Home refurbishment Leicester

New Year, New Look: Refurbishing in 2016

The New Year is a time for new beginnings, and where better to begin than with a brand new look for your home! It’s amazing to see the effect that a good refurbishment can have on a property, and when it comes to home refurbishment Leicester has some fantastic opportunities for you to discover.

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Style is Key

Beginning a project before deciding on the overarching style, colour palette, and feel that you’re trying to achieve is sure to lead in disappointment. Without a clear, cogent sense of where the refurbishment is going, you’ll struggle to maintain thematic cohesion and your home won’t become the best it can be. Spend time researching styles, themes, and ideas online or in magazines, and be sure to visit showrooms and suppliers so that you can get a feel of what’s right for you and your home.

Consider Your Budget

Refurbishment is an exciting prospect. The idea of the ideal home is something we’re all willing to put time and money into pursuing. But, be warned: it can quickly become an expensive endeavour without the proper planning and consultation! In Leicester, home refurbishment can be made infinitely more enjoyable by enlisting the services and know-how of an expert renovator who will help to guide your vision into an achievable, cost-effective reality.

How to Introduce Colour into your Home

This March 2015 was the first year that I’d noticed the interesting International Colour Day. The day prompted a lot of discussion on interior design forums and it seems that each year the industry is embracing colour to a whole new level. Crown Paint, Valspar Paint and Dulux have all launched their individual campaigns highlighting the importance of colour, with the latter warning that we are sleepwalking into a future without colour, enticing us to become ‘colour rebels.’ Colour really is one of the best ways to add that personal touch to your home. But just how can we do this without making an almighty mess of our home refurbishment Leicester?
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Start small

If your home is understated and filled with neutral tones, try to identify a statement piece to catch the eye. How about a chest of draws in the living or dining space with each draw painted a distinct colour. Perhaps start with yellow at the top, moving through some greens and finishing in blue. The sides, top and back of the chest can all be painted one subtle shade of greenish blue – perhaps the same as the penultimate draw? If this seems too audacious, perhaps start with introducing some flowers in a colourful, bold vase or some coloured cushions.

Big in 2015

This year we have seen the trends shift away from the nondescript cream and beige palette to a cooler set of colours such as silvers, fresh whites and greys. This trend is in keeping with the idea of bringing the industrial into the home. On the fringe of the more popular choices there is a real buzz about using colourful ‘artist palette’ designs against a backdrop of icy white.

Blinds

Sometimes the very nature of an accessory lends itself to colour experimentation. Window blinds are a clear choice when to create a bold impression in an interior because of their ‘blocky’ look. It is also easy to use colour contrasts or combinations, by using a border on a roller blind or alternating slat colours.

Kitchen mix

Colour mixing in the kitchen has been on the rise of late and helps kitchens look less ‘out of the box.’ The most obvious way to achieve this is with the units. A blend of oak and hand painted units can look lovely. This introduces a homely feel and elegant shades of blue and grey can look great against a predominant oak set-up. The great advantage to this is the colour can be changed in the future, giving you a relatively cheap freshen-up option going forward.

The idea of the Mood Board

Never has this expression been more apt than when applied to the idea of the Mood Board. For many, especially those involved in home renovation Leicester, the Mood Board is an essential tool that enables the would be designer present their ideas visually, giving an impressionistic idea as to their vision for your room. It is more about presenting the atmosphere of the design ideas rather than a snapshot and is an incredibly clever way to ensure that a designer is on your wavelength before making a decision. Mood boards are generally concocted over a period of time after several meetings and conversations and provide that essential proof-positive that a designer is taking your requests seriously and listening to your ideas.

If you look at the Mood Board and think, “Wow, that is me down to a T!” then it can be extremely liberating, not to mention stress-saving to hand over the reins, trusting that the designer knows what you want.

What does a Mood Board look like?
A Mood board will probably look like a collage, with scraps of fabric and swatches of paint and perhaps a sample of oak wood flooring – all coming together to show the intended colour scheme. Of course it could well be a digital Mood Board (also known as a ‘Digital Mash-up’), which eliminates the designer’s need to find physical manifestations of his vision and can lead to a more accurate and expansive portrayal of his desired atmosphere. An effective Mood Board will be roughly to scale in that each swatch and sample will take up the same sort of space on the board as it will in the relevant room in proportion to the other samples. This makes it much easier to visualise just how well the fabrics, tones, textures and shades will work together.

Just the beginning
For designers and project managers like Craven & Hargreaves the Mood Board marks the moment at which mutual trust and understanding is achieved and represents the first step on a journey that will end with your dream room or in more expansive projects, your dream house. A Mood Board is a very intensive and highly intuitive tool and so it makes perfect sense to make the most of that connection and retain continuity throughout each step of the process to ensure that that everyone remains on the same page.

Clever Storage Solutions for Smaller Kitchens

A lack of space
Not all of us are blessed with the modern day favourite: the large open plan kitchen. Most of us face the eternal dilemma of where to put everything! In fact, I hazard that even those endowed with large open plan kitchen diners that have been ineffectively designed bemoan a lack of STORAGE! Even if a kitchen has been designed relatively effectively, with plenty of storage space the nature of life is that we accumulate things and sound kitchen design necessitates storage that has the capacity to evolve alongside our lives. This is where experts involved in kitchen refurbishment Leicestershire really earn their salt.

Evolving space
Advancements in design and technology have yielded some superb new products and arrangements that enable kitchen designers to get around issues of storage space. The trend towards blurred lines between kitchen and living space need not necessarily be achieved by knocking down partition walls. In fact those with small kitchens can expand into their dining and living space through subtle integration of kitchen storage with stylish tables featuring hidden draws underneath their surfaces, for instance. With minimalism also high on the agendas of an increasing number of people, much can be learned from the emergence of ‘micro homes’ or ‘tiny houses’ which by necessity have involved some truly ingenious space saving ideas, such as fold away tables and benches with storage under the seats.

Larders etc
The life-changing qualities imbued in the magic kitchen larder cannot be overstated. Simply put, when you get a larder there’s no turning back. So if you are in the process of deciding on an extension or have a spare downstairs cupboard or toilet next to your kitchen, or even a corner of your kitchen that could be given a wall-mounted pantry it is an addition that you will never regret.

The words ‘larder’ and ‘pantry’ are so antiquated that they conjure visions of a grim dusty cupboard with a hard concrete floor and a thriving population of spiders and yet it can be über stylish. Imagine a whitewashed room of flexible shelving accessed by pocket glass fronted doors that provides all of the flexible space needed for those awkward but essential bottles of sake, soy sauce and the pots and pans and accessories that just don’t fit in the cupboards! Having all your food storage in the same part of the kitchen can also revolutionise your cooking time as well as making putting away your groceries a snap. Given the choice, a walk-in larder is the ideal solution and can even, given that it is cool, enable you to store your hard cheeses, eggs, potatoes and some fruit there freeing up precious space in the fridge!