Zoe-Lee Skelton

There are lots of ways  homeowners are currently working hard to update their interiors before the cold weather strikes. As the temperatures drop, most people just want to get home from work and chill out in front of the TV. So, now is the best time to undertake all those jobs you’ve put off but could save a lot of money and energy.

Invest in some stylish rugs

Adding some stylish rugs to the floor right now could keep the house warm during the cold months according to experts from Nest and other top brands. Of course, those with wooden or laminate flooring will benefit more than most. Still, even those readers with thick carpets should notice a difference after placing the rugs on the floors. The extra layer of padding and insulation will make it easier for the home to retain heat. That should mean individuals use less electricity and gas this winter. Everyone wants to move towards green living, and that is probably the easiest way to get started. 

Update those windows

There are a couple of reasons why all homeowners should consider upgrading their windows if they are more than ten years old. Firstly, the seal around the frame will have deteriorated somewhat, and that could mean the house becomes ‘draughty’ and chilly. Secondly, new aluminium designs tend to provide more insulation for the property according to experts from Buckingham Double Glazing and similar specialists. So, individuals will get rid of any gusts of cold air, and also will ensure the heat they produce stays inside the home. Some of the most popular window styles right now include:

• Residence 9
• PVCu
• Aluminium

Paint in deep colours

When the weather takes a turn for the worse, you’ll want your home to remain warm and as comfortable as possible. Giving the walls a new coat of paint could assist that with that process. Dark shades will always absorb heat a little better than anything else. So, head down to the local DIY store and pick up some dark blues or maroons for the best results. The benefits of painting the walls in dark colours include:

• Creating a relaxing atmosphere
• Retaining heat

There isn’t long to go until we all have to pack our shorts and t-shirts away for another few months. With that in mind, there has never been a better time to perform the updates mentioned in this article. 

Many people want to create a cool and modern look in their home, but they don’t want to compromise on their values. Decorating with your ethical values in mind means considering how your choices are going to impact the planet. Fair trade, sustainable, and eco friendly accessories are just a few options when you’re taking this approach to your home decor. Here are 5 simple steps you can take to create this sort of look in your own home:

Recycled Furniture

Recycled furniture is one of the ultimate ways to create a modern and ethical home decor. Recycled doesn’t have to mean that something is worn out and unusable. In fact, you can create a vintage, retro vibe by going for recycled furniture in your home. Recycled items in the home help to make the world a more sustainable place, and you can find some real gems if you look in the right places.

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Choose Handmade Furnishings

Handmade furnishings are a wonderful way to support small businesses and introduce some really interesting pieces into your home. Look for original artwork and homewares made in your area, as well as locally designed furniture, curtains, cushions and throws. The distance things travel to you can mean you’re making a larger footprint, so knowing where to shop in your area will go such a long way towards helping the environment.

Add Contrast

It’s OK to mix old and new together to create a cool and contrasting look. However, you should be sure that the new items you buy are in keeping with ethical values. There are many businesses out there that focus on this, so find one that resonates with you!

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Go With A Decorating Company That Share Your Values

If you need help putting your new decor together, you might want to look for a company specializing in contemporary interior design. There are lots out there, so make sure you ask the right questions to ensure that they share your values and are willing to decorate your space in a way that is kindest. Look at customer reviews and testimonials to ensure that the company you find is genuine and as good at what they do as they say.

Bring The Outdoors Inside

Bringing the outdoors inside is a lovely way to give a more natural feel to your home. Plants can help to purify the air, and using untreated wood can make your home look very rustic and cool. If you can use some natural materials to create things yourself, this is even better! There are all kinds of tutorials online that could help you to create things like dining tables, bed frames, side tables, and more.

Are you ready to create a more modern and ethical home decor using these 5 simple steps? Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it; you’ll save time, and you might even save money by using a professional that knows where to go and what to use. Have fun with your decor!

I have many favourite 20th century artists but few have influenced my practice quite like Picasso. His bold, abstract portrayals of the human form and monochromatic cubist meditations have inspired my creativity in so many ways from my own painting to my home’s interior design. I’ve been lucky enough to see some of his artwork on display but I know I’ll never own a real Picasso.

Truth be told, I wouldn’t have the guts to display a genuine Picasso in my home. I’d be terrified of light deterioration and theft. So it’s probably for the best that my Picasso is actually an embroidered cushion by Jules Pansu in Paris, available from Banbayu.

This particular piece, The Femme a la fleur, is a painting of Picasso’s lover, Françoise Gilot, aged 21 at the time, who was almost 40 years his junior. Although Picasso was a known womaniser, you can tell by the soft shapes, bright colours and delicate, enveloping flower that the romance was particularly special to him and it’s why this piece resonates a great deal with me.

