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Your Guide For Coastal Living

Are You Thinking About Getting a Pool? Here’s Why You Should Be

Date March 14, 2019 Category Renovating

Swimming Pool

When many people get their landscaping plans underway with their landscapers in Dalkeith, particularly with a generously sized yard, they may begin to imagine a swimming pool taking pride of place in the fenced section. However, as quickly as you come up with the idea, many naysayers start to talk it down.

The truth is, building a swimming pool in your yard has so many benefits – many of which you may never have thought. All you need is expert help and a bit of enthusiasm, and you can get the process underway. Here are a few of the many reasons why it might be time to get a new swimming pool.

Good For Your Health

Swimming is one of the most advantageous forms of physical activity, and only an hour of it every day can burn as much as 500 calories. If you don’t have much time or love for pounding the pavement, add a swimming pool into your landscaping plans. You will be surprised at how much slacker those pants feel around the waist!

Increase Your Home’s Value

The average temperature in Australia in summer is 30 degrees-Celsius, and even the average low temperature of 15 degrees isn’t all that cold. As a result, it’s clear to see that no matter the season, swimming pools are going to be in demand. Many homeowners want them, and many homeowners-to-be seek them out. You may find the market for your pool increases your property’s value.

Identifying The Best Places For Fire Protection Equipment In Your Building

Date September 3, 2018 Category Home Maintenance

Fire Protection Equipment

Fire extinguishers and other fire safety equipment are essential for maintaining the safety and security of your business. The experts at Integral Fire Protection advise that as long as they are properly trained, your employees and anyone else on site can use fire protection equipment to extinguish or manage a fire until professional fire fighters arrive. When used right, smoke detectors and fire alarms can alert people to a problem in plenty of time, allowing the area to be evacuated if necessary.

However, it is important to note that fire safety equipment is only effective if it is placed in the right areas, accessible to everyone and in working condition. Consider the following when identifying the best places for fire protection equipment in your building.

Accessibility:

First, you have to make sure that all fire safety equipment, including things like fire blankets and extinguishers, are located in an easily accessible place. Make sure that they aren’t locked away in a storage cabinet somewhere, or they will be absolutely useless in case of a fire. In the same way, make sure that they aren’t stored in a cluttered area where they will take a few minutes to find, because you simply won’t have a few minutes if a fire does break out in your building.

How Can Having A Clean Office Help Your Business?

Date July 15, 2018 Category Home Maintenance

Clean Office

When it comes to owning and running a business, there are a few small things that you can do to put yourself ahead of your competitors. One of these is making sure that your office is always clean and sparkly, ideally by using the services of an experienced professional commercial cleaner. Having a clean office can help your business in several ways. It will make you seem more reputable, it will make your workers more productive, and it will make it a much nicer place to spend your time.

Professional commercial cleaners advise that some of the ways a clean office can help your business include:

It Will Give A Professional First Impression

Nothing gives a poor first impression more than a messy or disorganized office. When a potential customer or client walks into your business, they immediately begin to notice things on a subconscious level. Although they may not look around and think “This place is messy; I’m going somewhere else”, their brain will be telling them that they should think about taking their money elsewhere. Make sure that your work space is clean and tidy, and you will be well on the way to making a great first impression with your clients.

It Will Make You More Productive

A messy, disorganized work space has never been and will never be favourable for productive work. If your office is messy, you will find that your mind is often confused and disorganized as well. If you have to look for things in your office, you might waste a lot of time searching through piles of clutter or junk, instead of simply taking it from its place on the shelf.

If you suffer from unproductive work time, consider employing a commercial cleaner to help you tidy up your office. Doing this should help you get more done every day, which should make your business more profitable and successful.

How to Start Fencing as Business

Date June 10, 2018 Category Renovating

Fencing Business

If you are the kind of person who is tired of the 9-5 rat-race, you may have considered starting up your own business. If you have handyman skills and love working outside, you may do well as a fencing contractor. As long as there are people purchasing homes, suburban blocks will need fencing. In rural districts where larger properties are being subdivided there are also plenty of fences to construct.

So how can you start up such a business? First of all, register for an Australian Business Number (ABN) and make sure you know how to keep records and accounts. You may need the following equipment, depending on the kind of fences you are building.

A ditch digger for digging out a trench for footings
A vehicle suitable for carrying such equipment, plus the materials for the fence
A license to drive it
A concrete mixer
Small fencing tools such a hammers, crow-bars, shovels and wire strainers
A wheelbarrow
A tractor and posthole digger or post driver if you are in a rural area
Sturdy boots, work clothes, gloves and a hat
Business cards/brochures. These can easily be done by anyone with a few computer skills.

