Reducing the Cost of Your Move

via

While moving is certainly something that most people prefer not to do, it is something you will do several times throughout your life. A new job in another city, the birth of a child or a retirement, are just a few of the reasons people move. Regardless of the reason, moving is expensive, hectic and stressful. However, there are ways to reduce the overall cost of your move and make the process a bit easier for you and your budget.

Create a Plan and Establish a Budget

Planning your move in advance will allow you to complete all the necessary things for a successful, uneventful move. Try to schedule movers at least a month or two in advance so you know roughly the cost up front. make sure that you factor in everything such as your travel expenses, packing supplies and cleaning supplies. This way when you arrive at your new home you'll have money available to make the improvements you want like upgrading or remodeling your kitchen.

Finding Reliable Movers

Everything you own will reside on the truck so it's important that you take your time and research companies ahead of time. Get at least two to three quotes and then check their record of service from testimonials of actual people who used them. You can acquire names of companies like North American Van Lines through family, friends, and co-workers of look online. Once you have the estimates in front of you, you can then make a decision based on the fees and service records. Additionally, make sure to ask about larger items you may have like a piano or appliances to see what the additional cost will be.

Consolidate Before You Pack

The last thing you want is to move into your new home and have a lot of things you either don't need or don't want. Before starting the packing process, declutter. This may take you a few days to achieve, but in the end, it will save you space in your new place to add new things. It will also save you money on the cost of the moving company by using less room on the truck. With the items you don't want to take along you have several options. You can have an estate sale and make some extra cash to apply towards the move, give things away to family and friends or donate the furnishings and clothing to a local charity.

Time to Pack

Now that you have things sorted out it's time to start the packing process. Here's where you can save a lot of money. The moving company is going to offer to supply the boxes in the allotted qualities and sizes you agreed to, however, they come with a pretty hefty price tag. Instead, a better option is to check with the local businesses in your area to see if they can save boxes for you. Even if you need to go to several places and make more than one trip they are "Free". Additionally, you can use linens, towels, newspaper and even coffee filters to wrap up fragile items, adding more to your savings. You will need to purchase packing tape but this will not cost you a few dollars versus several hundred dollars.

Schedule Your Move During the Off Season

In addition to packing your own boxes and acquiring them for free, you can save even more money by scheduling your move during the off-season. The months of September through February will give you the best rates. If you are unable to do that, then at least make the move the second or third week of the month and try if at all possible to avoid the weekend.

Moving doesn't have to cost you your entire savings. With a willingness to do some of the work yourself, decluttering and acquiring the boxes for free, you are well on your way to having a successful, stress-free move.

5 Tips to Decorating Your Kitchen

via

Meals are prepared in your kitchen and it’s the room where each member of your family hangs out and everyone converges. Whether you get to the kitchen to get some water to drink, prepare a quick meal due to your busy schedule or catch up over the weekend with your family around the kitchen island, it needs to be an inviting and functional space.

Although remodeling your kitchen is a sure way to give it a new look, there are other simple ways to decorating your kitchen without breaking the bank. Here are tips to help you spruce up your kitchen to an inspiring room where you look forward to each day and enjoy preparing your meals:

Top 5 Easy Ways to Decorating Your Kitchen

1. Create a Focal Point

What grabs your attention the moment you walk through the kitchen door into the cooking room? Is it the backsplash, the kitchen island or the walls? What do you want to stand out in your kitchen? Hang an artwork on a wall or paint it in a bold color you want in your cooking space to act as the focal point.

Alternatively, find wallpaper with a beautiful pattern or texture and fix it on one wall in the kitchen to make it stand out. Using colored tiles on your backsplash, colored bar stools or appliances can also give your kitchen an instant new look, atop making it inviting.

2. Add Open Shelving

Open shelves give you an option to display your collectibles for an attractive look. Color coordinate items on your shelves and keep them minimal for a clean yet attractive look. Open cabinets is a great alternative to installing shelves if there’s not much space in your kitchen.

Remove cabinet doors or replace them with glass doors to display your items. Chinaware, matching glasses, food stored in transparent containers, cookie jars and vases are some great accessories to display on your open shelves.

3. Use Grey PVC Tablecloths

Dressing your kitchen table or island is both functional and decorative. Grey PVC doesn’t just add a modern look in your kitchen, but also protects your table surface from spillages.

4. Create a Display Gallery on a Kitchen Wall

If your kitchen looks boring with plain walls, consider creating a gallery to add some visual interest. Vintage dishes, framed album covers, different types of mirrors, fabric swatches, framed wallpaper, baskets, empty frames in varying sizes and shapes, and antiques can make up a beautiful wall gallery in your kitchen.

