There are so many benefits to decluttering. Most of us are familar with the feeling of being out of control- of allowing clutter and mess to take over-not being able to find car keys, losing bills or not finding that essential item as we’re running out the door. Home life becomes an extension of the stress we experience at work. Clutter creates stress, therefore decluttering helps us reduce the stress in our lives. Our home should be our sanctuary – a place where we can shut off, chill and relax. Once we have our house in order, then we can get on with living our life, focussing on the things that are really important to us.
You will be amazed at how effective decluttering is, not only in giving us some control back but also in terms of creating much more open and ordered living spaces. The simple process of moving furniture and accessories around, getting rid of old tattered looking pieces and displaying some key pieces will give a space a new lease of life.
I know some people have a major block around decluttering and if you feel the clutter is overwhelming, then give me a call, I’m available (with a team) to help. If you decide to tackle it yourself , then it can be very straightforward, the following guidelines should help or listen to the interview I did with Michael Comyn on 4fm (October 11th). http://www.4fm.ie/.
Where to start:
1. Plan and be realistic – you’re not going to get the whole house decluttered in a weekend. So set aside a morning to begin with – it’s often easiest to set aside some free time on a Saturday, when someone else can look after the children. It’s important to plan as you’re going to have to pencil in a few dates over time to get the whole house sorted.
2. Phone a friend. Draft in the help of a friend – someone you can trust, who can help you be objective and make the difficult decisions. It’ll be more fun and you’ll get twice as much done. Tackle the most difficult room first – it’ll feel like you’ve broken the back of it.
3. Start on one room at a time -start on the superficial surfaces first, anything on the floor, bed etc. Once that is sorted you’ll have space to sort out the drawers and hidden areas.
4. Have a method to your sorting. You’ll need three bags – one for rubbish, one for keeping and one for recycling. The recycling bag will hold all the items that need to go to the recycling bins or centres and also items you can send to charity shops. The good news is that you can also make some money out of your clutter. Set up a stall at the dublin fleamarket or Blackrock market. You can also sell online through ebay or gumtree. http://www.ebay.ie/ and http://www.gumtree.ie/ And also there are auction houses such as Buckleys in Sandycove that will take standard furniture. Or if you have some nice clothes that you haven’t gotten any wear out of, you could try your local swop shop.
Management:
Once you have the whole house back in order, the key to keeping on top of things is to have some systems in place. My key tips are as follows:
1. Effective storage- a place for everything and everything in it’s place. This means investing in effective storage, ensuring that you designate a place for all items and making sure things are put there. A filing cabinet is a must for bills, paperwork and documentation. Good clothes, acessories and shoe storage is essential. Ikea, Heatons and Howards storage offer very good storage options. However you need to limit the amount of storage you have also e.g. limit the number of books to the size of your bookcase check out http://www.ikea.ie/ http://www.howardsstorage.ie/ http://www.heatons.ie/
2. Stop impulse buying This may mean window shopping, leaving credit cards at home. If you’ve got cash on you , you need to ask yourself the question – do I really need it and do I love it? When you buy something use the rule – one in two out, this means that when you buy one item, you get rid of two.
3. Get buy-in from the whole family Everyone needs to take responsibility. Each activity e.g. playing , must include putting away also as part of the activity, so the children take responsibility for their toys. Likewise clearing away must be part of the dinner activity, and chores must be fairly distributed.
4. Seasonal decluttering. Hopefully , you won’t have too much to do on an ongoing basis, but clutter does build up easily unless it is managed effectively. And even when it is, clutter can creep in imperceptively, so there’s no harm to carry out a small decluttering every so often.
Best of luck with it. I’ll be following up with lots more tips and some more details on products and websites, so check back with me over the next few weeks. And please email me your thoughts, suggestions or questions, (I’ll answer as many as I can!) I’d really like to hear from you.
Labels: 4FM, decluttering, design for less, effective storage
posted by elaine@homeinteriors.ie at 12:06 | 0 comments
Friday 22 February 2008
For those that would like to study Interior Design full time in Ireland there are Interior Design courses offered by Senior College Dun Laoghaire and Griffith College Dublin.
