Nice Home Live

Outdoor playground sets ensure a safe and fun medium of learning for children. These play sets offer a lot of developmental benefits for children, and with the help of these sets your children can play freely. This will help them in inculcating their emotional and mental development. When children play in a structured environment like a playground, they start developing their spontaneous imagination and this is very important for developing their strong sense of well being. Playing with other children or their friends will help your children to foster a feeling of togetherness, which will manifests itself during their adult life.

With the changing times, children’s playgrounds have changed from just monkey bars to swing sets. Modern playgrounds have rock climbing walls, wave slides, crawl tunnels, as well as steering wheels and telescopes. Playground creators keep in mind each and every aspect and then design the playgrounds for entertaining and satisfying a child’s curiosity. Read the rest of this entry »

A cottage garden is a great design if you have just built a kit home.   This sort of garden is filled with colour, with many flowering plants, including plenty of roses, snapdragons, pansies, peonies, poppies, sweet peas, lavender, hyacinth and other old fashioned flowers.  You need to first plan your garden, decide what you are going to grow and set up a few structures for your plants to grow over, such as a pergola.  Having climbing roses growing up the side of patios and other structures can really improve the look of your garden.

 Design

Draw up a plan of your garden space that is available around your kit home.  Work out where any pathways or structures will go then build your garden around them. Make sure you include any fences as well as any established trees.  Look at the garden during different times of the day so that you know which are shady areas and which parts of your garden will get full sun.  You will need to know this when choosing your plants because there are plants and flowers that do better with full sun and others do better in part shade.  Also plan what plants, trees and flowers you want to put in and whether they will work well together.  Think about which flowering plants are best suited next to others, in terms of what colours will blend well together.  Cottage gardens often look like a jumble of plants all thrown in together but there is actually a lot of work behind them.  Know what season plants will flower and arrange your garden so that you don’t have large bare patches without colour during the year. 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 »

The biggest investment most people make in their lives is their home.  They not only spend money on the house, but also plenty of time and effort.  Once your house is just the way you want it, you want to make sure that any guest you have over gets to see what you have done to the place.  During the warmer months, you may begin entertaining outdoors.  That does not mean your guests will not get to see the nicer aspects of your home.  It simply means you may have to highlight the house in order for them to notice.

Photo: Suman Chakrabarti

When it comes to entertaining outdoors, the time of day becomes very important.  If you entertain during the day, you will want to highlight the home in one manner.  At night, the effects are completely different.  The following are ways you can showcase your home from the outside in both the day and the night. Read the rest of this entry »