House Design News

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• Four Surprising Cleaning Tips For a Sparkling Home
• 5 Awesome Ways to Put the Waste around Your Home to Good Use
• Beanbags – Not Just for Play Rooms!

Four Surprising Cleaning Tips For a Sparkling Home Posted: 21 Jan 2014 11:34 AM PST Everyone wants a home where they feel comfortable living. Many believe there is not only a purpose but a place for everything. However, others are not so concerned with keeping a home tidy. They drop items onto the floor upon entering a room and/or throw their items onto a couch or a bed. These people also tend to spill food or drinks and expect someone else to clean up after them. This only creates welcome areas for pests such as ants, roaches, mice, and bed bugs while making cleaning both time consuming and difficult. We clean our homes by wiping counters, sweeping and mopping floors, doing laundry, and spraying nicks and crevices. As a result, we become exhausted while exposing ourselves to harmful chemicals which can make us become sick or ill. Therefore, many companies have designed products with anti-bacterial and germ-fighting ingredients to ensure a healthier home. To do their part, experts and housewives have offered numerous tips for making a home sparkle. Here are four tips that may surprise you: (1) Wear rubber gloves and masks. Wear rubber gloves to remove unwanted, pet hair from upholstered furniture. Remove the hair simply by submerging the gloves into water. You may choose to wear disposable gloves to help save water or reusable gloves to minimize trash. Masks also come in handy if using a duster to reach high places such as shelves, crown moldings, ceiling lights, and light fixtures. Masks also help protect against allergic reactions to dust. (2) Remove smudges. Make a home-made solution of water and several squirts of dish soap. Dip a washcloth or rag in the solution. Wipe smudges from tables, counters, and baseboards. Be sure to take into consideration that corners and baseboards are easy places for pests to build their homes. (3) Clean the microwave. Place a microwave-safe bowl filled with lemon juice in the microwave. Bring the lemon juice to a boil by heating for 2-3 minutes. This loosens food and grease making the microwave easier to clean while leaving a lemony-fresh scent. As for the tray, remove it and clean with dishwashing liquid in the sink. (4) Smell the sparkle. Houses sparkle when adding shine and using streak-free products. However, to add a little extra sparkle to your home, consider using air fresheners and scented candles to release an aroma of fragrances. For more information on pest control, products, and services visit www.admiralpest.com.

5 Awesome Ways to Put the Waste around Your Home to Good Use Posted: 21 Jan 2014 01:24 AM PST Looking for ways to do your bit towards going green and saving the environment? If yes, home is a great place to start with. Most of us have already started taking care of simple things such as using water efficiently, conserving electricity, saving fuel, using eco-friendly products, and so on. If you’re looking to do more, recycling, reusing, and wasting less is a great idea. So if you’re ready to take project go-green-at-home to the next level, following are 5 ultimate ways to recycle and reuse waste and rubbish at home. Scratchpad or notepad out of justifyover notebook pages or printed paper Discarding your child’s old notebooks? Just go through the notebooks and you’ll find plenty of pages or sides that haven't been used at all. Neatly tear them away before disposing off the book. Have a look around your study area or even the living room. You’ll come across plenty of papers and pamphlets which have only one side printed. File all these unused sides together, orstaple them together in the form of a notebook to come up with a nifty scratchpad or notepad! Whether you use it as a telephone book to jot down contact number and addresses, or as a scrap book to put down notes, or even if your children use it as a rough book for their study work, these recycled notepads can come in so handy! Plastic bag dispenser We all know how harmful plastic bags are for the environment but no matter how hard you try, at times plastic bags are hard to avoid. If you must use plastic bags, try re-using them for as long as you can. To store all those irritating grocery bags and shopping bags that keep piling in your kitchen, you can create an ingenious plastic bag dispenser out of that huge 3 liter soda bottle from yesterday’s party. Invert the bottle, chop off the bottom and also chop off an inch or so from the mouth to make it wider. Hang the inverted bottle behind the kitchen door or mount it up using a drill, and your disperser is ready – a perfect way to store plastic bags for future use. Tin-can pencil holders or flowerpots Have a nice look around your kitchen – do you see any justifyover tin cans? You’ll be amazed to see how incredible these tin cans can look if you re-use them as pen-pencil holders or flower pots. First of all, clean the tin and leave it to dry. Once dry, bring out your paints and start smearing the tin cans with your favorite bright colors and you can also even give them funky patterns and designs. Imagine how stunning these brightly painted tin-can flowerpots would make your garden look! You can also use these awesome cans in your room, to store your pens, pencils, and other stationary supplies. Create a compost heap for your garden Wondering if there’s a way you can reuse all those vegetable scraps and other biodegradable waste rather than dumping it into the garbage bin? Yes, apparently there is a terrific way you can recycle all biodegradable waste from around your home – by creating a compost heap! Be it justifyover food, vegetable and fruit scraps, green waste, egg shells, paper waste, old newspapers, or even leaves and grass clippings, all these can be effectively recycled as compost for your garden. Compost not only gives you an epic way to recycle biodegradable waste, but also works wonders as a natural fertilizer, pesticide, and condition for your garden’s soil bed. Indoor herb garden from waste bottles Even the most committed go-green warrior can find it hard to avoid the usage of plastic bottles entirely. However, all those justifyover plastic bottles from last night’s house party don’t necessarily need to end up inside the garbage bin. Simply put your creativity to work and you can come up with some unique creations made out of justifyover plastic bottles. One such ingenious way to reuse plastic bottles is by using them to create your very own indoor herb garden. Cut the bottle into half and use the bottom half to grow herbs like basil, thyme, parsley, sage, cilantro, oregano, and mint. You can use bias tape on the sharp edges of the cut bottles – this also makes them look neat. Convert your window sill or your balcony into a mini herb garden and reap the benefits – literally! Leslie Kramer, the author of this post is a freelance blogger, who is currently writing for PerthBinHire, one of the most reputable waste management companies in Perth. Leslie is a wild life photographer and often participates in green living and waste management campaigns.

