When it’s time to redecorate your home, do you always do all the work by yourself? Why not encourage your children to join in? There are many benefits to decorating your home together: Family Fun: Home decoration can be a fun activity for the whole family. Everybody can have a little break from the everyday routine and it can be as fun as a family outing. Just make sure that you give everybody tasks that they enjoy doing. Express their Artistic Skills: You can give your children an opportunity to express their artistic skills. You can delegate tasks like painting, … Continue reading →

Feeling bored with the color of your home interior? Perhaps it’s time to try experimenting with unusual colors. Here are some ideas to get a different look in your home. Combine Colors We often keep a similar tone of colors in each room to avoid a clashing effect. But you can try to combine colors from different color families to put emphasis on certain parts of the room. The best way is to use inequal amounts of colors from different color families. For example, use a little dark color to put emphasis on a room painted in light color. You … Continue reading →

Colors exist in various hues; there are dark colors as well as light colors. This color variation can be a bit confusing when choosing the right colors for your home. You might want to have blue to create a soothing and relaxing effect, but which kind of blue should you use? Dark blue or pale blue? Here are some facts about light and dark colors that you need to know before determining the colors for your home. Light and dark colors react differently to light. Light colors tend to reflect light. As a result, they can make rooms look bigger … Continue reading →

What color is the best for the rooms in your home? There is no ideal or best color to use. To decide which color to use, you need to ask what effects you want in each room. Do you want color that can stimulate you in doing your activities? Or do you need a peaceful and relaxing atmosphere? Here are some simple guidelines that may help you in choosing colors for your home. Warm Colors Red, yellow, orange, brown and burgundy are some examples of warm colors. You can use the colors from this group for the rooms where you … Continue reading →

Every year since 2001, The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), in association with Velux and The Best of British Home, awards The Manser Medal for the designers of the best one-off house in Britain. Four houses were shortlisted this year. They all reflect the intention of the designers for environmentally-friendly architecture. The winner of the 2005 Manser Medal is Stealth House in London designed by Robert Dye Associates. This five-bedroom house is built for the family of comedienne Jenny Éclair. The jury highlighted some features that make this house outstanding. The house represents the architects’ ability to make potential … Continue reading →

Many children’s toys include small pieces as part of a set and it is important to make sure that there are no missing pieces. Here are some ideas to organise these sets. Jigsaw puzzles The pieces need to be kept together in a set. Otherwise the kids won’t be able to complete the picture. You can keep the sets in their original boxes. Alternatively you can keep the pieces in small plastic food containers, one box for each set. Make sure you keep the sample pictures, if any, as your children will need them to help complete the puzzle. If … Continue reading →

Many people buy large plastic storage boxes to store their childrens’ toys. They just put the boxes in the kids’ bedrooms or in the corner of the living room, and dump all the toys into them. This seems to be a good idea to keep the room tidy. You just need to dump everything into the boxes. But there will be some problems when it’s time to play. With all the toys in one large box, it is quite difficult for the children to find the toys they want to play with at certain time. It will be even more … Continue reading →

Toys always become a source of headaches for us. They are everywhere, in every room of the house, and they seem countless. It becomes even more complicated when you have several children of different ages. You need to make sure that your one-year-old cannot access your older son’s tiny lego pieces. Meanwhile some toys seem to be everybody’s favorite and played together all the time, so it doesn’t seem a good idea to keep the toys in each child’ bedroom. Here is an idea for what you can do with so many toys in your house. First, you need several … Continue reading →

The Handmade House is Geraldine Bedell’s story of her experience with her husband in building a house for their family. Rather than buying a house ready to move in, they decided to buy a piece of land and hired a team of architects to help them create their ideal home from scratch. The book tells of how the house began to take shape from nothing. The dialogues between Geraldine, her husband and the architects reflecting on their hopes of ideal family living are intertwined with glimpses of architectural theories that reflect the way this couple and the architect approach the … Continue reading →

Here are some more ideas for using paper from old magazines to decorate your rooms. Picture Collage To make a picture collage you will need to cut out the pages from your old magazines and sort them into different colors. For example, you may find a page with half blue and half yellow, so just cut them into a blue piece and a yellow piece. Cut these pieces into small squares of 1 inch by 1 inch. Cut a sheet of posterboard to the size of the picture collage that you want to make. Draw a line picture on it. … Continue reading →