Remodeling on Your Own

I recently renovated my entire fireplace, and I wanted to share my method with you all. It had bothered me for a while, the way it stood out from the rest of the house, and I wanted to do something about it.

The walls were white, and the fireplace was made of wood paneling and black grating. I didn’t want to put a lot of work on myself, so I didn’t really strip much of anything out. I mainly just worked with what was there.

I started with the frame for the fireplace. I had always thought a stone fireplace looked better than a wooden one, but I didn’t have the tools or training to do a stone fireplace by myself. And besides, that would have been very expensive to start fresh with new materials. So what I did was use a stone, patterned paper. This isn’t typical wallpaper though- I wanted something that could withstand the heat of the fireplace.

So I turned to my local home furnishings store and found a fire-resistant panel paper. It’s thicker and more expensive than typical wallpaper, but it also resists the heat, and it looks great. It’s not quite a stone fireplace, but the white and gray rocks are beautiful, and they match the rest of the room.

I also painted over the grating, using a white, fireproof paint. I know it won’t last forever, but for now it looks wonderful.

This was a fairly inexpensive project, and I ended up with a look for my fireplace that I’m happy with. It’s not quite enough to afford a chauffeured car to work every morning, but it does the job. If I wanted that chauffeured car, I’ll have to save money on a bunch of other projects.

images1But you can find easy and inexpensive solutions to a lot of home improvement projects just by substituting what you want for a close approximation. I did the same thing with my kitchen. I had wanted wood paneling in the kitchen, but found it was cheaper and simpler to just put wood-patterned paper over the cupboards and various kitchen fixtures.

If you’re on a budget with your home projects, these kinds of substitutions can be a great money saver.

Home Décor for Renters

Your art and décor plans may be elaborate, but if you are renting the place you live in, you may have to find some alternatives.

Temporary Décor

One of the most important pieces of advice I can give any renter is to make sure your décor is temporary. You probably aren’t allowed (according to the terms of your lease) to make alterations to the home or to put holes in the wall. This erases a ton of great décor ideasfrom yourplate,but it can also open the way to some interesting ones you might not have considered before.

Food-based or plant based décor could be just what you need to give yourself a hobby and spruce up your home. Decorations made fromfood or plants will often break down or deteriorate over time. But if you are decorating your apartment, it’snotgoing to be permanent anyway. So enjoy crafting a new decoration each month for your home. It will give you the opportunity to try something new constantly andkeep your place looking interesting.

Decorate with Furniture

images1In an apartment, your furniture can be your best decoration. It is notpermanent, and you can put it wherever you like and find it in any style you want. The choice of furniture is up to you.You may not have any control over where the walls are or what is attached to the ceiling, but you can definitely determine what kind of furniture is being used and where it should go.

You can even build your own furniture for something truly original. You might want to check with tree service companies to get some lumber for cheap. Tree service contractors often sell the parts of trees they remove and fell and sell them for reasonable prices. If you are interested in creating your own furniture, that can be the perfect place to start.

Guidelines to Decorating Interiors

There is no set of rules that interior decorators follow. There are certainly things youlearn to do well in order to become successful at decorating, but the best decoratorscouldn’t tell you how they do it exactly. But that being said, there are some basic principles that all interiordecorators tend to follow. These aren’t the kinds of things you have to study years to do well at either. They are simply hard and fast points that make any interior decorating job look a lot better.


Wait on Choosing the Paint

A lot of people who want their home decorated have a set idea of what the colour of the walls should be. But if you do this step first, then everything elsehas to come in line with the wall colour. And you may find that your decorations are actually more importantthan whatever colour you havechosen for your walls. It’s shocking, I know, but sometimes it’s better to do the paint colour last.
Besides, the paint colour you pick out for your room may not look quite the same once it is on the walls. Your light source may be different from what is in the store, and you should really take some time to think about how it will go with everything else you plan on putting in the room.

Makes Some Space

Once again, a lot of people have ideas about what kind of furniture they want in their rooms. But they may not be giving the furniture enough room to look its best. Rooms that are overcrowded with furniture may have some nice pieces, but the overall feeling will be cramped. And none of the pieces ever get to shine on their own. To really showcase your furniture, they need some breathing room. And if you focus on fewer pieces you can save your budget for the really great ones.