Beanbags – Not Just for Play Rooms! Posted: 20 Jan 2014 11:34 PM PST For too long have beanbag chairs been relegated to the status of a quirky purchase for the stylistically impaired or limited to those wishing to replicate the casual ambiance of the 1970s “flower power” era. Rarely is the therapeutic value of the bean bag considered, nor is its potential for enhancing child development. Unstructured beanbag chairs, for example, are excellent for developing a child’s gross motor skills as he tumbles and flops all over it, struggles to get out of it, or even just wiggles himself around to get it “just right”. Children learn from sensory experience and a beanbag chair covered in a fabric that has a pleasing texture and colour scheme AND forms any shape he wants will keep him amused for hours. If there’s one thing kids are famous for, it’s moods. How many times has a mother felt her heart jump into her throat when her child decides to fling herself backward onto the floor in a rage? One of a parent’s duties is to teach a child appropriate ways to express stress, anger, and frustration. Banging the head off the floor or hard-edged furniture is not entirely appropriate – however a quality beanbag can take all the punishment a furious child can mete out and then cuddle the exhausted tot for a soothing nap. Children love to exercise control over their environment and express their own individuality, but no parent appreciates coming into the living room to find the couch shoved halfway through the doorway and their “helpful” four year trapped underneath the coffee table! Beanbag furniture allows children to reinvent their surroundings because they are easily pushed, shoved, kicked, rolled, carried, flopped, and skidded anywhere the child wants to put them – even if it’s under the bed or the dining table. Beanbag furniture is easily brought outside and instantly usable on even the most unstable of surfaces, since they have no legs to stab down into the earth and send the occupants toppling over. No one can deny that the site of a tiny tot teetering along on her first steps is simultaneously a heart-warming and a heart-stopping sight, especially when she gets close to the wooden dining chair or metal coffee table! Beanbag furniture takes the worry out of her first steps – solid enough to give her something to grip, they’re soft enough for her to be safe on those times she falls face-down. Since young toddlers should never be justify unsupervised, what better excuse for mom or dad to sit on the beanbag cushion with baby and enjoy a rousing game of “The Grand Old Duke of York” or “Twenty White Horses”? The adult is down at the child’s level without having to suffer the discomfort of sitting directly on the floor and then having to get back up afterward. There is any number of developmentally valuable games that can be played using a beanbag: Hide-and-Seek, King of the Mountain, Peek-a-Boo, to name just a few. While the safety is excellent, since there are no corners and crevices in which little limbs could get trapped, perhaps the best feature is the ability to clean beanbag chairs without having to call in the professionals and then wait two days for the upholstery to dry. So go ahead, child, dribble and drool all over it – a quick swipe with a cloth and it’s good to go! This post was brought to you by UK-based beanbag designer and manufacturer Rucomfy Beanbags, a leading beanbag manufacturer of beanbag furnishings including beanbags, pet beds and cushions, for nearly thirty years.

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