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3 Ultimate Chill-Out Zone Ideas For Your Home

by Trish

Ah, the woes of modern life! We all seem to be caught up in an endless sequence that involves juggling work pressure, dealing with financial issues, family, and other social obligations, all at the same time. All these factors cause a lot of physical stress and mental strain, majorly due to lack of adequate sleep and poor eating habits – basically, a rather unhealthy lifestyle. In such situations it is imperative to take some time out to relax, unwind and refresh yourself. But once again, by the time your weekend off approaches, you’re hardly left with any energy to go for an outing, isn’t it? You’d rather stay indoors and laze around. Not a problem. If you don’t have the energy to step outdoors to loosen up a bit and indulge in some fun and recreation, why not bring the fun and recreation home to you instead? Yes, it is possible. Have a look at the following few home recreation ideas to build your very own chill-out zone at home!

A bar in the basement

Have you got a basement at your property? Has it been lying neglected and abandoned for as long as you can remember? Why not give it a brilliant makeover and turn it into an amazing bar! Imagine chilling in your basement with your mates over the weekend, enjoying a few pints and watching your favorite sport on television. You could utilize your personal bar to host small parties and gatherings to socialize with family members or close friends. Or maybe on a weekday, after a tiring day at work, you could just unwind in the bar with a soothing glass of wine. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

Swimming pool in the yard

Swimming in color

If you have a large backyard or even if you have an extended terrace, you could consider getting a swimming pool constructed. Depending upon the amount of space available there are plenty of interesting swimming pool designs you could choose from. Whether you want to relax in the pool on a hot Sunday afternoon, have a pool side barbecue party with your friends in the evening, or just have a fun session in the pool with your kids and wife, getting a swimming pool constructed at your property is one decision you will never regret. Moreover, it will also go on to add to the aesthetic value of your home.

A gaming room – up in the attic or out in the garage

wall invaders

When it comes to relaxing and unwinding, nothing comes close to the ultimate chill-out zone – a gaming room! How about cleaning up your attic and turning it into a fantastic gaming room? Or maybe you could take up the same project in your garage instead, if that’s more convenient. Having a personal gaming zone at home can be epic – an ideal way to escape from daily stress, office tensions and pesky partners! The main things that could go into your game room would be a pool table, darts, a television set for gaming and movies, a couple of cozy sofas, a mini fridge to store soft drinks, milkshakes or beers, and a few table games like Checkers, Uno, Jenga and Monopoly.

So say goodbye to stress and anxiety by investing in these incredible home relaxation and recreation ideas – a permanent solution to all your modern life woes.

Attached Images:
  •  License: Creative Commons image source
  •  License: Creative Commons image source

Jennifer Atkinson is a house wife and loves to keep her home neat and tidy. Along with the usual activities that she undertakes to keep her house clean she also has a chill out zone i.e a swimming pool in her house where she unwinds after the days work. She suggests using the services of Sunbreaker pools if you want to construct a swimming pool at your place. She also likes to blog about various household issues.

Filed Under: Health and Fitness, Home and family, Home Improvement Tagged With: chill out, gaming room, home, ideas, lifestyle, relax, swimming pool, unwind

Top 3 Basement Renovation Ideas That Will Make The Basement Your Favorite Place In The World

by Trish

Is your basement a dark, dingy, and damp area which is used only as a utility room or a storage dump? Is it a shady neglected area where the only occasional visitor is a solitary spider and where the only resident according to your children, is a three-eyed monster who looks more like a mix between SpongeBob SquarePants and an amoeba? No, this is not happening at all. Its time you rolled up your socks and considered transforming your abandoned basement into something fun, constructive and entertaining. There are plenty of remodeling concepts and ideas that you could implement on your basement. Here are a few:

Pool table

Gaming Zone

Probably the most exciting thing you could do to your basement is to convert it into a game room – the perfect get-away from stress, homework, nagging girlfriends and other worldly issues. It can be a place where you can just chill with your mates after work or school. You can adorn the game room with a cozy sofa and a television set for video gaming and watching movies. The other portion of the room could have a pool table or a table-tennis table, or both, depending on the space available and your budget. You could also include other games like darts, foosball, and some table games like Monopoly, chess, checkers and backgammon. So why spend money every time going to the mall or the gaming zone when you can have your very own game room in your basement!

Untitled

Basement Bar

Why not charm all your friends and guests with an attractive and wonderful basement bar? Turning your basement into a cozy drinks bar can be an amazing idea. A fantastic way to unwind with your favorite drink after a long day at work, a basement bar will also come in handy to host small parties and fun gatherings with friends and family members. You can choose from a variety of incredible bar designs and exclusive bench-tops to give your bar that classy and elegant look. You could also add to the charm by putting a billiards table and a television set where you can enjoy a few beers with your mate over a game of football. So if you’re looking to give your basement a splendid makeover, an awesome basement bar might just be what you’re looking for!