Placement Is Essential

Your art pieces may look great once you hang them up, but if you take a moment to step back and see them from a different angle, youmight be surprised how odd they look. The average art gallery hangs its art at the average human eye height. Your art should be hung in the same way. You want it to catch the eyes and not strain them. It really should not require that much effort to look at the art.

Considerhow much effort people put into weight loss. They try all sorts of methods and supplements, when Garcinia can do most of the work for them. Garcinia is a dietary supplement that really works and saves people tons of effort in exercising and calorie counting.

Similarly, art should be hung in a way that requires no effort to appreciate it. You can take a picture to get some perspective, and you may notice how off your original estimations were. It will then be easy to see if peopleare having to put in much effort to just glance at the art or if it is hung at the appropriate level.


The Importance of Antiques to Our Generation

When you walk through an antique shop, do you see a piece of garbage that belongs to somebody else? Or do you see a piece of history-something that has relevance to you, be in a tangential way?

Finding Worth in the Past

Antiques are really a part of our history. They show us where we came from and what life was like before the one we are living. They give us a glimpse into a past world and let us understand about the way people thought and lived. And those people’s lives relate to our in important ways.


The things that our ancestors did and the way they lived affects our lives now. It was their actions that shaped our world and their inventions that we use every day. You may not see anything of value when you look at antiques, but they were of value to someone. And that person may have done something of value to shape your life.

The past can serve as an important lesson to our present, but it can also open a window of understanding into why we do the things they do. If you want to understand the reasoning for anything that happens, you simply have to look into the past, however near or far that past may be.

The Value of Antiques

In an antique shop, each item is marked with a price. This is the value it is assigned. And while each item has a monetary value which can change with time and trends, it also has a historic value. This value can change as well. When interest peaks in a certain time period or a new invention comes along that was inspired by older inventions, it can raise the significance of older items that are not in use anymore.

We can look to these past items to understand why these items had significance in the first pace and see how their value fluctuates over time. We can also look to them as a lesson inhow not to do things. In the past, solarpower was unwieldy and expensive. It was made from parts that were hard to manufacture and materials that were limited in availability. Now the technology has advanced enough that solar power is affordable for most people, and it is very efficient at predicting power on a large scale.

Times have changed for solar power as they do for most scientific inventions. These things have to change over time, but looking back at their antique versions, we can still see some traces of their modern counterparts. We can see how iteration and ingenuity produced what we have now from what came before. And it can help us to see the value of our beginnings and the beginnings of everything in our culture. We can see those beginnings in the antiques around us.

Seeing Art in the Everyday

Stylish people have a way of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. They can find art and discover something to appreciate in everything they see and everywhere they go. These are the photographers among us, the painters, and the musicians. They may see things the exact same way as everyone else, but then they add their own interpretation on to it.

Gryphon Garage Doors

Gryphon Garage Doors

Art All around Us

I’ve seen this more commonly in parks and college campuses and in art schools than anywhere else. There people are encouraged to express themselves and find a new interpretation of something mundane. And when they are able to take something no one else would give a second glace to and make it into something beautiful, we can all appreciate their skill.

Many of the great works of art came about because someone had a vision that extended beyond what they could see. Great art is often a combination of reality and imagination, formed together in a perfect union. And while great art may not always be perfect, it can still be intriguing.

You’ve likely seen high resolution photos of people’s faces, photographed professionally. While you might not give that person a second glance in the street, you cannot help but be captivated by the detail on their face, the expression in their eyes and what is hiding behind that silent picture.

Appreciating What Others May Not Notice

Similarly, art can take things we would take for granted and make them exceptional. Something as simple as garage doors can become something so much more. Some artisans will take their garage doors and replace them with something more akin to the set of a science fiction movie or change up the materials of the garage doors to give them an entirely different feel.

They are projecting their own concepts onto the mundane and making an artistic statement in the process. Architecture is often a place where many artists go to express their ideas. Even if they are not architects themselves, the can use something as common as a house and turn it into a display piece.

This is the talent of those who are able to see art everywhere they go, and we can be thankful that they often show it to us to appreciate.