The vividness of the pallet manages to complement the neutral colour cheme we have in our home, especially the muted tones of our furniture and decor. In smaller rooms (which make up the majority of our home) I’ll add splashes of colour to maintain a light open feel.

As much as I want to preserve my Picasso, I’m not going to shy away from using it as the embroidery cover is hard wearing, like a tapestry and can be removed from the insert to be washed.

This iconic image has added a  beautiful focal point to my room, one that isn’t framed and on the walls. It’s more effective as a one-off furnishing rather than many “paintings” together which could look too deliberately worldly.

Have you got any original pieces of artwork? How have you displayed them?

Creating a home that you feel happier is so much easier in your mind than it is in reality. Because home decor can take a lot of work, even when you want it to look really natural. When you have some stellar ideas for what you’d like to achieve, more often than not, they end up staying as ideas. Whether you can’t find the inspiration you need to get started, or your budget is looking a little light right now, try not to be put off. Because you can create the stunning natural home that you’ve always wanted, you just need to take it step by step.

Start With The Colours

When you’ve got too much to think about, you can often over-complicate things and stop yourself from just getting started. So, to strip things back so that you can actually start moving forwards, begin with something basic, like the colors you want to use. And because you’re looking to style out very natural vibes, this should be quite simple. To create the look you have in mind, stick with neutrals. Beiges and browns, soft greens, pink, or metallics can often work well in the home and will allow you to achieve a natural feel.

Pick The Perfect Base

When you’ve decided on the colors that you’re going to use, and you’ve started to work with the walls, you then can move on to the floor. Whether you’re decorating one room or several, keeping everything unified is often a great way for your home to look very natural. And you’ll find that the flooring choices you make can contribute to that. Going with something such as bamboo and cork flooring should help. Either can add a very natural feel to a space, which will help with the air you want to achieve.

Use Restored Furniture

When it comes to picking out the furniture, you can do this over time, or bit by bit. When you really want to add a natural element, you should think about working with wood and restored furniture in particular. To do this, you can either hunt through different antiques and vintage shops for bargains, or even restore old pieces of furniture yourself.

Stick To Natural Fabrics

To complement your use of wood, you should think about the natural fabrics you can bring into the space too. Whether you opt for hessian or even cotton, just make sure that you’re picking out soft furnishings that give a warming, homely feel to the space and keep to the neutral color palette you first picked out.

Style Out With A Touch Of Green

Finally, the last thing you may want to do is add in an element of green. But this doesn’t have to be in color alone. Plants can add a really calming and natural feel to your decor. Whether you want to add in some cool cacti or larger houseplants, you should find that you can really set off your natural theme with a little something living. Combined with the different natural textures you’ve picked out, you design should finally feel complete.

Our homes, if functioning as they should, are the places in which we feel the most safe and secure during our daily lives. Here is the place where we feel the most comfortable, the place where we raise our families and have the freedom to talk candidly about a bad working day. They’re the places where we invite our friends, and the places where we relax and stay cosy from the cold weather. However, if your home doesn’t have the most comfortable aesthetic that it can possibly have, it’s likely that your home feels clinical or has the potential to alienate you.

This is a sad state of affairs. A home can be a wonderful place to recharge your batteries, but only if it looks right. A home that doesn’t match your personal taste or simply feels unwelcoming or friendly can be as difficult to live within as one in a state of disrepair. For that reason, and if you do feel like this, it’s important to revolutionize the way your home looks, bringing in the decors that really speaks and means something to you. However, it’s important to understand that you’ll never get there if you’re not willing to make large changes and experiment, after all, that’s where the best methods of home improvement come from.

It’s how you inform your taste. If you feel like your home isn’t quite matching up to your tastes, or you have that sad feeling that opening the door to your home isn’t quite met with that feeling of complete and total freedom which you deserve to feel from the sometimes chaotic outside world, then following the tips in this guide could help you tremendously. Not only will they offer simple style advice, but they’ll give you large and revolutionary makeover tips which can simply help the problem be solved for good. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to simply improve the home for yourself. If you’re hoping to get on the property ladder and aim to redecorate without much previous experience of having done so in the past, it’s likely that following this guide will help you stay available for selling and attract a much wider audience than you might have done in the past.