Home Library/Study

My Game Collection

Is reading your favorite way to spend time? After a long day at work, do you like unwinding with your favorite novel and a glass of wine? Well why not consider turning your basement into a library? With the perfect lighting, study lamps and comfortable sofas, you could create just the right cozy ambience of a library. You could arrange racks and built-in shelves to accommodate your mounting collection of books which currently seem to be scattered all over your house. Your personal library could also station a couple of computers with internet access to help you with your research work and basic surfing or for your kids to do their school projects and other study work. Having a basement library is an awesome way to read all your favorites in your own personal haven of knowledge.

There are so many more such incredible remodeling ideas that your basement could offer, such as a home gym, kids play area/nursery, a home theatre etc. So what are you waiting for? Get into action and start working on your basement’s cracking makeover.

Attached Images:
  •  License: Creative Commons image source
  •  License: Creative Commons image source
  •  License: Creative Commons image source

Patrick Hugo is an interior designer by profession and whenever he finds time, he writes to help people improve their lifestyle by unconventional yet cost-effective methods. His designs mainly include bar design, basement renovation, pool design and others.

Filed Under: Home Decor, Home Improvement, Interior Design, Renovating Tagged With: basement, basement bar, basement renovations, comfortable, favorite place, friends, Furniture, gaming zone, home library, ideas, Lighting, money, relax, remodeling, reno, study

Turn Your House Into A Home By Making It As Comfortable As Possible To Live In

by Trish



Sometimes it feels like you’ve been living in your house for years and it’s never felt like a home. From the moment you unpacked the boxes and found your belongings somewhere new to stay, there was just something different about the way you felt. In your old home you would feel more relaxed than anywhere on earth. Times have changed and even though you can relax it’s just missing that spark. It’s not uncommon for that to happen to a huge percentage of people who move house. For some people, everything falls into place. For some it doesn’t.


It doesn’t always have to be like this. Your new house will never be the same as your old place and you shouldn’t try to force it. Instead you should look around and see what changes you can make that will turn the new place into somewhere you can love. There’s 3 main places you should start. The 3 places where you should feel more comfortable than anywhere else. The bedroom, living room and the bathroom. We can take a look at some things you can do to each of them to turn your house into a home.

You should look forward to bedtime

For some reason that’s unknown, people are prepared to spend their whole life sleeping on an uncomfortable mattress just so they can save themselves a little money. Think about how much time you spend in your bed. Unless you have insomnia it will be more than any other place in the world. 7-8 hours per night is a lot of time. That’s why you should buy the best mattress you can possibly afford. This won’t seem like a terrible idea after the first night you lie down. You won’t want to get up.

It’s the same with sheets and pillows. Have you even thought about buying new ones? Even if you were to spend a lot of money on expensive sheets it still wouldn’t come close to the amount you spend on crap. If you skip a few cinema nights you will have the money to buy silk sheets. The kind that makes you feel like heaven when they touch your skin. And you want pillows that instantly relax you as soon as your head hits them. You won’t regret it.

Living rooms should be luxurious

It’s the same idea with your living room furniture. You can pick up a nice couch for cheap, but if you spend a few extra hundred dollars you could have something that is a pleasure to sit on. The kind that makes you fall asleep when you’re watching TV. You’ll probably have the same one for a good few years. Wouldn’t it be great if you spent a bit more money on the best one you could afford?

Who cares about a nice little hardwood cabinet to keep your ornaments on? You don’t sit on that. Just buy a cheap one and spend the extra money on what you will really get the use out of. It’s nice to have a living room that looks beautiful, but you don’t want to sacrifice your comfort for a nice bookshelf. Spend that little bit extra on curtains that don’t let any light in. When you close them and settle down to watch TV it’s a lot easier to get cozy.

A bathroom is not for going to the toilet

Yeah, you go to the bathroom to use the toilet, but then you close the door and don’t bother going back in again. It’s easy to turn the bathroom into somewhere you’ll love. Firstly, it depends if you use a bath or shower to wash. If you use a shower you should have a lovely powerful one that could potentially rip your skin off when the water touches it. It feels so much better. I mean a powerful shower; not when you’re skin gets ripped off.

