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How To Turn A Small Room Into A Castle When Your Forced To Rent

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Living at home is never easy when you can’t afford a place of your own. Your parents are probably the loveliest people in the world, but the amount of things you can do are very limited when you don’t have somewhere to call your own. After a while it could get to you and you’ll have no choice but to find somewhere. You shouldn’t let it get that far and start looking for a place right now. You could easily afford somewhere if you rented out a nice room. It’s still living with someone else, but at least it’s not your parents.

If you do decide to rent a room it could be hard if you’re not prepared. You won’t feel as comfortable wandering around the house, especially in the beginning when you’re not friends with the person you’re renting from. When that’s the case you have to make sure your little room is as comfortable as possible. If it’s not you will soon get fed up, because you have to spend a lot of time in your room by yourself. You can’t just get up and lay on someone’s couch when they want to watch TV. Do you know how you can turn your room into a castle?

Get the best bed your money can buy

When you spend more time that normal in the room it means your bed is something you’ll get quite friendly with. That means you should get one that’s as comfortable as you can possibly afford. The mattress especially has to feel like heaven when you lie down. Not because it will allow you to sleep better, but because you’ll spend hours laying in it at night reading books or watching TV. Go for gold and get very comfortable sheets and pillows to go along with it and you won’t go far wrong.

Squeeze in a computer desk

At home you maybe had a big desk in your room, or perhaps you even lay on your bed with the laptop on your stomach. When your room becomes your castle you will probably be spending a lot of time on the computer, so you want a little desk that you can sit at. It doesn’t need to be big because it probably won’t fit in the room anyway, but something good enough to feel like you’re important will make you feel much better and more grown up.

Buy a leather chair

You also want to get yourself a leather chair, which isn’t that expensive when you think about it. You could use a normal chair but eventually you will realize you’re not comfortable and you’ll get claustrophobic. If you never spent money on beer and pizza for a month you could probably get yourself one your backside would thank you for. It will become the centerpiece of your room and something you cherish. Especially if it reclines and you never end up reaching your bed at night.

Make it look as sexy as possible

When you were living at home I bet you didn’t treat your bedroom as an actual room. Not a grownup room, anyway. Did you still have your posters up that were there when you were a child? Now you need to forget about everything you had in the past. If you want the walls to be a certain color you can paint them, with permission of course. Buy some cheap art work for a touch of class. Something you will stare at when you walk into the room. Buy a big lava lamp if you think it will look stylish. Just start treating it like you would a room in your own pad and make it look sexy.

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Patrick Green is an avid blogger who writes informative and innovative blogs on home improvement, he is also writes web contents for sites like nahfloors.com.

Going Green: Renovations That Won’t Cost the Earth

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Must it always be a choice between what you want and what’s good for you? Being environmentally-conscious can be hard sometimes, but it doesn’t have to come down to living with a home that is aesthetically shocking. By using sustainable materials and smart energy-saving techniques, you can effectively spruce up your home and lessen the environmental impact it has on the earth.


Outside the Home

The key here is insulation. By properly insulating your house, you can greatly reduce your energy requirements, which helps to save you money as well as reducing your carbon footprint. Obviously the optimum solution is to hire an energy expert when you’re designing your home so you can install the correct level of building shell insulation, but if your property has already been built you can still talk to the experts to find out what can be applied.

There are multitudes of energy-saving options and many of them are also eco-friendly, involving long-wearing or natural materials being installed in your house. Cool roofs, double-glazed windows, and radiant barriers can all reduce solar heat transfer, while double-glazed windows, partitioned rooms and sealed doors will help to keep a house warm in colder climates.

Inside the Home

It’s natural to be a little apprehensive about applying sustainable principles to your home. After all, green is great, but not if the chair collapses underneath you! It might reassure you to know that sustainable materials can be some of the most durable and hard-wearing substances in the world. They’re also much more inclined to feel natural and lend elegance to the room.

One of the quickest ways to change the feel of a room is to change your window dressing. The correct form of blinds or curtains can assist with energy-saving measures, and there’s a large range of colours and materials available so you can brighten even the dullest of rooms.

Great materials to think about include natural wood, bamboo, marble and stone. Your floor and furniture should be the right mix of durable and recyclable and if possible, you should think about purchasing your pieces second-hand. There’s a great community of interior designers out there who love to adapt recycled materials like old tyres and whiskey barrels into quirky furnishings.

You might also consider purchasing modular furniture, that is, furniture which can be transformed by moving parts and used for more than one purpose. There are incredible designs that function as couches, beds, bookshelves, ottomans, tables and more – all with the one set. Purchasing this kind of furniture means you reduce the overall number of pieces you require. Combine this with buying modular furniture made of 100% recycled and recyclable material and you’re onto an eco-friendly winner!

Finally, when you’re thinking about interior accessories, you should consider the fact that these will be discarded more readily and more often than furniture. Invest in one or two pieces made from a strong material like marble or stone, and the rest can be comprised of materials like clay vases, wicker, river rocks and branches. Get creative and lend a touch of the wilderness to your living room!

Kate Lee is a freelance writer who specialises in environmentally-friendly solutions for the home. In her spare time, she writes for Susan-Hopkins.com as well as various renovation websites.

Helping a friend with insurance choices

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A friend of mine is starting to look for life insurance coverage and she knows that my husband and I were looking into life insurance policies recently so she asked me to check out a few of the insurance websites that she found interesting.

One of the websites was called ComeToBarter.com and while I only took a short peek at the site I thought it was one of the better sites that she’d sent me to as far as insurance coverage goes.

It’s hard for me to tell my friend what company or policy might suit her best as i think insurance is a personal choice.

A new look

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I finally bit the bullet and got some new glasses.

I’d been wearing the same pair for about five years and I’d noticed that my glasses were getting dirty so much easier than they used to (perhaps the coating was wearing down?) and I thought my vision might have changed a bit.

So a couple of weeks ago I made an appointment with an optometrist to get my eyes checked and then, armed with a new, and only slightly changed, prescription I started the search for new eyewear.

I think I went to about four different stores that sold eye glasses and contacts. I’m certain I tried on at least 100 pairs of glasses before I finally found some I liked. Three of the stores seemed to mainly carry tiny oblong or rectangular lenses. I guess that’s in these days, but they don’t suit everyone’s face – certainly not mine!

The final store that I went in to had a huge selection of frames and the man that started helping me within minutes of walking in really new what he was talking about. I told him what I was looking for – semi rimless or rimless glasses and NOT rectangular and within seconds he was holding a pair that suited me perfectly.

Oh and get this … we got talking and I found out that his wife used to be in the Jewelry trade, just like me, and along with designing jewelry she also sold wholesale diamonds. I think I knew her back when I was in the business.

Anyway, I ended up getting a pair of Transition lenses and my second pair of glasses just have normal lenses.

I’ve only had my new glasses since Saturday and I’m still getting used to them, but I think it’s going to take a while to get used to the Transitions. They are pretty good outdoors, well unless I’m looking directly into the sun or a very bright spot, then they aren’t quite dark enough. however they are a little slow to change back to clear when I go inside and when they are clear I can see reflections or prisms on the outside edges of the lenses. The guy at the optical store said that would stop bothering me … but I don’t know.

I’m glad I got two pair of glasses. I think I’ll try to just use the transition ones when I’m going outside and use the normal pair when I’m staying home or working on the computer.

Have you tried the new Transition lenses? What are your thoughts on them?

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