Choose patterned, symmetrical, asymmetrical or freestyle item placements on your wall. Try an arrangement on the floor before fixing things on your wall gallery to ensure that once you fix something, you don’t have to remove it. It’s all about being creative and playing around with the items to use in your gallery and how to place them. Have fun!

5. Add Chalkboard Paint

Dress up one of your kitchen walls in chalkboard paint. It won’t just act as a backdrop for other colorful items in your kitchen, but is also bound to create visual interest. A gallery or floating shelf on part of the board can help create a layered, unique look for an inspired wall you can use to list your menu each day.

Whether you want to decorate your kitchen in a natural, contemporary, modern, traditional or cozy design style, you won’t go wrong with these tips.

Contact us to find out how you can decorate your kitchen on a budget with simple yet attractive tablecloths. You can utilise Zanui discount codes for great deals on tablecloths and kitchen appliances.

Five Tips on How to Keep Your Kitchen Grease Free

Whether you are a busy working mom or a single bachelor, you’ll agree that scrubbing a greasy kitchen is no simple task.

If you are looking to keep your kitchen grease free, here are 5 tips for you.

1.Kitchen hood

Cleaning greasy range hoods can be the least fun job in the kitchen. The range hood is a large fan housed in a structure suspended over the stove. It’s supposed to pull all the fumes from your stove top. The mixture of used cooking oil, fumes and particles from your food can get trapped in your hood. Over time, it becomes greasy.

Some indications that your kitchen’s range hood needs some maintenance include: the lights or buttons aren’t working, the motor is humming or is excessively loud, or smoke isn’t clearing from your kitchen.

Cleaning the range hood is simple and you only need a couple of minutes. The first step involves removing the filter and cleaning it. There are two kinds of filters: a charcoal filter and a metal filter.
The filters get rid of smoke and particles from the air before expelling it from your kitchen.

To remove the filter, look for a latch or loop. Next, dip the filter in a degreasing solution. Leave the grease to dissolve. Once all the grease has dissolved, leave it to dry before reattaching it.
The next step is cleaning the hood and the vent. To clean them you only need a household cleaning spray.

2. Microwave

It’s time to inspect your microwave closely if you’ve come to believe that microwaves are yellow in color instead of white.

Whether you are using a built-in or countertop, there are many ways to clean your microwave. Using lemon juice is perhaps the simplest. Place a cut lemon in a cup of water. Microwave until it steams.

Let the steam fill the microwave before turning it off. Go ahead and wipe the interior with clean paper towels.

Needless to say, the more you use your microwave oven, the more cleaning it requires. But if you want to keep it looking and smelling like new, cleaning it once every few weeks is an appropriate schedule.

3. Tile grout

Typically, grout, the filling between tiles, is white or light colored. Over time, grout becomes stained, dingy, dirty and discolored.

To bring back the sparkle to your tiles, you’ll need the following: a bucket, safety goggles, rubber gloves, a mop and a soft toothbrush.

Here are a couple of tips on grout cleaning:

• Make a paste of baking soda and peroxide. This is recommended for stubborn stains on light colored grout. 
• Spray shaving cream on stained grout. Scrub with a small brush after a few minutes. 
• Use a silicone-based grout sealer and apply one or two coats to dry grout. 
• Combine a small amount of white vinegar with baking soda. Next, use a soft toothbrush to scrub the grout off. Rinse with water. 

4. Wood panels

Grease can build up on wood paneling, dulling the sheen and reducing the quality of your kitchen’s overall look.

Here, you’ll need: several cleaning cloths, mineral oil, white vinegar, measuring cup, large spray bottle, vacuum with brush attachment and a microfiber dusting cloth.

Use a dry microfiber cleaning cloth to dust the paneling by wiping it. Use a vacuum cleaner if the microfiber cleaning cloth doesn’t remove all the dirt.

Next, add one-fourth of vinegar and half a cup of mineral oil to a spray bottle. Shake well.

Spray the mixture on wood panels and use a clean rag to rub it in. After you do this, bring out the shine of the paneling by buffing the panels with a clean, dry cloth.

5. Kitchen sink

Make it a ritual to clean your sink after washing the dishes, as the kitchen is a great place for germs to thrive. To clean your kitchen sink, you’ll need a sponge, rubber gloves, dish or castile soap, water, and baking soda.

Sprinkle baking soda on the sink then squirt a little castile soap onto your sponge. Next, add hot water and begin scrubbing. The whole process should take you around two minutes.

When the kitchen is clean, everything feels and smells better! Use these tried and tested tips to keep your kitchen grease free.

