Giving Your Home a New Lease of Life

August 5, 2020 Leave a Comment

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We all want our homes to be the best they can be. Your home is likely to be the investment you’ll spend the most money on in your lifetime. It’s also the space where you’re going to spend most of your free time. You’re going to want to make sure that it’s the best that it can be. When you first move into any property, you tend to be on top of things and everything will look pristine. But as time passes by and you’ve been in the house for a few years, people’s standards can drop and things can begin to look a bit worn and below par. With the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and more of us spending increasing amounts of time in our own properties, many of us are starting to look at our homes with a more critical eye and are looking for ways to spruce our properties up a bit. If this sounds familiar to you and you’re in this situation, you may be looking for different ways to give your property a new lease of life. Here are some ideas to get you started!

 

Decorating

 

It’s amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do to a living space. We tend to assume that our walls don’t get touched all too often, but you’d be surprised how much dirt can build up on them and how much light can fade certain exposed areas. So, give your walls a fresh lick of paint around once a year. You can opt for a brand new colour scheme to completely convert the look of the property, or you could go for a new coat of the same tone. Generally speaking, if you want the best results, you should use professionals. Check out Local Offers for good quality and affordable services in your local area. The pros will be able to complete every job to perfection. Alternatively, you can go DIY. Just make sure to cover any floors or furniture so that paint doesn’t splash onto them.

 

Conducting a Deep Clean

 

If you want a less intense option to give your home a new look, you should conduct a deep clean. The majority of us will conduct a regular, standard clean around the house. We’ll run the vacuum around. We’ll wipe down the kitchen counter tops. We’ll polish surfaces. We’ll sweep and mop the hard floors. We’ll clean the toilet and wipe down the bath. This is enough to keep things clean and hygienic. But there are other less routine tasks you might want to tackle when conducting a deep clean to give your home that brand new feel. These tasks tend to get overlooked as they’re time consuming and you really don’t have to carry them out as often or on a daily basis. Some deep cleaning activities you might want to consider include washing shower curtains, cleaning out gutters, wiping down skirting boards, cleaning under large pieces of furniture (like sofas and beds) and more.

 

These are just a couple of areas you can focus on when it comes to giving your home a new lease of life. Both are effective, so give them a try!

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Finding An Audience For Your Unwanted Furniture One Step At A Time

April 28, 2020 Leave a Comment

 

As most of us know in this age of Facebook Marketplace and good ole’ Gumtree, selling old furniture online is a fantastic way to earn cash on the side. Whether you’re having a clear-out or just fancy updating; these platforms provide you with easy resources from which to advertise and sell those spare pieces—all without an ounce of effort on your part.

 

Or, at least, that’s the way it should be. But, as many sellers are finding, these increasingly competitive platforms have led to pretty selective buyers. So, how do you know if a piece will appeal to the online shoppers out there or not? Keep reading to find out. 

 

The price is right

 

One of the best ways to ensure your furniture appeals to shoppers is to make sure you’re pricing it right. After all, the main reason people shop online is for the opportunity to grab themselves a bargain. That said, if an item is priced too low, it’s hardly worth the effort of putting it out there. Luckily, guides like this one at www.thespruce.com can help you to settle on the ideal amounts. Extensive research is also guaranteed to help. After all, the more you look at what other sellers are offering, the better chance you have of determining whether a piece will hit the mark or not. 

 

Sticking with fair-medium condition

 

While you could have gotten away with selling furniture in all manner of conditions as little as a few years ago, the same doesn’t apply to the market these days. Now, if you’re set on making money from a piece, you’ll need to ensure it’s in fair-medium condition at the very least. In other words, a tear here or there isn’t such an issue, but entirely threadbare fabric would be best off going straight for junk. Make sure, too, that you’re honest about every snag, rip, and potential issue. Worse than failing to sell a piece is selling to it a buyer who leaves you a bad review due to things you omitted to mention!

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Is that fire safety label in place?

 

Lastly, you’re also going to want to look out for a fire safety label. These come as standard on all items of furniture, and you’ll want to keep them in place if you ever intend to resale. After all, you might not be an established company, as such, but you’re still selling items to the public, and likely doing so on a semi-regular basis. That means you do have that same seller’s responsibility to health and safety. Hence why, if a potentially sale-able item has no fire safety label insight, you would be better off sending it straight for scrap through a company like https://dallasjunker.com/furniture-removal/. If, however, labels are intact and legible, there’s no reason you can’t earn a little extra cash!

 

Selling online can be a lot of fun and incredibly profitable, too. Make sure that’s the case by always considering these pointers, and curating a shop you can be proud of.

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How To Get Your Garden Furniture In Tip Top Shape!