You will need to think of a name for your business and you could even have a logo designed for it. However, the latter is an extra cost that is not essential at the beginning, especially if you are starting on a slim budget.

The Basics of Plumbing

Date May 22, 2018 Category Home Maintenance

Basics of Plumbing

When a plumbing job comes up suddenly, they are classified as an emergency.

It might seem like the problem appeared out of nowhere, but the fact is that we all seem to ignore the signs – a leaky pipe dripping tap or a shower drain that does not run out as quickly as it should.

5 Things To Do Before Moving House

Date January 23, 2018 Category New Home

Moving House

People choose to relocate to a new home for many different reasons. Often, it might be caused by a new job in another area, the need to be closer to family or schooling, or the purchase of a new home. Whatever your reason for moving, you’re sure to find there is a lot to take care of. In fact, the moving process, while undertaken in one day by professional removalists, can often take weeks of planning.

To make the moving day that little bit less stressful, we’ve compiled a list of five things to do before moving house. Taking note may just spell the difference between a nightmare and a dream for your family.

Declutter

Take the opportunity before moving day to clear out possessions you no longer need or use. The benefits of doing this are huge. You can not only enter your new home with a clean slate and no junk, but you can also make a few extra dollars by selling off furniture you don’t need, or toys and clothing that your children have grown out of.

7 Benefits of Hiring Professional Landscape Designer

Date October 23, 2017 Category Home Design

Landscape Designer

When planning and designing your landscaping it’s important to hire an expert instead of trying to self-create the features. This is because landscaping entails a unique balance of magnifying the natural features surrounding your house to create an attractive and functional environment.

This affair by itself is a complexity that may not be easy to entangle. This is why it’s easy to consider the following benefits of hiring a professional landscaper.

Idea generation

Good landscape designers have the expertise and experience to develop loads of ideas. Ideas formulation is a quality of human but in most cases to be abundant with ideas is an innate quality of a landscape designer. They are able to spin an idea and generate improved versions using their past experience and unique talent.

Site analysis

Every yard or garden is unique and belongs to a larger ecosystem. A landscape designer is bestowed with the right skills to comprehend the macrocosm that determines all the strokes of the design they create. They have the ability to interpret all the natural elements the influence the design within the area of focus.

Reasons to Add a Shade Sail

Date August 23, 2017 Category Home Maintenance

Shade Sail

Shade sails can add greatly to any business, but there are some types of business where they are very important. In any hot, sunny climate, shade is of primary importance to provide coolness and relief from the direct rays of the sun. When outside, almost everyone seeks shade on a hot day.

The exception may be children who are too busy playing to consider staying in the shade. The result is that they can get very sunburned and this can potentially cause cancer as they get older.

Shade for children

So if you have a business such as a day-care centre or pre-school, it is essential to provide shade for the children in their outdoor play area. This can best be done with shade cloth, which is a very affordable solution due to its light weight. It doesn’t have to have the same kind of strong framework and foundation that a roof would need, even one with no walls.

Engineered Wooden Flooring

Date June 19, 2017 Category Home Design

Wooden Flooring

When you talk about engineered timber flooring, some people get that glazed look on their face because the word ‘engineered’ has appeared in the sentence. “Oh, nothing as complicated as that, please.” So that means this type of flooring might go under the radar when a person is looking to refit their floors.

Why? Because it falls between the other, probably better-known options, laminate flooring and hardwood timber flooring. Engineered flooring is made completely from timber. The appearance you like so much is only in the few millimeters of the overall thickness, a bit like laminate flooring.

Engineered flooring is made up of layers, something like a hardwood layer of oak or even jarrah, just a few millimeters thick, which is affixed to a base of strong plywood.

Very Popular

Engineered timber flooring is the best of both worlds and it has risen in popularity over the years. Even though the original timber, be it oak or blackbutt, is as little as 2mm thick, the look and finish is identical to that of a floor laid with solid oak or blackbutt.

Know your Lawn Turf

Date April 19, 2017 Category Home Maintenance

Lawn Turf

When you are wandering through a Home Depot or related store checking out the roll-on turf, or even if you play golf and you see great expanses of turf on fairways, in the rough, around bunkers and on the greens, your mind goes into overdrive as you picture this type of turf in your own yards – front and back.

