Nice Home Live

If you are buying, building or renovating a home there are many decisions to make regarding the design and decorating of your home.  Choosing the right flooring is an important decision and can influence many other design factors of your home. You might choose tiles, carpet, timber floor boards or even have a polished concrete floor. Do remember that floor coverings, like carpet are not covered by your home insurance so you will need to include this in your contents insurance.  As your carpet can be removed it comes under the heading of ‘contents’, just like your furniture or your Westinghouse fridge.

Photo: Pecma

Lifestyle
You need to consider your lifestyle when choosing your flooring and how much traffic you have through your home.  When you have children you should be choosing a more hard wearing carpet or having a surface that is easy to clean, like floor boards.  If you entertain often then you might also want to think about a more hard wearing flooring, like tiles or floor boards.  If you have children and are putting in carpet then choose a style that is more hard wearing and practical.  Don’t pick a light colour that will show stains and dirt too easily or one with a plush pile.  Hallways and living areas have a lot of traffic so you might want to have tiles or floor boards.  Kitchens and bathrooms are obviously areas where you have a hard surface, and wet areas, such as the laundry and bathroom, are best to have tiles. Read the rest of this entry »

While you may not want a permanent transformation in your home for Halloween, you’ll definitely want to decorate your property, especially if you’ve got little ones to please.

Photo: Marissa Babin

Traditionally, colours associated with the Pagan event tend to include orange and black, with green and purple tending to be linked with witches, but all of these are perfectly apt if you’re decorating. Whether you’re making your home Halloween themed to entertain children or adults, you’ll need to have some basic things strewn around to make sure it looks the part. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you have finished building your kit home you can look at putting on the finishing touches.   Kit homes come in many designs and suit both rural and suburban areas as well as being a great style of home for use as a beach house.  You can have a kit home with either timber or steel frames, with steel being particularly good if your property is close to bushland as it is more fire resistant as well as being pest resistant.  Finish your new home off by adding a patio or a veranda and putting in a garden.

Garden
A garden will improve the look of a kit home and will also increase its value.  If you have built your new home on a vacant block  you can improve the look of your home with plants, trees and an area of lawn.  If you have children you might want to put in a play area with swings, a sand pit and a cubby house. Design your garden first, know what you want it to look like and draw up a detailed plan.  Look at what will grow best in your area, check the soil type and get help from your local nursery. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve all lived in a street where one of our neighbours has managed to sell their property for what you’d consider as a ridiculously high price. Without any special features, they seem to have reeled in the right buyers one day and moved out the next, but how?

Photo: sean dreilinger

Did they have a smooth talking real estate agent who managed the deal flawlessly? Did they sell at the opportune moment? Did they spend thousands of dollars on spectacular advertising? They probably did all of these things and more – one thing they would have been certain to do is prepare the house appropriately. Read the rest of this entry »