August 12, 2017 Leave a Comment

Going out and buying brand-new garden furniture that will look stunning in your newly finished and landscaped garden is part of the fun of being an adult. You’ll muse over Rattan furniture, meander over oak table sets and deliberate over marble firepits, because the garden deserves that much attention! The first time you unpack and set up those garden sets, you can breathe in the splendor and how much your garden looks ‘finished’ at long last. However, the work does not end there.

Chairs Fire Pit Evening Summer Backyard

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Keeping the garden looking brand new is a whole other job. You could have spent weeks mowing and planting and painting the fence, but a garden is never truly ‘finished’, because of the amount of work it will always need for the upkeep. The seasons turn – as they do – and it’s because of these reasons that you will need to stay on top of that pretty new furniture. The weather can affect garden furniture in ways you didn’t imagine, and this means that you need to be vigilant for signs of damage. Rusted metal, wood that has become weather-beaten and mildew on the fabric of the garden swing are all very common occurrences, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep them! To keep your garden furniture in the best shape, you need these tips:

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  1. Treat! Most garden furniture that you buy is pre-treated but it’s always worth asking about it and paying a little extra for it to be done. For luxury outdoor items, manufacturers tend to get it treated early before you pick up so always double check. You can treat the items yourself of course, with products like these. You can even strip back wood and remove old stains with Real Milk Paint’s oxalic acid, which acts quickly to get rid of stains you’ve spent time scrubbing. If you do the treatment properly, it should last you several years before you have to do it again.
  2. Follow Instructions. Every set of garden furniture will come with its own set of instructions. It sounds really simple, but you should be following these instructions to the letter if you hope to have your garden furniture looking its best.
  3. Clean! It’s not hard to give garden furniture a good wipe down before you use it, but always brush down with a soft-bristled broom before you get started. It doesn’t just clear the debris left behind from grass and leaves etc, it’ll also get rid of any bugs and cobwebs that could be lurking. Soapy water is enough to clean it so avoid any harsh bleaches and other cleaning products that could stain.

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Your garden furniture is bought to last and you have to do what you can to ensure that it does. Keep an eye out for mold and rust as the year goes on and get investing in some good furniture covers. Just because there are ways to keep the furniture clean, it doesn’t mean it should have to sit outside in the storming rain all year round! Your garden is a place of pride, let’s keep it that way.

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The Big Problems With Living In A Big Mansion

July 10, 2017 Leave a Comment

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We have all dreamed of living in a huge house – a mansion – because we have always dreamed of more space. The idea of having eleven bedrooms and twelve bathrooms and three kitchens, all with Aga’s, and a garden that would rival Central Park in New York. However, for all the dreams that swirl around the world, the reality is often very different, and that is the case with mansion life. It just isn’t the simple life of luxury we all imagine it to be.

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Too Much Space

Yes, we want to enjoy more space, but not to the point that our home feels empty and bare no matter how much furniture we throw at it. Even if you just living in part of a mansion, one wing or one floor on one wing, trying to make two sofas fill a ballroom is like trying to make two drops of water fill an ocean.

 

Never Feel Cozy

High ceilings and vast spaces don’t add to the cozy feeling in any way whatsoever and this only gets worse when winter starts to creep in. Even in the height of summer, a mansion can feel abysmally cold as you spend a large fortune on logs for your fireplace and oil for your ancient heating system.

 

Never Enough Internet

Having the internet reach every corner of every room in your home is a luxury. Anyone that lives in a big house will know that this is hard to disagree with because in order to enjoy that same nuisance-free existence they have had to invest in multiple wifi extenders if they want any chance of getting any web browsing done. As for 4G, well, either it hasn’t reached that part of the countryside yet or it can’t penetrate the thick walls.

 

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Gardening Never Stops

If you live in a mansion with a mansion-sized garden then trying to keep on top of the lawn alone is like having a full-time job, except you don’t get paid to do it (and you don’t get paid to do your normal job because you are spending your entire life mowing). Not to mention that, once you’re done, you’re more out of breath than an amateur marathon runner that decided they could participate without any training.

 

Money, Money, Money

The only thing that leaks more than your roof is your money, with every cent you have seemingly being pumped into your home. Trying to repair broken beams, or replace another shattered pane of glass, or the leak in the roof, or discover where that god awful smell is coming from, or trying to keep the place warm, or whatever. It is a constant drain on finances, and we mean constant.

 

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Permanent Paranoia

Big, old houses make loads of noises, and most of them are really eerie noises. Something will fall down between the walls or the sound of a ghost will interrupt your dinner. But that isn’t all because there is also the constant worry that someone will break in through any number of easy to lift windows or shrunken doors that don’t seem to lock properly anymore. Just walking around a big house can be terrifying and you’ll start to curse your own imagination as time goes on.

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