Properly packing, labeling, and storing your possessions can save you from frustrations once the project is complete. Here are a few tips for packing your valuables.

  • Purchase the necessary supplies, such as high quality boxes of different sizes, bubble wrap, plain news prints, packing tape, marker, and notebook for inventory.
  • It is best to keep an inventory of the things you place in each box and put a label on each container. This will help you find and identify the items stored inside each box.
  • Do not leave empty spaces in each box; however, do not over fill the container since it might damage the items inside. Keep in mind that heavy items should be placed in smaller boxes while lighter items should be placed in bigger boxes.
  • Fragile items, such as glasses, dishes, and other breakable kitchen items must be packed first. If you have items made of glass, crystal, or if you have china or stoneware, they must be protected with bubble wrap. This can cushion them and protect them from getting damaged.
  • For large kitchen appliances, you will need to apply specific care. For instance, if you are storing your fridge or freezer, make sure that you defrost them first. This will prevent water from leaking out to other items and appliances. It is also advisable to keep its doors slightly open to prevent water condensation. As a tip, make sure that all the appliances stored in the storage unit are clean and moisture-free.

These are just a few practical tips for keeping your sanity during home renovation. Remember that proper planning, organizing, and storing can make a huge difference between a smooth home renovation project and a frustrating one.

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This guest post is written by Kris Hopkins who had gone through home renovations in the past. These tips helped her throughout the process. She also recommends using safe and secured storage units from US Storage Centers when storing valuable items, furniture pieces, and appliances.

Luxury Style Trends For Your Bathroom In 2013

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All bathroom trends seem to point to one thing, a more natural and simple useable bathroom. Fashion designers are constantly coming up with new ways for you to make the most out of your bathroom space. Designers in 2013 have decided to go back a little in time and choose to make the most out of using materials like natural wood, and use bright natural colours such as creams, browns and whites to emphasise natural light in the bathroom.

Eco-Friendly Designs

2013 is going to be the year that home owners embrace eco-friendly designs within the home. If you are considering totally remodelling your bathroom, then it is worth taking a look at your current plumbing system. The government are encouraging homeowners to switch their plumbing system to a more eco-friendly system, known as a low-flow flush toilet.  These environmentally friendly toilets have been designed to fit in with the modern sleek designs of bathrooms, and are known for being extremely cost effective, reducing the amount of water used per flush. Not only will you be making a huge difference to the environment, but you will also save yourself a fortune.

An additional design feature of the bathroom that is going to be a hit in 2013 is the tankless water heaters. These heaters will provide hot warm on demand all around your home; you will find that these heaters will significantly reduce the cost of your home heating bill.

Natural, Sleek Design

Everyone knows that the bathroom should be the room that is a place of relaxation and meditation; this is the place that you should retreat to after a hard long day at work. Designers have been working hard to come up with features that can represent the outdoors, indoors. To keep up with latest fashion trends in the bathroom, you should only use natural materials such as wood, stone, granite or even a textured tile that represents one of these materials.

You should try and attempt to create a minimalistic look in your bathroom, to achieve this look you should fit a variety of different cabinets and cupboard in the bathroom where you can keep all your private belongings. A great cabinet idea for bathrooms in 2013 is a gorgeous mirrored cabinet, not only will it hide all your belongings, but it will also add to the natural look within your home, reflecting natural light all around the bathroom.

Some designers have suggested that you should remove old bath tubs from the bathroom and instead install a gorgeous sleek, walk in shower. Most people have a bath tub, which takes up half the bathroom and you will probably only use it around once a year.

Kerry loves sharing advice on interior design trends of 2013; she loves the gorgeous mirrored cabinets available on http://www.primroseandplum.co.uk






Home Improvements That Will Enhance Your Way of Life

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When we make changes to our homes, often we do so because we are planning on making them look better or increasing their worth as an investment. Most of the changes then tend to be either practical or aesthetic, but if that’s all they’re doing then this is quite a limited approach to take.

While your property might benefit a lot from getting an attractive new paint job you see, and while it might be able to benefit to a large degree from having double glazing put in, other projects for your home can do much more to change the way you actually use your property and even alter your routine on a daily basis and your whole lifestyle. Here we will look at the changes that will have the biggest direct impact on the way you spend your days and probably your happiness as a result.

Kitchen/Bathroom Renovations

These are two of the most practical rooms in the house that we use on a daily basis in a very functional way. There are jobs we do in our kitchens and bathrooms that we simply can’t avoid, but having the best utilities and layout here can make those jobs easier and more pleasant – whether it’s adding a hot tub for your bathroom or adding a washing machine and more draining space in your kitchen.

Home Gym

If you’re struggling to get into shape, then giving yourself a home gym will make that a lot easier and mean you are much more likely to stick at the routines you come up with because you won’t have to leave the home to do so. This will then mean that this simple renovation helps you to look and feel better and to avoid illness or obesity – which is a very significant thing to change about your life.

Terrace or Patio

Having a terrace or patio area in the garden allows you to actually use your garden in a much more effective and pleasant way. Rather than just using this as somewhere practical to grow plants/work this then becomes somewhere that you can sit outside with a cup of tea while you read the paper, or somewhere that you can entertain guests. This will mean that you spend more time outdoors, and that in turn will mean that you feel much less stressed and aren’t as likely to get cabin fever after a day at home.

More Living Space

Added more living space in general to your existing rooms by extending them can make a huge difference to your daily routine and make you generally feel a lot less hemmed in and give you many more options for how you want to use your rooms. For instance if you use home extensions on your living room then this could give you more space to entertain allowing you to host dinner parties or have more people round without worrying about the lack of space. Likewise if you use them in your bedrooms it means you can have a larger bed in there, or add some of your other belongings whether they’re decorative or practical.

Donna Shepard is a very artsy person and her taste in taste in design is impeccable. She gives tips, ideas and advice on house decoration in her blogs.

Time to replace some curtains

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I’ve been looking at the curtains in my upstairs bedrooms and I think it’s time to replace them. Actually I wouldn’t call them curtains, I suppose they’re roman blinds? Anyway, they’ve been up in the windows in the two spare rooms for several years and they’ve been exposed to the brights sunlight for a long time and as you can guess the sun has caused some fading in places. It’s definitely time to replace the blinds.

I’m thinking the rooms need a whole new look. New window treatments can give a room a totally different look, especially when combined with new bedding. I was just looking at some valance styles. The windows aren’t very large so a Valance might be enough, but they are bedrooms, so maybe full narrow curtains would be better. I’d better do a little more looking around.

Speaking of the upstairs rooms, the two spare bedrooms could use a repaint as well. The hallway too. I guess we’ll get to that soon. We’ve in the middle of finishing a renovation in the living room and dining room but I’ve been thinking of refreshing the paint in several areas.

Finishing our renovations

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We’ve been in renovation mode for a couple of months here at our house. It’s a been quite a while since my husband and I were renovating our home non stop like this. Back when we first bought our house in 2001 we did a lot of renovation – everything from knocking down walls to refinishing floors to painting and doing all kinds of repairs.

Then after about two years of constant renovations I got sick and we just stopped. We weren’t done renovating, not by a long shot, but we stopped … for about three years, then we started again for a few months and then stopped again until just a few months ago.

Now we’re just trying to finish up all the renovations that we started in the past. Finally get the house looking good. We have most of the supplies that we need. I think we just need a little more paint and maybe we might need to buy welding supplies for when we do the upstairs bathroom but otherwise we have everything we need stored in our basement.

I can’t wait until our renovations are done. I’ve literally been waiting 11 years to see how everything is going to turn out.

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