Home Makers

A good part of the house to start renovating is the kitchen. It is the most used room in a typical home that is used not only for cooking but many use it for informal dining as well. One of the inexpensive way to give a kitchen a new look is to re-paint (or re-varnish) the cabinets. If you have a bigger budget, change the cabinet doors (retaining the cabinetry), then re-paint the whole cabinets. I

f the cabinets are still good, changing just the knobs and handles will give it a new look and feel. Replacing old and chipped kitchen counter tiles is a good renovation investment. There are many alternatives that will beautify any kitchen style: laminates, ceramic tiles (some are very inexpensive), granite, natural stone, marble, cultured marble, stainless steel and even wood. Lighting is an important element of home renovation. As a rule of thumb, use yellow (warm white) light inside the house. People's complexion looks better, food on the table appears more appetizing and the overall ambiance is enhanced. Exceptions are work spaces like the kitchen. Note that a combination of white and yellow lights in the same room is very pleasing to the eye. If you have a bungalow built in the 70's with low ceiling and are about to do a major home renovation, you might be able to make your living/dining room ceiling higher by removing the ceiling and reinstalling the ceiling up near the roof and exposing the trusses or rafters. This will make your room look bigger and will have a impressive change to the look of the room. Don't replace old and even damaged parquet and hardwood floors (unless you really want a new type of flooring). There are many shops who will repair and re-polish/re-sand your floor and will look like new. Since you are already into home renovation, check out if you have ample storage spaces. Old houses tend to have inadequate closets and storage spaces. Having enough storage space means you can minimize clutter in you home. In small rooms, the simplest and cheapest way to make the room bigger is by installing mirrors. This can be a big framed mirror placed on a wall, or a wall to ceiling mirror. You can also change closet doors with mirrored sliding doors. Another home renovation idea to dramatically change the look of a room is by adding wainscoting on walls. This can be done by adding a horizontal molding on the wall at about 3 feet high (height of the wainscoting is subjective; adjust height to the proportion of the room). Apply a different wall treatment on the upper and lower portion of the wainscoting (paint, wall paper, wood panels, etc.) When building an extension to your home, blend the design, roofing, windows and exterior finish of the extension to the existing house structure. The extension should not look like an extension but rather, it should look like part of the original design of the house.