The Perfect Sofa for Your Living Room: A Buying Guide

Choosing a sofa for your living room is a bit tricky. You wouldn’t want the sofa to be too big; the room will look cluttered with a large sofa in it. You also need to choose the right colour and consider various other aspects before making a purchase decision. Buying the perfect sofa for your living room is tricky indeed, but these next few tips will help you get started with shopping for one without hassle.

Size It Up

As mentioned earlier, choosing the right size is very important. You need to consider not only the size of your living room but also the size of other furniture in it. You want the room to be spacious enough to walk around but still well-furnished and comfortable.

Aside from the couch – and the accompanying chairs – you should also consider whether you want a coffee table, a bookshelf or perhaps a nice TV desk to complete the room. A good rule of thumb is to leave at least 40% of the space open.

Lastly, choose the shape of your sofa well. An L-shaped sofa often looks bigger than a more traditional couch. Browse through online catalogues, such as distinctivechesterfields.com, and you’ll find a lot of interesting choices to contemplate.

Research Upholstery Materials

Leather couches look really great in almost every room, but they can be quite expensive depending on the kind of leather you choose to use. Suede and other materials, on the other hand, often offer more finishes, colours and budget options. All of these options are great as long as you do enough research and settle for the one option that works best for your living room.

Colours, for instance, can change the ambience of the room a lot. Since the sofa is often the biggest furniture item in the room, its colour matters more than the rest of the living room. A bright-coloured sofa, such as a tan leather couch, will create a warmer ambience. A white or black suede sofa, on the other hand, works better for a cooler, more minimalistic living room.

Don’t forget that the material you choose will also influence just how comfortable the sofa is when you sit on it. You’ll be spending a lot of time on the sofa, so choosing the right upholstery material is definitely important.

Work with a Theme

An interior designer friend once suggested the combination of black floor and black leather sofa for a very clean look. The rest of the living room can then follow the clean theme as well. You can easily centre your choice of sofa and other furniture items on a particular theme.

There are plenty to choose from too. Aside from clean and modern looks, you can also go for a brighter summer tone, a more relaxing blue or even a very chic white-on-white. When you already have a theme going, stick to it and it will be easy to create a comfortable and spacious living room you have always wanted. Be sure to use these tips to help you shop for the best sofa for your living room.

from Home Design Ideas | Interior Design Ideas And Architcture http://ift.tt/2bycoWP The Perfect Sofa for Your Living Room: A Buying Guide - International Home Design Interior

Different Types of Home Improvement to Add Value to Your House

One of the first important steps into adulthood or family life is buying a new home. There are a lot of boxes we need to tick when it comes to picking out a place: safety, atmosphere, accessibility, and community. This is why house and land packages in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and in different areas in Australia have become increasingly imperative because they can provide a safe and fun community you and your family can live in.

After a few years you will find that you are going to need to redecorate or redesign, concocting lots of home improvement schemes to add personality and texture to your house. You have all of these ideas but you cannot seem to reconcile them.

Here, we list down different types of home improvements that can be done to your house. It is important that you get to categorize all of your ideas to help your with the budget and to see which ones you should do first.

Safety repairs

When it comes to home improvements, this is the first thing you need to look out for. These are electrical and plumbing repairs, roof fix-ups, and other damages that may have been caused by natural disasters.

You also need to consider putting fire safety appliances or additions like a sprinkler system, smoke detectors, and maybe even a fire extinguisher. Put home safety upgrades like a burglar alarm for your doors and windows. And you can also have a shelter installation set-up to protect your house from earthquakes, tornadoes, and the like.

These will make sure that your family and your house will be safe in whatever situations you will find yourselves in.

Interior designing

This includes re-painting the walls, buying new furniture, installing cabinets, and more. The first thing you must decide on will be the theme of the new design. It is easier to think of paint colour and furniture if you have something to follow. So let us say you want a rustic vibe in the living room, this would mean using a minimalist colour plate with furniture that look vintage or antique-like. It does not have to be really old, it just has to look it.

Home additions and upgrades

You might want to add a few rooms or converting rooms you already have for something else; this is what the home additions improvement is about. This is when you see that your family is growing or needs something different, like maybe a playroom or an exercise room. Maybe an additional bedroom for one of your kids who is all grown up now. You can also have comfort upgrades like ventilation, air conditioning, or heating installed.

This list can guide you once you start your home repairs, it can act as a flow to help you prioritise which ones you want to work on first. Just make sure that you have planned everything before starting, we do not want a project that is half-finished, it invites in more problems. So go on and grab your notebook and start making notes!

from Home Design Ideas | Interior Design Ideas And Architcture http://ift.tt/2b53qyT Different Types of Home Improvement to Add Value to Your House - International Home Design Interior

Creating a Kitchen for the Kids!

Moving away from the honeymoon days and entering the world of family life where babies are being born and kids are growing up, will definitely have a big effect on your home! The kitchen especially is more often than not the main hub of the house where all the activity and spillages go on. This is why the kitchen essentially needs to be bomb proofed! However, you can still retain that sense of luxury style without feeling a blow to your wallet every time something is broken or stained from the accidents that are bound to happen with children running around.

The gap in the market for durable yet cheap kitchens has been rapidly filled in the last few years, as now retailers and designers are able to source and use cheaper materials which can be disguised to look a lot more expensive... for worn down kitchen units and cupboard doors there is now a huge range available for you to replace them cheaply with and it’s amazing what simply repainting them can also achieve in your home. Following this advice, it’s best to go for materials that you can keep repainting when choosing your kitchen units as this will allow more flexibility as the family grows older and styles will need to change.

To help prevent your own kitchen furniture from general wear and tear from the kids, why not invest in kid’s size furniture in the kitchen for them to get involved with, the furniture is still useful to you but also allows your kids the chance to test out their own cooking skills! It is vitally important that kids learn the basic skill of preparing and cooking food for later life as well.

Simple features in the kitchen such as having a blackboard installed can really be a great help to a family and especially mums and dads who have a million and one to do lists! Blackboards are extremely useful for writing little messages, grocery lists and reminders for your family. They can also look extremely stylish when embedded into other pieces of furniture in your kitchen, for example, the kitchen island can be easily transformed into something a little more exciting for the kids when a blackboard is fitted on to the side of it. Other features such as having one colourful wall amidst a neutral coloured kitchen can really add brightness to the kitchen and colours are a far more interesting to kids, it will help encourage them to spend more time in the kitchen spending family time.

If you already have furniture in your kitchen that you're just not willing to let go of and see get ruined, there are many ways you can protect these and make them more kid friendly. Top end designers have saved their own furniture pieces such as a chair and table set by having slipcovers made from materials they liked to put on them and these have shown to be extremely effective!

It’s important that no matter the design of your kitchen whether it be modern and classy or more of a mash up, that you can appreciate it even with children as nothing lasts forever and you might as well be keen to renovate your kitchen as much as possible by using these cheap tips!

from Home Design Ideas | Interior Design Ideas And Architcture http://ift.tt/2aQUTSc Creating a Kitchen for the Kids! - International Home Design Interior