And if you use a bathtub it should be one that you can sink right into. A big deep one like the ones you see in 5-star hotels. They don’t cost 10x the price. Not if you look for a good deal, but it’s somewhere you can relax to your hearts content. If you love using the hot-tub when you go to a health club, you have to ask yourself why you don’t have a bathtub with a jet stream built in. Always aim for maximum comfort before anything else.

Christina Appleworth is an expert interior designer who suggests the liberal use of  web blinds  for home improvement purposes.

Filed Under: Home and family, Home Decor Tagged With: bathroom, bedroom, bedtime, couch, home, house, insomnia, living room, mattress, pillows, relax, sheets

Finally got rid of our renter!

by The Diva

I’ve been trying very hard to relax and get back into my regular routine all week. Our troublesome renter finally moved out late last Monday night. YEAH!!!!!

I’m so happy about that I almost dig a big happy dance right in front of him the night he moved out. I would have if it hadn’t been so late! Who moves out of a persons home at 11 o’clock at night after being out all day and arriving at the house by banging on the door furiously? Very odd.

We’d basically reached the point with our renter where we told him he pretty much had to move out. He moved in the last week or July and he was only supposed to stay for a week or two. We were just doing him a favor because he’d broken up with his girlfriend and he was supposed to just be staying at our house while he looked for another room to rent or an apartment .. but we should have known .. he’d waiting until he HAD to move out from his girlfriends place even though he’d known he needed to look for a place for about a month and of course once he moved in to our place he didn’t start looking for a new place. No … in fact, the first week he was with us he apparently even quit his job!

Yep .. he paid the rent late, ate our food even though we were only renting him a room, used my soaps and shampoos .. like really used them to the point that I have empty bottles of bathing products! Oh and if you read my last post about our house smelling like cigars .. well he’s a cigar smoker. He didn’t smoke in the house but ALL of his stuff was just saturated with the smell of cigars and it was so bad that it basically made my house smell of cigars. I’m very sensitive to scents so I could smell it. My husband who is a smoker couldn’t, but it was extremely strong to me.

Oh and this guy .. when he was still working worked an evening shift so he wouldn’t come home until about 1 am at first. That was ok as I’m a night owl .. but he started going out drinking with the “boys” after work and unbeknownst to us he put in his notice at work because he hated his job so I guess between being miserable over breaking up with his girlfriend and quitting or maybe even being fired from his job – hey we don’t know! – and as a result of this late night drinking he started coming in at three or four in the morning absolutely toasted!

Naturally this would totally disrupt the whole household as my dog would be barking when he came in. Sometimes i’d still be up sometimes not but I could never relax. He’d come in and start banging doors around, slamming the bathroom door or his bedroom door, run water like Niagara falls in the bathroom to fill his glass and walk back and forth and back and forth from his room to the bathroom several times. Then he’d always get up an hour or two later and make noise … and I think sometimes barf.

He just stunk and made so much noise. He was inconsiderate of everyone in the house. There’s more, lots of little things but those are the main things. I’m just happy he’s gone. He was one of the worst renters we ever had! Now he’s back living across the street “temporarily” with his girlfriend again. I have no idea how long that will last. Maybe they’ll get back together .. who knows.

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Filed Under: Home and family, House and Home, Womens World Tagged With: alcoholic, ate, banging doors, barking, bathroom, bedroom, board, broke up, cigars, crazy, dog, drinker, drinking, eat, favor, food, girlfriend, happy dance, house, inconsiderate, late, leave, month, move out, night, night owl, no rent, noisy, relax, renter, room, scent, shampoo, smell, soap, stressed, stunk, week

I need a nice long bath

by The Diva

I’m seriously thinking of having a nice long soak in the tub before I go to bed. That might be just what the doctor prescribed for all my aches and pains. See my last post to understand why I’m aching and bruised and in need of such a soak.

I’m more of a shower person. I don’t take baths very often but when I do it definitely is a pampering spa like bath experience that I’m going for. I’ll soak in the bath until the water has gone from being almost too hot to get into to too cold to stay in. I certainly have enough bath oils, bath beads and bath salts that I could take nice long baths almost every night but I just don’t. I’ve even been thinking of trying a seaweed detox bath every once in a while to see if it helps when my psoriasis acts up.

Do you pamper yourself with nice long soaks in the tub? I’m sure it would help if I actually had a nice big tub in my house. We only have one tub and it’s kind of small … a really nice one would be more enticing I’m sure.

Filed Under: Bath and Shower, Health and Fitness, Home and family, Items to Try, Skin Care, Womens World Tagged With: aches, bath beads, bath oils, bath salts, bathe, bed, big tub, bruises, long bath, long soak, nice tub, pains, pamper, relax, shower, showering, sleep, soak, spa, treat

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