Devonshire Woman

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Should It Stay or Should It Go? Dealing with Clutter

Clutter is a big problem in the homes of many people. But equally challenging is deciding what to get rid of when you do get round to having a big clear out of your house. Never fear; this guide is here to give you a helping hand when you are trying to determine whether it should stay or it should go.

Is the Item Useful?

The first and most obvious question to ask is whether the item is actually useful. Many of us hold onto stuff under the false assumption that you will one day make use of it. If you have not used the item in the past year, there is every chance that you will never use it again. If you are still afraid that you may need it one day, you could stop it taking up premium space in your home by moving it to a lesser location like an attic or shed.

Do You Have Sentimental Feelings Towards the Item?

We keep some things because we have an emotional attachment to them and not because we actually need them. If it is one of these sentimental items, are you keeping it in good condition? Perhaps it would be better off on display in your home so that it is taking up wall space rather than storage space.

Do You Have Adequate Space for it?

The bigger items in your home provide a particular problem. These are the ones that you really have to make a decision about whether or not it is worth keeping. If you would still like to keep hold of it, you could always look into completing a self-storage price comparison. But you may have to make a difficult choice if you simply can’t justify holding onto it.

Is it Something That You Can Use Up?

The worst thing to do would be to hold onto something that is going to expire or go bad before you even have a chance to use it. If you are not in this habit already, you should look at rotating the items in your kitchen so that you use the ones with the shortest expiry date first. If you don’t do this, it is like throwing money in the bin.

What Need Does the Item Satisfy?

All objects that you own satisfy some sort of need – whether this is aesthetic, status, emotional etc. Be honest with yourself about which one the item is satisfying for you. It is very possible that your mindset is causing you to let clutter get on top of you, so doing a bit of independent analysis can be majorly beneficial.

Once you have answered these five questions, hopefully, you feel in a better place to tackle the clutter in your house. Many people find this to be a very cathartic experience which helps them to live a more minimalist life that is not centred on possessions so much.

3 Luxuries Every Travelling Brit Enjoys

British tourists can be found all around the world. While they all have different tastes and enjoy visiting certain locations, it’s almost certain that many of them share the same travel taste when it comes to luxury. If you’re finding it hard to secure a place to visit in your mind this summer, then consider the following luxuries you might like to experience, and consider heading to a place that ticks them all of the list.

A Good Bar

While Brits are notorious drinkers, the majority of us enjoy a beautiful and premium drink over a large quantities and low qualities of alcohol. Heading to an environment where you can enjoy a beautiful martini, a gorgeous mojito, or a beach cocktail with a tiny umbrella, searching for the most classy bars near Courtyard Bridgetown, the city you have travelled to, or even on the road trip to the destination in question will help you find places to socially relax with the locals and perhaps let loose a little.

Temperature

There are two camps of people. One type of Brit who indulges in the warm weather, heading to new and tropical climates to experience something very rarely enjoyed in the home country. Then, there are those who enjoy the cold landscapes of Northern Europe or Canada, heading to ski or to simply enjoy some of the most beautiful sights imaginable. However, all British folks enjoy the ability to change our temperature well if we’re not comfortable, and immediately.

We’re just not that good at being suited to any one climate that isn’t grey or lukewarm. This might mean heading to a resort that affords you competent care with your skiing trip, or finding the best water parks to mitigate the scorching heat of the Caribbean. You’ll be grateful for this as the temperature forces your inner Brit to come out, usually in the form of a complaint about the weather.

Limited Tourists

Of course, heading to a beautiful location will often mean you find tourists in high number around you. British people often don’t like this, and this is even more insidious when the other tourists are British! Most of us head to new places to see the local country, to absorb the local populace, and not to bring most of the country with us. Of course, this is not to disparage British people, just that meeting them is likely not the reason you have paid thousands on airfare. This means finding the most quaint places can become a fun challenge, as is taking time to absorb the history and local culture of an environment. Staying away from the overly corporatized package deals can lead to a sense of real discovery, as can visiting the small villages and towns along the way. This will lead you to some wonderful places that seem custom made for you to visit and will grant you with excellent memories to share.

If you’re British, you’ve likely nodded in response to each point on this list. With these things in mind, finding a place to entertain your natural tendencies might be easier than ever.