Most enthusiastic, and sometimes inexperienced gardeners, are let down in their attempts to create those beautiful landscaped lawns, because they didn’t check the type of lawn turf that best suits their soil, climate and situation.

Your lawn is like a painting canvas and the frames are the garden beds and landscaped areas. Did you know your lawn absorbs sound, that it produces oxygen, that it attracts and traps dust particles, it prevents soil erosion and helps reduce pollution? Let’s not mention what beautifully kept lawns do for the value of your home.

This is all great news and additional knowledge to some, but only if you have selected the right turf grass in the first place.

Tips for Making Your Home Easier to Live in

Date February 12, 2017 Category Home Maintenance

Many homes have all anyone could possibly want for a pleasant life, yet there are still quite a few older homes that are not up to modern day standards. These days we need the kind of amenities that weren’t even thought of in our parent’s day. Many of them include things that use gas or electricity, so it’s essential to have an experienced electrician install them.

Australian standards require most electrical things to be installed by licensed electricians when doing home renovations or maintenance even something as simple as a ceiling fan. Having all the modern amenities makes a home much more pleasant to live in and reduces stress in a lot of cases.

When you feel way too hot or cold, your body is under stress and that means you feel stressed out emotionally as well. And when parents are stressed, they snap at the kids who then get upset and the whole problem escalates until even the cat goes into hiding.

Here are some tips to make your life more pleasant in the home.

If you live in a hot climate, install air conditioning and ceiling fans as well.
If your climate is cold, make sure you have really good heating that goes into every room.

10 tips to Make Your Pool More Eco-Friendly

Date December 16, 2016 Category Home Maintenance

pool-more-eco-friendly

Even though most pools are not the most environmentally friendly things on the planet, people still love them. There is nothing quite as refreshing as a swim in the pool on a hot day. There are several ways you can make your pool more eco-friendly; even using a pool cleaner more often can help by reducing the need for as much chlorine.

Here are some more tips to make your pool more eco friendly

Use one of the robotic pool cleaners that also skim the top of the pool to remove surface debris before it sinks. A cleaner pool requires less maintenance such as back-washing, which wastes quite a lot of water.

How to Add Cottage Charm to a Modern Kitchen Design

Date November 24, 2016 Category Home Design

Cottage-Modern-Kitchen

If you ask Colray Cabinets, the modern kitchen is known for its sleek, neutral colours and minimalist look. If you have a kitchen design like that, but are not totally happy with it, try adding some cottage kitchen elements to it. They can mix and merge with what is already there, offering workspace that is user friendly and functional, but still pretty in that warm, charming way the cottages of yesteryear had.

So how can you add the look and feel of a country cottage kitchen to your modern one? Here are some tips.

5 Benefits of Adding a Carport to Your Home

Date October 24, 2016 Category Renovating

carport

If you don’t have anywhere to house your car, adding a patio or carport to your home will have many benefits, not least being the fact that your car will be protected. Leaving a car out in the weather is the best way to see it degrade over time, with that nice mirror finish soon looking less than pristine and rust forming in places you probably can’t see.

However, it is not only the car that will benefit from having shelter. You will find when taking out car insurance that one thing you will need to fill in is whether you keep the car out on the street on if it has a locked up garage. If the former is true, your car insurance is likely to be more expensive. Even if you keep the car locked in an open yard, it is still liable to vandal damage as well as damage from the weather.

4 Ways Aluminium Doors can Enhance Your home

Date September 3, 2016 Category Home Design

Aluminium-Doors

Once, windows and glass doors had to be framed in timber, which had to be kept painted to prevent warping and twisting. Timber frames made the doors much heavier so design and use was limited. These days there are aluminium frames which are amazingly light, yet strong enough to hold that glass in place. They don’t have to be painted because the colour is already there. The lighter frames meant that doors especially, can be used in ways that were once impossible. Here are four ways in which aluminium doors can enhance your home.

You can remove a whole wall and replace it with bi-fold aluminium framed glass doors. This allows the outside to be easily accessed, gives more natural lighting and enhances your living space. Having breakfast or supper on a warm spring day with all the kitchen doors opened into the garden or the veranda has to be much more enjoyable than sweltering in a closed up room. It’s like enjoying the outdoors without having to go out there.

7 Advantages of Glass Fencing for Your Pool

Date June 1, 2016 Category Home Design

glass-fencing

Everyone who has employed a Sydney pool builder to build themselves a nice pool for their home knows that it is essential to have a safety fence around it so that toddlers and children cannot fall in and drown when you are not watching. However, traditional pool fencing has relied on steel rods to perform the task of keeping children out where they are safe. Such fencing may do a good job, but it is less than attractive and can make a small space look and feel even smaller. That is where glass fencing comes into its own. Here are some of the other advantages you will find with glass pool fencing.