Senior College Dun Laoghaire offers the the following Courses:
1) Rhodec Associate Diploma in Interior Design
2) Higher National Diploma (HND) in Interior Design
The Rhodec Associate Diploma in Interior Design is a 1 year full time course and the Higher National Diploma (HND) in Interior Design is a further 2 years full time course (3 years in total)
Full course information can be found here: http://www.scd.ie/interior1.htm
Griffith College Dublin offer both a full time and part-time interior design course,with the Diploma course in Interior Design is the only two-year Diploma course in Interior Design in Ireland, which leads to Associate Membership of the Institute of Designers in Ireland. http://www.gcd.ie/
For those that would find it difficult to travel to Dublin or would prefer to study Interior Design from home there is the Limperts Academy. The Limperts Academy is a well-regarded programme that allows you to study Interior Design from home. They offer the following programmes:
Diploma in Interior Design & Decoration Higher National Diploma (HND) in Interior Design Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Interior Design
Master of Arts (MA) in Interior Design
And their website can be found here:http://www.limpertsacademy.com/
If we have left any Interior Design courses out that are available to Irish students please drop us a line to elaine@HomeInteriors.ie and we will expand the list
Labels: interior design colleges, interior design schools, learn interior design
posted by Home Interiors Ireland at 8/14/2007 06:22:00 PM links to this post
Top 10 Kitchen Design Tips Ireland
Following on from our earlier entry on kitchen design idea, here are some tips to get you started.
1.Stop and think.
What do you actually want your kitchen to do? Do you want a place to heat up the latest supermarket offering and unpack takeaways or do you fancy yourself as a bit of a Jamie Oliver? Do you want the latest thing in kitchens or do you want something a bit more classic. Trends are great but remember that some of them don’t age well. That purple fridge might look great now but will you still be able to live with it in twelve months time.
2.Assess your space.
Measure up carefully and work out just how much space you have and how much you need. Do you have a lot of stuff in your kitchen that needs to be found a home, or do you have a lot of clutter that needs to go to the bin? Remember that creating a kitchen with too much storage can be just as bad as a kitchen with too little. Not only do banks of cabinets not look great but they can just lead to you filling them up with junk which you never use but never throw out. It might be that the space could be better utilised by including a breakfast bar or another appliance.
3.Planning.
Some kitchen designers start with the “golden triangle” whereby you rank your three most important “items” in the kitchen, for example, your sink, your fridge and your cooker. The kitchen is then designed around these in such a way that functionality is optimised, the theory being that the most used equipment and work areas should be grouped together to allow the user to operate effectively and efficiently while cooking. However, this is not a hard and fast rule. Go back to what you want your kitchen to do and work from there.
4.Hit the net.
Enter kitchen design ideas into Google and prepare to spend a lot of time looking at just a few of the 12.5 million results that are returned. Some of it is rubbish but some of it can be pretty handy, including planning and design packages as well as budget calculators.
5.Budget.
Work out exactly how much you can afford to spend and then stick to it. Kitchens are notoriously easy to spend money on and if you’re not careful costs will spiral before you know it.
6. Shop around.
The quality and cost of kitchen units and installations can vary widely. Get at least three quotes before you buy.
7. Think very carefully before doing it yourself.
Kitchens are like bathrooms in that they can be very tricky to install and require some specialist skills, including the plumbing and electrics. If you get these wrong the results can be fatal. Or if you make a mess, getting a professional in to fix it all up can end up costing you more than if you had just booked a professional in the first place.
And if you can’t afford a whole new kitchen, a revamp of what you already have could be just what the doctor ordered.
Try one or all of these:
8· Re-tiling, repainting or repapering makes an enormous difference.
9· Try replacing the doors or even just the door handles.
10· Update your appliances, even just one will give your kitchen a different look.
11· Replace any tired old linoleum or ratty carpet. There are some surprisingly good looking linoleums on the market and a new floor covering can transform any space.
Labels: Interior Design Ireland, Kitchen Design Ireland, Kitchen Ideas Ireland, top 10 kitchen design tips posted by Home Interiors Ireland at 8/14/2007 03:49:00 PM links to this post
Kitchen Design Ideas Ireland
If you’re thinking of designing a new kitchen or redesigning your current kitchen then there are lots of things to think about and an almost infinite number of concepts, gadgets and furniture styles to explore. And if you have access to the internet then your options are almost limitless when it comes to playing with designs, ideas and most importantly costs for any new kitchen.
The status of the kitchen as a room has undergone significant changes over the years, especially in the last century or so when modern technology has rapidly altered not only the shape of our kitchens and their equipment but also the amount of time we spend in the kitchen.
Today there seems to be two apparently contradictory trends for the kitchen. One is that kitchen space has been reduced to a bare minimum, catering to those who subscribe to the notion that they can’t cook or don’t have time to cook.
This kitchen is an environment that features only the most basic of equipment and functionality. The room itself is no longer really a room, but more of a ‘galley’ that is separated from the other living areas only by a change in the flooring, from carpet or wood to tiling or linoleum. The other, more aspirational trend, however, is that of the kitchen as the heart of the home, a place where not only is food prepared and cooked, but where visitors may be entertained, family gathers, and perhaps even meals are shared. This kitchen needs to be multifunctional, welcoming and very savvy with its use of space.