Helping Your Children Stay Safe Within The Family Home

Raising children can be a wonderful time. It is the most phenomenal, life-changing, humbling and educational thing you can ever do. However, it’s also only enjoyable when you ensure that all your bases are covered. This means of course ensuring that the child is well educated, has plenty to eat, and develops properly. However, it also means they are safe. There isn’t a worthwhile parent on planet Earth who doesn’t consider the health of their child to be of absolute paramount priority.

For this reason, it’s important to know how to keep a young child safe. Young children explore, and when they begin to walk around, that’s when you need to be your most vigilant. Let’s start within the family home. There are many areas of improvement you could take care of in this regard, but only if you’re wise.

Helping your children stay safe within the family home is only achievable if you:

Protect Sharp Corners

It’s important to see where your child could injure themselves. This horrible act of imagining your child running around your home and the worst happening is the necessary payment you must make to ensure it doesn’t happen. A good place to start is the corners of tables. This is especially important if wooden. While a ninety-degree wood fitting might not seem dangerous to an adult, to a child it could be potentially very painful to run into. You can purchase foam covers for your coffee tables, main dinner tables. You can fit these tot the perfect size of the implement you need to protect. Doing this will allow you to ensure that no matter how silly your children get running around the house, a table will never grossly injure them.

Drawers & Cupboards

While it’s always wise to raise certain dangerous items to be higher than your children can reach, it’s not always feasible for you to do so. After all, a child can injure themselves with almost anything in a drawer. While you may have cutlery, cleaning products and may other implements out of the way, you might need to store your plates and bowls in a lower area. For these areas, it can be worthwhile to install catches so these doors or drawers do not open all of the way.

Even a hidden, invisible prying hand can prevent a small child from opening these areas when you’re looking the other way. Simply press down on the catch with a little force, and you are granted access. This allows you to ensure that your child stays away from the heavier and potentially damaging items that they simply cannot have access to. However, it’s absolutely critical to still house dangerous chemicals or belongings at height, because this is not a fool proof strategy.

Exits

One of the most obvious methods of protecting your child is sometimes the hardest to enforce. Ensuring that your home is well taken care of works well, but sometimes simply protecting the exits of your home is a step in the right direction. It might be that you live in a relatively rural area, but ensuring that you keep a good view of your children at all times is essential. This means preventing them from leaving the garden by ensuring fences and roller garage doors are well maintained. It means locking the doors from the bottom when inside, because it can only take a few moments for your child to unlock a door and run into a road.

This will dramatically change depending on where you live and how many adults are in your home, but for the most part ensuring that there is absolutely no possibility of escape is perfect for a young child’s safety.

Electrical Outlets

It’s important for you to cover electrical outlets. You can purchase small plastic entries that allow you to cover plug sockets. At the right age, allowing a child to understand why avoiding them is important can also help them prevent making the wrong decision themselves. Ensure that the plug sockets in their room are protected. You can also buy installation boxes that prevent any form of water damage or difficulty for children who might be intelligent enough to remove plastic coverages.

Education

The best thing you can do when it comes to protecting your child is educating them. This might be in a simplistic manner. However, simply talking to a child respectfully and with a concerned tone can be much more digestible for them than simply shouting at them when they do something wrong. While some things are of serious nature and do require this to hammer home the point, sometimes the light touch can help encourage the importance of safety in a child’s mind.

With these tips, your child is sure to stay protected and healthy in the family home.

Could Your Home Make You Healthier?

Health is happiness, so the saying goes, and anyone who has experience prolonged bouts of ill health will know that without your wellbeing, you don’t have much else. We know this, and so we place importance on having a balanced diet, taking regular exercise and aiming for quality sleep. But do you ever think about the role your home has to play in your health and wellbeing? Our home environments constantly surround us, woven into the fabric of our daily existence, and so they become fundamentally linked with how we feel and how well we are mentally and physically. Some simple changes to your home can result in a much better balance, and they can be as big or small as you like…

Improve Lighting and Layout

It’s fundamental things that can make a huge difference to how you feel. For example, have you ever really thought about the lighting in your living space? It’s a subtle thing, but how we choose to light our homes can have far reaching impacts, from the timing and release of hormones, the regulation of our blood pressure and glucose levels, even down to affecting our ability to sleep well and to think clearly.So think about upgrading the lighting solutions in your home with elegant new lamps or uplighters from Scotlight Direct. Similarly, it could be time to rethink the layout of your most used rooms. Studies have proven that messy and cluttered rooms inhibit sleep quality and cause stress – so invest in some chic storage units to keep the mess tidied away.

