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Home Improvements

Home Improvements

5 Tips When Preparing Your Home For A New Family Member

Welcoming a child into a home means a number of important changes to both lifestyle and property design. Outside of the most fundamental safety considerations, there are useful changes that can support parenting and comfort, ensuring that family members are happy in their living space together.

For first-time parents, the prospect of expanding a family can be daunting. To then also consider adapting the home to a new family member is an even more troubling prospect. However, there’s little need to worry and even equipped with only our five tips can the foundation of a home be more appropriate for those welcoming a new family member.

Dedicated Storage

Even the most careful of parents will likely find themselves in a state of surprise, suddenly finding themselves with certain essential items or even enough food for their own dinner. It’s part of parenting and an occasional result of sleeping less.

Being prepared, however, simply requires having dedicated storage and ensuring that it is appropriately filled with dry goods. This could be nappies and napkins or tinned foods and spices. With a space dedicated to such stock, parenting becomes far less stressful and even the surprises can be swiftly overcome.

Expanding Space

Those who live in an already full home, whether due to size limitations or amount of belongings, may need to consider expanding their living space to welcome a child. Many parents go through this process and the most common outcomes are extensions, log cabins, and annexes. Such designs add a significant portion of living space to a home, allowing the utility to be shifted elsewhere. Home offices and hobby rooms, for example, can be moved into the garden while spare rooms are dedicated to a new family member.

Create A Monitoring System

Comfort with a little one can be difficult, which is why monitoring systems are essential. Traditionally, parents have made do with a rudimentary audio setup. However, technology has progressed (and become more affordable) allowing video systems to be more easily adopted. Such assets can allow parents to monitor a home fully, even from their mobile devices, ensuring families are kept safe at all times.

Babyproofing

A common phrase that cannot be overstated is babyproofing. Little ones, especially when they get to an age that allows them to crawl and walk, are inherently curious and clumsy. This is a dangerous combination in an environment like the home that is generally designed for adults. As such, parents must bring themselves down to a child’s level and ensure everything is safe. This doesn’t mean simply locking cupboards and covering corners, but also assessing furniture and its stability too.

Double Your Comforts

Isolating items, such as bedding, to one portion of the house can lead to frustration over time, especially as little ones tend to create a number of unexpected situations. By duplicating items, such as blankets, bottles, and towels both upstairs and downstairs, new parents can always ensure that everything they need is accessible quickly and without the need to trek upstairs and downstairs too often.

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Home Improvements

5 Summer Designs For Your Home Renovation

There are very few interior designs that make the most of each season and, as such, homeowners should be willing to embrace flexible designs while making seasonal renovations a part of their annual routine. Lighting shifts and temperatures are two significant factors that can change the way a design is received. Cosy designs, for example, those that are embraced during winter, can become too stuffy during the summer. By embracing seasonality in design, however, living spaces not only continue to feel fresh but will be comfortable throughout the year, no matter what the season.

With summer on the horizon, here are five great designs to ensure your home is comfortable during a period of longer days and warmer nights.

Open Spaces

 While the act of enclosing spaces during winter benefits rooms by keeping them warmer, during summer it can be disadvantageous to divide living spaces. Instead, home designs should embrace light and airflow during the summer period, enabling spaces to become brighter and cooler.

As such, it is recommended that residents reduce the amount of furniture and decor in their homes during the summer months, storing them away to create more open spaces within their homes.

Floral Wallpaper 

Refreshing a space and making it more suitable for summer can be as simple as adding a bright and floral wallpaper to a room. Such additions can be even more impactful when they are added as a statement design, such as on a single wall or as a mural.

Wallpapers can be chosen for their exotic designs or even their embracing of elegance and beauty, harkening back to vintage aesthetics such as chinoiserie, which are becoming more popular among interior designers.

Cabin Escapes

 Having an outbuilding can change the way residents view their garden spaces. The part-interior part-exterior space that is offered by such structures like log cabins and annexes is ideal for bringing various activities out of the home during summer.

This could be as regular as dining in a covered space, one that remains open to a garden environment, or as specialist as creating a bespoke sunroom within which to practice yoga.

Exchange Curtains 

Curtains are an excellent way to prevent drafts and help a room to feel cosy. During the summer, however, swapping out curtains for light and airy alternatives can help a room to feel better ventilated and softer too, especially with the presence of a greater amount of natural light. 

Natural Materials 

In the same way that floral designs can help a room to feel more open to nature, the materials used to construct furniture and decorations can also benefit a living space’s atmosphere during the warmer season. Materials such as cork and wicker, as well as lighter woods like pine, can elevate a room’s sense of weight, especially when compared with darker woods and stone.

The same is also true for fabrics. Thick wools and velvets can lose their sense of comfort during the summer, being weighty and dense. By exchanging them for lighter and brighter alternatives, such as linen and cotton, homeowners can make their homes feel better on warmer days.

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