Finding the Funds For Property Renovation

via

Only 35% of Americans are satisfied with their finances today, so it’s no wonder that many households find it difficult to acquire the extra money to fund a home renovation. However, renovation can significantly improve the value of your property. It might just be the case that coughing up the cash could pay dividends in the long run. Nevertheless, this is an important decision, and not one to be taken lightly by any household. Do examine your options fully before making a potentially costly decision. Let’s take a look at them now.

Come up with a plan

Have in mind what kind of budget you’ll want before you even start to look at financial products. Different types of renovations will need different budgets, so think carefully about the exact improvements you want to make. Will you be knocking down walls? Adding plumbing? Applying for permits? All of these are likely to add significant costs.

One thing to help with your budget is comparing the cost of tradespeople. It could avoid you needing to take out multiple loans, meaning a much lower interest rate overall, and of course, it will give you a lot more piece of mind too! Make sure to compare multiple tradespeople, and also ask for quotes rather than estimates. A quote is a more accurate reflection of the true cost of a service, and unlike estimates, they’re legally binding.

Don’t peso much for a loan!

Another thing to look at carefully is the options you might have to finance the renovation. Someone new to renovation might easily overlook what might have been the best option for them. One option is always to pay out of your own pocket. Unlike any other options, this one comes with a zero percent interest rate - which might be very appealing to some! You might think that you don’t have quite the level of savings for this, but do look carefully at your monthly outgoings to see whether it’s possible to cut back on spending in the short-run to reap those gains in the long run.

If an upfront payment is not an option for you, then when you’re comparing financial products, look for both a low interest rate, no nonsense in the terms and conditions and clear evidence that the entity you’re looking at is legitimate. Alongside personal loans and mortgages, do look at some of the less conventional options too. Consider using a P2P (person to person) lending platform, or calculating a reverse mortgage, as these methods could be end up being the best choice to make.

Safe as houses?

So, there are two big things to think about when renovating your house. Make a detailed plan and then follow through on it: calculate exactly how much the work will cost, and how you’re going to pay for it. Remember, there are plenty of frauds out there looking to make easy money by ripping people off: don’t let yourself be one of them!

Seven Rules to Follow When Renovating Your Apartment

Whether you live in a studio apartment or something more spacious like The Madrid, renovating is the perfect way to make it your own. If you’re in the market to spruce your place up, then follow these seven essential rules.

1. Always Check With the Landlord

Apartment living comes with its own set of rules, and the person in charge of those is your landlord. Unauthorized changes to your dwelling can lead to fines or eviction, so play it smart. Start by checking your lease to see what upgrades can be made, then ask the landlord directly to get the okay on your project.

2. Hit the Kitchen

Apartments typically come with outdated kitchens since they save landlords money. That’s not always the case, and http://www.carmelapartments.com/the-village/ is living proof, but it might be the first area you want to spruce up.

Simple changes like replacing knobs or repainting cupboards can breathe new life into this space, as can printed contact paper inside the cupboards. To save on space, add adhesive hooks to the insides of your cabinets and some easy to install removable shelving.

3. Bathroom Etiquette

Dealing with a small bathroom? If your porcelain throne room could use an update, start with the showerhead and knobs on the sink then add a shelving unit to help stores things like towels or toilet paper. If you want to go the extra mile, ask about painting the walls a different color or updating the flooring.

4. Floors Galore

Updating the floors is a major change, but most landlords won’t argue if it can help increase the value of the space. They might even reimburse you for part of the cost if you sell the idea to them this way!

Keep your cost down with carpet, laminate, or linoleum. If you can install it yourself, all the better. Whatever you choose, this can make any room feel like it's brand new.

5. Livable Living Space

Apartments can often feel smaller than they are due to cramped furniture arrangements. Thankfully, moving your furnishings around is free and takes a mere few hours to complete. If you’ve already got the ultimate feng shui down pat, then consider swapping out certain pieces with space saving alternatives.

6. Make Use of Space

Have an extra room that you don’t use very often? Why not repurpose it into something more useful? Any room, open or not, can quickly be made into an office or extra space to entertain guests.

If you really want to go the extra mile here, use the smaller space for your bedroom. It might not seem practical, but consider how many more guests you could entertain with the opened up space in the larger room. Besides, how much room do you need just to sleep?

7. Brighten Things Up

A dimly lit apartment will always look smaller than it really is. While ample amounts of natural lighting are nice, it isn’t always an option. Consider adding a few lamps, and keep your eyes peeled for any overhead lighting you can install.

Provided you have permission, you could try out Lantern & Scroll custom lanterns for a truly unique feel, or pick up a few standing lamps to place in the corners of your room. To give different rooms their own vibe, try our different lighting in each.

Renovate Away

These rules are the recipe to making any apartment space feel more spacious, inviting, and aligning them more with your unique personality. By the time you finished #7, you’ll swear you just moved into a new place!