Go For The Green

A planting scheme may be something you think of in connection with your garden, but actually, devising a scheme for your interior greenery can boost your health. Improving your indoor air quality, research by NASA determined that having at least one potted plant per 100 square foot can dramatically improve the air in your home. Choose low maintenance potted varieties such as ficus, rubber plants or spider plants to provide a splash of greenery that won’t die off if you don’t keep to a religious watering schedule.

Choose Better Paints

As well as the effects of colour on mood, it could be time for a spring repaint so that you can switch to no VOC paints. VOCs, or Volatile Organic Compounds, are stabilisers and preservatives added to commercial paint brands. Unfortunately, they release a host of nasty chemicals into the environment, and this process continues for up to five years after painting. The good news is that no VOC paints are becoming more widely available, and the colour range and quality won’t leave you feeling disappointed.

Keep Your Flooring Clean

Your floor is a significant source of dirt and pollutants entering your home environment. Choose a carpet with a low pile density or hardwood floors with a flatweave rug which makes it tougher for dust and allergens to settle in and are very easy to keep clean. Natural fibres will also make sure no chemicals are being released. Also, make a practice of removing your shoes as you come into the home – a stylish slimline shoe cabinet may help with this – and then you aren’t tracking dirt and mess into your home, keeping it a little healthier every time you come in the door.

What’s In The Way Of You & Your Perfect Home?

If you are not already living in your perfect home, why might that be? At first glance, you might think that you know what it is that’s stopping you, but if you look a little deeper you might quickly be surprised to discover that you are kidding yourself about the real causes. There are so many things that can get in the way of you and your dream house, and it is worth knowing exactly what those are so that you can approach the issue with as much previous knowledge and understanding as possible. With that, you will be able to get much closer to having your perfect home much sooner than you might expect. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a number of the common hurdles stopping people from having their ideal, perfect home.

Lack Of Vision

One of the most common reasons that people end up living in anything less than perfect conditions is that they are not actually fully aware of what that perfection looks like to them. You need to have a strong sense of what it is that you actually want from your home, otherwise you will find it hard – perhaps even impossible – to manifest the kind of dream home that would really make you happy. So, the first thing to get out of the way is this: are you suffering from a lack of vision about what you really want? It might be that something is blocking your creativity, or that you have taken on too many other people’s ideas of what makes a good home that you have forgotten your own. Whatever it is, remove the blockage, and improve your own understanding of what you really want. It can even be helpful to sit down with pen and paper and give yourself the opportunity to brainstorm freely. In this way, you can open yourself up to what you really want, and that will mean that you are more likely to get it – for obvious reasons.

Financial Constraints

It goes without saying that bringing your dream home into existence is going to cost money in one way or another. This is equally true whether you are building a home from scratch or simply renovating an existing one. But no matter the extent of your financial concerns, there is always a solution to be found. It’s worth remembering that, because money worries very often have a way of making things seem impossible, even if that is not actually the case. If you are struggling financially, you might want to think about what you can do to make it a little easier on yourself.

The first thing to consider here is how you might be able to bring about more money in your life. This can be easier than you might think; mostly, it just requires that you change your mindset to wealth and gaining money. With the right kind of mindset, you can find yourself receiving much more, and it can almost seem to happen as if by magic. In a way, it is magic. An immutable law of this magic is that you must share and share alike with any wealth you receive, and that process of sharing can be much looser than you might think. It can mean, for instance, creating a better and more peaceful home to share with your family. Follow this rule, and money will come.

Alternatively, you can simply work on finding ways to keep the costs of renovation and building down. If you are curious about how to update your home on a tight budget, the good news is that there are many places to begin – and no matter whether you start with something small or something larger, you should be able to make it happen. Reduce the costs, and much of the stress of the process will be removed, along with one of the major hurdles.

Time

Time is an even more important resource than money, and in many ways it is even more difficult to master and control. For obvious reasons, it is finite, whereas your ability to gain wealth is pretty much infinite. However, with a better understanding of how to use your time, you can easily make more use of it, and this can help with what is often one of the major hurdles stopping you from having your perfect home. Work on planning out your renovations in detail regarding the timescale, and you will find this really does help to achieve what you are hoping to achieve in a much better speed.

Get A Better Night’s Sleep With A Better Bedroom Setup

Sleep is important, without it – we’re only operating at half the speed we should be. If you find it difficult to get to sleep at night, perhaps your bedroom is to blame. With spring on the way, now’s the perfect time to give your bedroom a makeover.

