I have been loving this home trend: incorporating glass-paneled garage doors in place of windows and walls. It opens up rooms, and allows you to multi-purpose your space.
While I’ve noticed businesses latching onto this trend first, more and more homeowners are incorporating it into their homes too.
On Monday I talked about some quick fixes for your dining room. Today, some of my major overhaul ideas if you’re dining room just can’t be revived with small changes.
1. Knock Down Walls: One of the best ways to makeover your dining room, is to create the illusion of more space. My favorite way of doing this is creating “open plans,” which allow for direct flow of traffic between the kitchen living room and dining room. Open plans will make your home feel bigger since you’re eliminating some of the things that take up space, and confine your space, namely, your walls. Check out these examples of an open plan home and how convenient and beautiful it looks to merge your kitchen, dining and often living room spaces.
2. Add windows: Let in the light! Nothing opens up a room and makes it like new more than natural light. Adding windows or making windows in a room bigger can make your space more inviting.
2. New Flooring: New flooring in any room makes it feel brand new. Replace carpet with hardwood, or maybe a new varnish to your hardwoods to give them a new look. This picture is a perfect example of what new flooring, and new windows can do to your dining room.
November, for me, means one thing: Thanksgiving! The food, the friends, the wine, and of course, the assortment of delicious pies.
Nothing makes Thanksgiving more enjoyable than the perfect space to enjoy it in. This week we’ll look at ideas, both big and small, for making the most of your dining room.
Some projects you can finish before your family arrives on the 27th, and others will take longer to plan and execute, but will bring greater, more noticeable results. This week we will look at major and minor ways to change up your dining room.
Part 1: Quick Dining Room Fixes
1. New Lighting : Adding a new light fixture not only adds a new focal point, but can also brighten up a room.
2. New Paint: Add a new coat of paint to a room. A new color scheme can dramatically change the look and feel of a room. Painting can be a great DIY weekend project, or just paint half of the room as seen here to make it an even quicker project:
3. A New Table: A dining room table can make or break your space. Make sure you have a table that fits the space you’re in, and that functions for your purposes for it. If you’re less than happy with your table, maybe it’s time to start scouting out a new one before the family arrives.
You might not think about your stairs that much. You know that they’re there, and you use them to get between floors, but when you think about remodeling, they are the last thing on your mind.
Well, maybe it should be the first. Check out these awesome ways homeowners revamped their stairs:
It’s Halloween today and for most, it means one of day of celebrating ghoulish, fall weather fun.
But, if you like darker palettes not just on Halloween, but all year round, here are some great ways to use a lack of color for amazing effect.
When using darker colors, lighting plays an important role. Notice how well the bright natural light plays against the darker interiors:
I love all the dark wood floors. These types of wood floors can be created with a coat of dark varnish color. It gives a classic aged, antique look:
Obviously this look isn’t for everyone, and honestly, while it has rays of elegance, I prefer much more vibrant color palettes, like in these previous posts:
Do you want to show your home some love, but don’t have the budget for all the projects you have in mind? Well, I just got an email in my inbox that could change all of that for you. If you’re a homeowner, and you think your home is deserving of some love, you could potentially get a free home makeover.
Rhom and Hass, a specialty materials company, and the Arbor Day Foundation are teaming up for the $pruce Up Your Home nationwide contest. All you have to do is enter a photo of your home and write 200 words on why your home deserves a spruce up.
The Grand Prize is an $8,000 home improvement gift card and a new exterior home paint job. Eight first place winners will receive and new exterior paint face lift.
What have you got lose, right? The winners will be announced on National Arbor Day, April 29, 2009.
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There is such a thing as a bad lofted bed. I experienced this as a kid when I got the chance to pick out bedroom furniture for the first time. I chose, of course, the coolest bed ever: It had a desk and a bookshelf underneath it, and I got to pretend I was sleeping in a tree house. Only problem was, we picked it up from the furniture store in a flat box…and the only directions included were in Russian. After one failed attempt to return it, a lot of cursing, hammering and some crying, I had my loft bed, and it was actually assembled in my bedroom.
However, there are good loft beds out there that you won’t have to agonize over foreign directions to get. In fact, it seems like lofts have gotten even cooler since I was 12. For example:
Is your guest bedroom getting to be a burden? You’re probably not the first one to think that. Whether it has started to become wasted space or on the flip side: overwhelmed by the odd conglomeration of stuff that seems to appear in there, the clutter has to go to if you want your guests to actually have a place to sleep.
A lot of the problems seem to stem from not knowing how to have a guest room that can multi task in a happy medium. You don’t want the room to be restricted only to house guests, since most people aren’t going to be having visitors with enough frequency to warrant such sole-purpose dedication. So naturally, we want these spaces to be at least a little bit multi-purpose. Whether they house our personal libraries or double as home offices, most of us don’t have enough space for the guest room to be only that.
Good Ideas to Get Your Guest Room Going
A good way to squeeze some extra use into your extra room is to start with furniture that has a fairly open design style, enough so that you can see the floor through a pane of glass or other portion of the furniture. Using this type of furniture works to make the room feel bigger, which is a great attribute when you need it to be multi-functional. Even in the smallest of spaces if you use this approach, you can keep the feel of the room more open.
The guest bed is another good place to look when you’re after space saving, multi-purpose solutions for your guest bedroom. A single bed can double as a couch; think a much more updated variant of the daybed. For some reason I see ruffles when I heard the word daybed. I like the idea to ditch the frame altogether to cut down on clutter, and cover the bed in simple floor length fabric and finish it with oversized pillows to make the back of your new ‘couch.’ That way, you’ve got a good space to curl up with a magazine as well as a comfy place to host your nephew from the midwest next week. No ruffles, no problems.
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