Category Archives: Remodeling

Redecorating Ideas to Rejuvenate Your Home’s Interior

Does your house’s interior look drab or boring? If your answer is yes, then your house needs a bit of rejuvenation and redecorating to enhance its appearance. Luckily, we have a list of things below that you can do to your house to accomplish this task.

Change Paint Colors of the Walls and Trim

Repaint the walls and trim with new paint and new colors! This will brighten your interior and could even make you feel like you are living in a new house. You must take the right enough time to match the paints, though, as you do not want them to clash with each other or the furnishings.

Do not just depend on the small paint samples from the home store to make your decision. You can now buy small containers of the paint to try on a wall in a place that is out of view. This way you know what each color looks like after it is on the wall and trim.

Add Colorful Throw Rugs

Colorful throw rugs brighten up carpeting that has seen better days. You can use the rugs to cover stains and worn spots. These come in a wide range of prices, colors, patterns, sizes and shapes. It is surprising what a big difference this makes in the house.

Of course, if you have a large enough budget to work with you could replace all your carpeting, but it is nice to know that throw rugs provide a cheaper alternative solution for worn carpeting. You would need to choose the carpet and have a professional install it for you. This is an expensive way to freshen up the appearance of the carpeting.

Don’t Forget the Kitchen

You use the kitchen on a daily basis cooking food for your family. The cabinets and cabinet doors most likely are starting to show the wear and tear. Repaint or re-stain the cabinets and shelves, whichever is your preference. If you need to, you can purchase new cabinet doors to match the cabinets. These doors also may need a coat of paint or stain depending on the look you are going for in your kitchen. Attach the new doors when the paint or stain dries. Add new knobs if necessary. Easy fix for a rundown kitchen.

Give Your Home a Designer Look on a Budget

Designers don’t have a set of rules that they use. While they understand colors and patterns, they aren’t pigeonholed with a few ideas. Instead, they look at the size of the room and begin to design a room based on the potential it has. Here are some of the tricks they use when designing the homes of the rich that you can incorporate while sticking to your budget.

The first thing to remember is that rooms need breathing room. When you walk into a room, have a few places for seating and fill empty space with objects of interest. A room with a couple of couches and a handful of unique statues and vases will have more of an impact that a room littered with items.

Another trick that designers will tell you is to pick an item to be the central focus of the room. This is something that you want people to instantly look at when they walk in. Once you’ve determined that item, incorporate wall colors, flooring and patterns in the room around it. This can also reduce the amount of time spent trying to find shades and styles of paint and flooring. That item should also be place towards the front of the room when people enter.

As you are setting up your room, know the right height to hang artwork. Don’t just toss something up and say it looks good. The mid-line of any piece of art should be approx. 57”. This is the average height of the human eye. This brings a room together and gives it a professional feeling.

Rugs are another item that can make or break a room. When you have a rug, furniture should be placed on it so there is 12” – 18” of surface on all edges of the furniture. This gives it a natural look. The rug should also accent the rest of the room and not command attention. Otherwise, visitors may end up focusing on a floor that needs to be vacuumed when they walk in.

If you follow these tips, you can have a home that looks like a top home designer came in and helped you to redecorate your home. All without the hefty price tag that they often come with.

Unique Way to Wallpaper a Wall

woman holding wallpaper

Some walls just seem to cry out for something different. This is especially true with walls that may be the only wall in a room with wainscot or a narrow bit of wall at the end of a hallway or entryway. You might want to consider using wallpaper in a uniquely different manner.

Instead of hanging panels of wallpaper, get scraps, samples, short rolls, etc. and tear them into small pieces of a couple of inches square to create a mottled look on your wall. It does take some time but is simple to do and can be a fun, creative way to add color to a small part of your home.

The first thing to do is prepare the wall. If it has old wallpaper on it, you will want to remove that wallpaper. To do this, you can use a wallpaper remover to loosen it and then scrape it off. If the wall is painted with a smooth surface, just clean it well and put primer on it. If the wall is textured, you can use a joint compound to fill in the low areas, let it dry, sand it lightly and then cover with primer.

Finding wallpaper for this is fairly simple. Most stores that carry wallpaper have sample books and may have some old ones they will either give you or sell cheaply. Also check the bargain wallpaper for rolls of discontinued wallpaper, short rolls and scraps. It is best to have an idea of what colors you want before you start buying so you don’t end up with wallpaper you end up not being able to use. For example, you may want to use blue as the basic color so you look for various shades of blue. If you want to create some sort of pattern in another color or two, such as a night sky, also watch for whites and shades of yellow.

If possible, get prepasted wallpaper that only has to be wetted to put up. Since it may not be possible to get all of it in prepasted, get wallpaper paste too. Even the prepasted will stick better with a little more paste on it. The paste won’t be mixed as thick as it would if you were hanging full panels so you won’t need to buy as much.

Once you have most if not all of the wallpaper you will need, start tearing it into small pieces of two to three inches square. In a medium bowl or bucket (an ice cream bucket works well for this), mix the wallpaper paste so it is soupy. This would be about three parts water to one to one and a half parts wallpaper paste. Drop a couple of handfuls of the torn wallpaper pieces into the paste mixture and start sticking them to the wall, overlapping them slightly as you go. One nice thing about this method is that it is forgiving and there is no such thing as a mistake.

Once you have the entire wall covered with no bare wall showing, you can add a complimentary wallpaper border at the top and bottom for a finished look. Once it is completely dry, you can give it a couple of coats of spray or roller polyurethane to seal it.

Though it takes time, it can be fun to do and your wall will be unique. If you have more walls that are similarly crying out for something different, you might use the same technique and try different colors and effects for each one so each can make its own statement.

Low Cost Kitchen Island-Weekend DIY project

If you’ve always wanted a small kitchen island with an area for breakfast, there’s an easy way to accomplish that which won’t cost a great deal. Using some used cabinets or even new ones if you prefer, and a few brackets as well as some and will give you just what you’re looking for.

Two cabinets, about thirty inches tall which are set at either end of the counter top with the backs facing inward and the cabinet doors facing outward may–depending on whether you buy them new or used, cost as little as 50 to 75 dollars. They may be as fancy or as cost effective as you’d like them to be.

Add to that a piece of counter top that is approximately 3 feet long and 24 to 28 inches wide. Getting remnant counter top will save you a lot of money on the cost of building your island.

Set the cabinets back to back and then spread them out enough to give you the length of counter that you’d like to have. If you want just a work island that is small and not very long, you’ll just butt the two cabinet backs against each other. If you’d like it a little longer, you’ll leave space between them.