Learn more about how to get a better night’s sleep by improving your bedroom setup.

Block out the light

If your bedroom has too much light coming in, you could find it difficult to drift off or be woken earlier than you should in the morning. Consider getting some blackout blinds to make it easier to get to sleep, or invest in some darker, thicker curtains that can help reduce the effects of streetlights.

Invest in a new mattress

A new mattress can make the world of difference to your sleep. If yours is looking a little tired, it might be time to invest in a new one. You can buy mattress styles that come with comfort guarantees, so if you don’t see an improvement in your sleep habits, then it’s possible to get your money back to try another option. Look for a mattress that is durable and made from quality materials such as memory foam as well as a mattress that addresses specific needs if you suffer from back or joint pain.

Get rid of the clutter

It’s difficult to relax in a messy room, so if you find your mind preoccupied with your untidy floor, then it’s time to start decluttering. Give your bedroom a 60-minute spring clean that will help tackle some of the obvious clutter, while taking the time to fully declutter bedroom will help make it easier to keep tidy. Start by getting rid of any unwanted clothes and consider investing in extra storage solutions to keep everything off the floor.

Keep your bedroom at the right temperature

Temperature can have a significant effect on your quality of sleep, and if it’s too hot or too cold – you might not be getting the rest you should. 16-18 degrees is typically considered the ideal temperature for sleep, so if your room is colder than this, you might want to think about using the heating. If your bedroom gets too warm (especially during the summer months), this could also impact your sleep quality, so getting a fan is a great investment for those balmy nights.

Keep electronics out of sight

Using electronics before bed could be another factor affecting your sleep. If you like to browse in bed, consider giving your phone or laptop a break for an hour or so before you go to sleep. Keep your tech locked away in a drawer, or another room and rely on traditional alarm clocks to wake yourself up in the morning. It may not seem like much of an issue, but switching off could significantly improve your sleep quality.

Sleep is important for your health, so if you’re not getting enough of it, then you need to find out why. If your bedroom setup is to blame, making some simple changes could soon make poor sleep a thing of the past, providing many benefits for your health and wellbeing.

Add Value To Your Property Before Selling

One of the main advantages of stepping on to the property ladder is being able to upgrade from your starter-buy house to one that fits your description of “dream house” more accurately. Selling up and putting the money towards a new property could put you on the market in a position that you never thought you would be able to obtain. When selling your house, you want to be sure you are getting the best possible price, and in order to do that, a few simple additions or changes may be necessary. Below are a few options you may want to consider investing in before you put your house on the market.

Conservatory

Even though you are not adding to the number of bedrooms in your home, you will be adding to the living space – an invaluable asset to many large families. It allows room for another social area for either parents or children, so the occupants of the house aren’t always living under each other’s feet. Taking the time to research and choose a conservatory build that compliments the architecture and structure of your property will help to avoid that “stuck on the back look” a lot of conservatories are associated with. Due to the high traffic nature of a conservatory, it will be worthwhile investing in a durable and sustainable floor such as karndean flooring or similar. Going for a light colour of flooring will also minimise bleaching from the hot sunny days that will bless your conservatory.

Renovate The Kitchen

It seems nowadays that when someone looks at a house, one of the most important rooms in it is the kitchen. For some, it is a make or break factor in buying the house. The bedrooms can be redecorated, the lounge can have a new carpet put down, but replacing the kitchen takes money and time – money and time that a lot of people are not prepared to part with, especially if they have young children or are elderly. According to Phil Spencer, a new kitchen will add 4.6 percent to the value of your house if the price of it is in accordance with the rest of the property, so you make your money back.  

Modernise Your Bathroom

You don’t necessarily have to rip out the entire suite and change the tiling unless you are still sporting the avocado or maroon bathroom from the seventies, then you may want to consider a refit. It is more about the simple changes that can help a bathroom look like new. Redoing the grout around your tiles, fitting a new shower head and taps, and replacing the shower screen or curtain to a brand new design will work wonders. If you do decide on investing in a refit, make sure that the master bathroom has an actual bath rather than a standing shower unit, as this will be a lot more attractive and useful for families with young children. In any ensuites, a standing shower is suitable and will be useful for any potential elderly persons looking at buying your house.

With the demand for housing at the moment, it can be quite a competitive market to enter into, so it is a smart idea to make a few additions to your home to make it the most attractive in your local area.