Unless you’re a Stepford Wife, or employ a live-in maid, you’ve probably experienced that feeling of shock and distaste when you discover an ingredient lurking in your larder, desolate and forgotten and long past it’s best by date. It couldn’t possibly have been there for the past 2 years! You surely would’ve noticed an opened, half-used packet of chicken stock nestled between your foil and vat of cooking oil. Or maybe not.
Category Archives: Home & Design
How to Store Books
If, like me, you love to read, it’s safe to assume that your love extends to books and you therefore have a fair few lying around your place, spilling off shelves and towering precariously on your bedside table. In fact, books are a great practical as well as decorative item to have around the house; they provide colour, topics for conversation and show that you’re well-read (or at least you can pretend to be).
How to Create a Garden in your Tiny Yard
When I was younger having a swimming pool was a real luxury and anyone who had one in their garden was extremely lucky (and probably quite well-off to boot). Nowadays, swimming pools are usually installed on roofs and balconies because it’s having a garden that has become the luxury!
Unless you manage to buy a house that was built a few decades ago in a time when gardens and houses came hand-in-hand, your current abode is more likely to have a small area towards the back of the house from which you can spot a patch of sky and which was likely sold to you as a yard, although it’s more of a hole. Either way, it’s yoursand you want to make the most of it, so even if you won’t be planting any citrus groves anytime soon, you can still create a space in which to sow plants and flowers and call your garden.
Low Maintenance Living
Most people own a lot of stuff; more stuff than they really need or even realise that they have, yet somehow it’s accumulated over time and has taken up residence in that corner of the room, or under the bed, or up there on those high shelves that are never really touched.
And it’s because this stuff has found a home and blended into the background of our lives that we don’t realise the sheer amount of what we hold and hoard. Afflicted with the mentality of ‘I won’t throw it away because I might need that shoelace/rusty nail/single toy car wheel one day’ we place things in drawers and boxes assuring ourselves that we’ll remember where everything is when the need arises. Naturally this rarely, if ever, happens – neither the need nor the remembering. Yet we keep adding to our hoard of stuff, always buying more and never throwing anything away. Until one day, something happens when we have to deal with the clutter; whether re-decorating or moving house we suddenly realise that we have a high maintenance style of living.
Customising your Furniture to Customise your Home
There’s that feeling of awe, and possibly a tiny bit of jealousy, when you enter someone’s home and it’s completely unique, yet still very much put together in terms of style. They seem to have the ideal bits of furniture, perfect soft furnishings to complement them and to top it all off, they’ve even got just the right design for everything.
Most people have ideas and visions about the way that they want their house to look, and dream up their ideal pieces of furniture which will have the exact dimensions to fit into ‘that awkward corner’ or ‘the useless space in the hallway’. Unfortunately that ‘perfect furniture’ is unlikely to be readily available in shops.