We hope the tips help in both of these ways. Without further ado:

Electrics

The electric setup in your home largely dictates how well you can use your home. Faulty electricity, or too few electrical outputs can simply frustrate a homeowner. Not only that, but older homes might find their electrical setups wanting and in need of renovation. If purchasing a property, it’s always worthwhile to make sure that the integrity of the electrical system is strong. For example, overloading a room with electrical appliances is more than easy to do when the transformers are old or faulty. Hiring a qualified electrician to assess and improve the setup in your home is important, and will help you understand the places to avoid best if considering an extension or knocking down a wall yourself.

Blown Up Photo’s

Instead of doing the normal home decors thing and puffing up your walls with artwork which you have no real interest or knowledge of, why not decorate the rooms of your house with a form of real and substantial family celebration in the form of large photographs? They needn’t be limited to pictures of your family, as some people aren’t at the stage where having a family is feasible just yet. In this case, placing pictures on the wall of your achievements or tastes, such as your favourite cities, dreams and ambitions can make the property feel like it’s truly your space. It’s a great way to decorate the walls if you’re also renting, as renovating the property is usually legally impossible in these circumstances. This can serve as a nice middle ground.

Conservatory

If you’re looking for an extension to your owned property but have zero interest in all of the heavy stresses and investments that come along with fully adding another room, a conservatory could be your best bet. It’s the best way to add a room which is easy to install, available for heating as well as offering a nice middle ground between interior and exterior spaces.

Bay Window Conversion

Bay windows are often a feature of a property you purchase or rent, and not something you install yourself unless you’re building an extension. If you do have a bay window, switching up its utility can be a great way to change the aesthetic of your room. Why not change the space into an additional seating area, which instantly increases the size and amount of guests you can entertain in your room? If you feel that the room wouldn’t be suited to host more people, then why not simply implement a storage area which can help you declutter some of the mess in the room? Simply opening up the space can add a massive boost to the way a room feels. Bay windows are a property privilege, so be sure to use it.

Picture Walls

Take images that you love – family photographs, torn images from magazines or even prints you own – frame them and together on a feature wall. Images of different shapes and sizes have a bigger impact. Alternatively, if you’re not afraid to use your own art skills, why not get some stencils and create a mural? You could use a variety of motifs from floral to geometric to create something truly unique. What’s more is that it’s cheap and easy to implement. As they say, the best things in life are free, or in this case, the cost of paints and templates.

 

Recyclable Furniture

Reading that heading might have startled you. You might think we’re about to suggest throwing in a thousand pencils to create some form of recycled chair. However, that’s not what we’re suggesting. Recycled materials can come in many forms, be that reclaimed wood, simply reupholster and cleaning old furniture, to finding old goods on websites like Freecycle. It’s good to keep an eye on these resources because you’ll never know what you might find. You might acquire that coffee table you’ve been hoping to acquire for some time, or simply save a bunch of money finishing of the decors in an unfurnished flat. No matter your motivation, you’re sure to glean some form of positivity here.

One of my own upcycling projects included scavenging a front of a drawer from a local second hand furniture store and turning it into a cotton thread spool holder

Craft Wooden Furniture

Why not make your home YOUR home by crafting wooden furniture yourself? Luckily, access to woodworking shops if you haven’t one is only the cost of a rental. If you have your own garden space or garage, you might not even need to worry about that. Most people have a list of tools that can be needed to make cheap home repairs, but purchasing cheap tools is easier than ever to really complete your collection. What’s more is that standard woodworking practices aren’t difficult to learn, and can become addictive after some time when you finally see the fruits of your labour.

Identify Colors That Please You

A simply home change may be as easy as changing up what colors your walls are. People have different tastes when it comes to the colors they enjoy, and colors have been proven to have emotional effects on those who view them. However, this can work for the better or for the worse in the rooms of your home. Sprucing up the way a room feels and looks may be as simply as giving it a new coat of paint. If you’re living in a house which is decades old, it may still have

forms of wallpaper considered dated, and in this case painting over them can work wonders.

Textured wallpaper is now a thing of the past, so if you have that these days too it’s worth getting rid of in exchange for a better and lighter looking color, such as hues of beige or light blue. Darker colors are best kept in rooms which don’t need much illumination. For example, a deep purple in your bedroom may actually help limit the light level at night and help you sleep much easier. It’s mostly all dependent on taste, and you’re sure to enjoy your home space more if you keep this in mind.

Craft A Positive Space

Your home space says a lot about you, and so making it positive can inform your personality, as well as your personality informing your home. Make sure the home is welcoming by installing new lighting features, friendly ornaments such as small figurines of the Buddha or Himalayan salt lamps, as well as a generous use of candles (electronic or authentic.) A home space which is cosy and warm, especially in the winter, is one you no doubt desire to spend your time in.

These tips will help your home take on a new and beautiful light.