When it comes to designing or redesigning your kitchen, before you even think of opening a magazine or heading for B&Q, stop and think. The key to any successful kitchen is the exercise of a little common sense.
What exactly do you want your kitchen to be?
Are you a person for whom the culinary world begins and ends with a microwave readymeal? If so, you are probably not going to need a kitchen full of cabinets, gadgets and a huge island; these things will do nothing but cost you money and then gather dust for the next ten years. So before rushing out to recreate the dream kitchen you have seen on the latest episode of Cribs, take a breath and be realistic about your actual needs and desires.
However, if you are one of the many people for whom the kitchen is one of the most important rooms in your house, then you’re in luck. Designers have put a lot of effort into creating kitchens that are “expandable and collapsible”, which means that the kitchen is absolutely functional for those weeknights where you come home to do little more than simply warm up a meal, but can also “expand” to accommodate the weekends where you’re kitchen might be filled with guests and you want to show of your cooking skills. Your options are endless and include specialty lighting, elaborate moldings and finely crafted floors and ceilings.
Trends
Custom cabinets – if you have a little money to spend then you can design your cabinets to do pretty much whatever you want from enclosing overhead wine racks, to pull out spice racks and chopping boards, or even warming drawers or drinks chillers that pull out from under the counter.
Colours
white is a perennial favourite as is blue but a current hot trend is for red in all its hues from chilli pepper red to dark cherry. Wood is also very popular, natural woods like knotty pine or much darker woods including mahogany; and bear in mind it’s more about the wood than the stain finish. Appliances too are getting into colours especially reds, purples, and teals. And if you are going to go for metal, remember, it’s not all about stainless steel.
Space saving
If you are tight on space look to Japan for some great options to make the most of what you have. With over 127 million people all jammed into a very small area, Japan knows how to maximise its space, and its kitchens are no exception. Corners on cabinets that telescope out; all-in-one islands that contain virtually the entire kitchen; very small scale appliances including dishwashers and tall skinny fridges; shelving that runs across windows; and even touch sensory faucets or motorised shelves.
Labels: Interior Design Ireland, Kitchen Design Ireland, Kitchen Ideas Ireland
posted by Home Interiors Ireland at 8/14/2007 03:47:00 PM links to this post
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Friday, January 19, 2007
Custom Designed Furniture
Happy New year Everyone!This is the time of year, we all think of how we can improve our lives. Whether its giving up smoking, drinking a little less and basically trying to be a better person. Well, we may not be able to help you with these things, but we can certainly help to improve the layout of your home. If its a computer desk, new kitchen layout or just some extra storage, we can custom design a piece of furniture for you. Why not start the New Year with a fresh, well designed and organised home!
posted by Home Interiors Ireland at 1/19/2007 03:37:00 PM 1 comments links to this post
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Hi,
We’d like to thank everyone who attended the Ideal Homes Exhibition last weekend and also a special thanks to those who voted for Home Interiors. We were presented with the Gold award for best design last Thursday and on Monday evening we were also presented with the People’s choice award. It was great fun designing this room for the show and we really enjoyed meeting you all at the stand. The best of luck with all of your design projects and if you need any help just give us a call.
Thanks again.
posted by Home Interiors Ireland at 10/31/2006 03:07:00 PM 6 comments links to this post
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Thursday, October 05, 2006
Ideal Homes Exhibition
Its that time of year again and the RDS is getting ready to exhibit the biggest Interior Design show, ‘The Ideal Homes Exhibition’. This year they are holding a competition between eight Interior Designers and we were fortunate enough to be chosen to take part. The theme we chose for this competition is, ‘In Your Wildest Dreams, A Teenage Bedroom’.
Our design will catch the attention of the public with its unusual, funky scheme! So why not come over and check it out. It will also give you the opportunity to meet us in person. The Ideal Homes Exhibition is on the 26th to the 30th of October in the RDS in Dublin. See you there!
posted by Home Interiors Ireland at 10/05/2006 03:21:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
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Hi there,we recently attended the launch of a new furniture store in Dublin called Zebrano. These beautiful pieces are made from rare woods from Africa and Asia, called Zebra and Wenge. They are individually designed by a well respected and admired craftsman called Mr Zhu. All the wood is reclaimed, therefore it is environmentally friendly. Each piece, is a work of art and very unique. Unfortunately this store is not open to the general public. You can make an appointment to see the furniture with your architect or interior designer. Check out the website and let us know what you think!
posted by Home Interiors Ireland at 9/15/2006 08:53:00 AM 1 comments links to this post
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