It is aesthetically pleasing. Frameless glass pool fencing means that you can see right through it with nothing to spoil the view or cut your yard in half. Since you can see through it, you can keep an eye on the children without having to sit right by the pool.
The spigots that contain the glass sheeting and keep it upright can be of stainless steel or anodised aluminium. They are firmly attached to the concrete base and quite short so they are not intrusive to look at.

7 Advantages of Colorbond Roofing for Your Home

Date March 21, 2016 Category Home Design

Colorbond-Roofing

These days, more than ever before, Colorbond roofing is a popular choice for people building homes, whether they are upmarket homes or more affordable ones. Once, the roof of choice was tiles, with corrugated iron being left for sheds and commercial buildings. But once Colorbond arrived with its large colour range and ease of transport builders soon found many other advantages of using this material for their homes.

While the simple silver colour of yesterday’s corrugated iron did not suit brick walls, the large colour range of Colorbond roofing means that there is a colour to suit every style and type of home and every building material. In fact, many people are turning to darker coloured roofs that seem to merge into their city surroundings or provide a foil for the surrounding countryside. The beautiful colours in Colorbond roofing have been derived from the many elements of the Australian countryside. Mountain mist, sea-spray, soil colours, eucalypts, rocks and even the sky have all played a part in the colour range.

Limestone As A Construction Material In Building Industry

Date November 9, 2015 Category Home Design

Limestone-As-A-Construction

Limestone has a wide variety of uses in home construction based on the numerous products into which it can be processed. Consultants who provide building and construction advice have recommended it over and above, it has been used in the building and construction industry for walls and floors on buildings. It can sometimes be hard to find the right material suppliers, searching for “building supplies near me” can help open up your options. This is in various ways as follows:

Limestone blocks used in building of structures such as houses
Stone cladding on walls – supplied by companies such as Meteor Stone
Retaining walls
Floor paving and tiles

Limestone blocks used in building structures
Limestone is well used for construction of both strong and durable structures, proven by some of the structures found in world history.

Limestone is first shaped into large limestone blocks then used as construction stone. It can also be sized into brick-sized blocks which are much smaller generally in physical size.

Some of the icons of world architecture such as the great pyramids of Egypt have been constructed purely out of limestone. The reasons why limestone is preferred for this specific use is:

6 Kitchen Renovations to Die For

Date July 17, 2015 Category Renovating

kitchen-renovations

If your kitchen is badly in need of renovating it is essential to know what kind of renovations are possible and what would best suit your lifestyle and tastes. A company like Kitchen Professionals will tell you that not everyone has specific tastes in kitchen renovations so it is wise to get some ideas and jot down those that appeal to you most. However, you also need to ensure that your kitchen becomes more functional as well as more attractive, while at the same time fitting in with the decor the rest of your home displays.

Finding kitchen renovations to die for is not difficult; you only have to Google the topic to find many wonderful pictures of lovely kitchens. What becomes difficult is incorporating the different elements so that they work together and don’t look odd with the rest of the home. For instance, you may really love exposed beams, but unless they are featured somewhere in the rest of the home they won’t look very attractive on their own in the kitchen.

If you are serious about having the best kitchen renovation possible but know that you could use some advice, it is wise to consult a professional kitchen renovator, one who specialises in doing kitchens only so that they can give you the benefit of their advice – and won’t try and talk you into renovating the rest of the home as well.

5 Tips for Choosing Security Fencing

Date May 16, 2015 Category Home Design, New Home

Security-Fencing

When it comes to security fencing, most people think in terms of keeping people out, but in fact keeping people or animals in is often more essential. When you think what would happen if your toddler or your doggie friend got out onto the street, you will soon see the need for the kind of fencing that will keep them safe. So how do you choose this kind of fencing?

The first thing to do before choosing any kind of fence is to check with the council to see if there are any rules and regulations about fencing in your suburb. It could well be that certain kinds of fencing are required, in which case you won’t have much of a choice.
If you do have a choice you will need to think whether privacy is also a requirement. Steel cladding fencing – or any kind of fencing that cannot be seen through – is the best for privacy. It can keep your dog from seeing another dog over the fence and barking at it all day long. And it can keep nosy neighbours from seeing what you are doing, while still keeping your animals and children safely contained.

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