It is extremely common for a home-owner to grow bored with the look of their home after a while. Some people will consider a complete makeover, others still may even contemplate more drastic measures such as moving residence. Both of these can extremely time-consuming and costly options. It doesn’t have to be this way though; you can easily revitalise your home by simply rearranging or purchasing furnishings.

Rugs

Rugs are one of the simplest and cheapest methods of enhancing the look of a living space. There are innumerable styles and designs, of which you can often get them in a variety of colours or patterns.

Furniture

If you have a small budget, you could just rearrange your existing room’s layout to make it seem fresh. And sShould you have a bit of cash to spend, why not just go ahead and buy a few new pieces of furniture?

Emulsion paining can be a tiresome job, especially when you have to do more than a couple of coats to get an even coverage. So image your fury when you have to start the job from scratch and apply further coats because of a problem with the paint.

Although it was more common a few years ago, many people still suffer from wall odour phenomenom. This is when for some unexplicable reason the wall starts to smell after it’s been painted. And we don’t mean a a faint paint smell, we mean a putrid smell that resembles cat pi**. Paint manufacturer’s are stepping back from the problem and saying an unfortunate reaction with a mould on the wall is the cause.

We are not amused.

You can’t even stop the smell by applying another coat, the only way to stop it is by first applying a coat of plaster sealer on the paint then painting the walls again. This stops the smell coming through. And can mean around three additional coats of paint and one very annoyed customer and one very annoyed painter.

Has anyone else experienced this? We’d like to hear your thoughts.

We’ve all been there - we have to do a painting job and we have to do it quickly. Whether for business or pleasure, most of the painting jobs we do all have to be done with a degree of perfection. And you can get this easily and quickly if you follow the seven step guide:

1) Bare wood needs to be primed and undercoated. You can get an all-in-one product that should do the job
2) The surface should be sanded to remove roughness and any unevenness.
3) The undercoat can then be applied.
4) The surface can be sanded again.
5) The surface can get a top coat of paint.
6) The surface can get a final light sand.
7) the final layer of top coat can be aplied

When you’re doing any DIY you need to make sure that you get things right from the start. If you start the job in a bad frame of mind you’ll find that the job will take longer and it will usually be a shoddier job than if you spend a little time and attention to detail.

As an estimate we’d say that approximately 50% of the work you do in any DIY job is preparation work. This includes things such as stripping wallpaper, sanding woodwork, removing old fixtures and fittings or even just moving furniture around.

If you take your time during this preparation process you’ll often find that the level of finish you get is much better too.

DIY stores have expanded rapidly over the last few years as many people resort to doing work in their homes themselves in an effort to save money. Where once a homeowner might have just wielded a paint brush, they are now fitting floors themselves and even carrying out tasks such as making modifications to the plumbing or electrics in their home.

All this means that the standard of workmanship in some homes is downright appalling and what may look good on the surface, generally hides a botch job underneath. It’s for this reason that we’d always recommend getting a thorough survey before buying a house. And if you need to do a job in the house, make sure you’re capable of doing the job and have the right skills. If you don’t know what you’re doing, get a tradesman to do the job and you’ll also get a better finish.

One of the easiest ways to spruce up a room is to give it a lick of paint. Painting a room doesn’t take a lot of time, just a little effort and a little dedication. If you plan well ahead you can give the room a new lease of life in just a day.

1. In the few days prior to decorating start to remove ornaments from the room and give it a good clean.
2. If the wood work (skirtings/windows don’t need painting just give them a wipe over
3. Emulsion paint can be applied using brushes or a roller if you want a speedy job
4. Cover all the things that can’t be removed from the room such as carpets and sofas before you begin
5. Paint all the tricky bits first and then fill in the gaps
6. If you have to paint over the walls again to get even coverage

We don’t normally advocate the use of one-coat paints, but if you want a job done quickly, these are the best type to go for.

If you are about to start decorating one of the rooms in your home, it may be worthwhile taking a step back to work out your plan of attack.

Preparation is the key

Before you open any of the cans of paint you have purchased from your DIY store you should look at a few things:

• Are your electrical sockets in the right places?
• Do you need to strip any wallpaper from the walls?
• Make sure all surfaces that are to be painted are sanded so that they provide a key for the new paint to attach to.
• Take out all items from the room that can be easily removed
• Cover the floor with suitable dust sheets

If you dive headlong into the painting you won’t get the best results from your DIY project.

When you have laid all the planks, you can fit the beading around the edges of the room. Beading is usually available in the same colour as the floor you have chosen and simply needs to be tacked into place to the skirting. The beading provides a nice finish to the floor as well as hiding the expansion gap.

Next you have to fit the room threshold. Thresholds can also be bought in the same type of wood as your floor covering or in aluminium or brass types. The threshold differentiates where the floor ends and is usually fitted at doorways. If you have different types of floor coverings in the room, you can also buy thresholds that are really long in length so can divide a room perfectly.

We have talked a lot about finding the right type of wooden flooring and leaving it to acclimatise, be we have said little about fitting a wooden floor over the last three articles. In this article we will discuss fitting a wooden floor over a concrete subfloor.

When you fit a wooden floor over a concrete subfloor you need to make sure you use a damp proof membrane between the floor and the subfloor. If you don’t, damp will rise into the wood from the concrete and cause buckling and warping. After installing the damp proof membrane you can lay the underlay and then start to lay your wooden floor.

If you are using click flooring, the planks will go down easily, you just need to make sure you leave an expansion gap so the floor can float.

When you have decided on a type of wooden flooring and have had the flooring delivered to your home, it’s imperative that the flooring is left in the room where it will be fitted for a minimum of 48 hours. This is called acclimatising the flooring.

Wooden flooring will have been kept in completely different conditions to the conditions in your home. The temperature and the humidity in the warehouse where the flooring has been stored may make the flooring contract or expand when it warms up. If you fit the flooring before you leave time for this to happen to the individual planks, the floor may buckle or warp when fitted and hence your newly fitted floor will be ruined.