The Perfect Blinds For Your Home

For a long time, most homes depended on just curtains to add visual appeal to their windows. These days, however, many home owners go for blinds for various reasons. Aside from being even more aesthetic, blinds are also more practical in so many ways.

Aside from décor and sunlight control, blinds also provide you privacy. More importantly, blinds help your home become more energy efficient, especially during the summer when the scorching heat of the sun passes through your glass windows and makes your air conditioner work harder, which results in larger electricity bills.

If you’re thinking about switching to blinds, you need to know how to choose the perfect blinds for your home. To help you get started, here are the types of blinds that are available in Australia.

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Tips To Avoid Encroaching On Your Neighbours

In general, buying or selling property is a fairly drama-free affair. That is, until your neighbour claims that you have encroached on his property. That is where all the fun begins. Actually, a friend has actually experienced this. He had a fence built around his newly bought house, only to find out later that his fence to the right actually sat on his neighbour’s property.

Lucky for him, it was just a simple fence. If the encroaching structure was anything bigger than that, it would have been a pretty costly proposition. You can only imagine how much of a hassle it would have been for him if the encroaching structure was a veranda or eaves that cross into the airspace of his neighbor. Even worse would be if the encroaching structure was a swimming pool that he has poured a lot of money into.

The thing is, property encroachment can actually be avoided before it happens. If you want to avoid encroaching on your neighbours, we’d like to share some tips in that regard.

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Boost Apartment Value With A Second Bathroom

boost home value with a second bathroomHere’s a bit of great news for home owners who are renovating to sell. According to a report on Smart Property Investment, you can boost apartment value with a second bathroom, and by a significant amount at that.

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How to Make Your Relationship Survive a Renovation

For couples living under one roof, the idea of initiating a renovation project for their home together seems like a very romantic idea. After all, what could be more romantic than making your dream home come true by working with the person you love on it? Alas, a renovation project is not that simple. Exciting, yes, but easy, no. As a matter of fact, renovations could prove to be so stressful it’s not uncommon for couple to get into arguments or fights over the way they’re going. Some relationships may even suffer so much strain with the renovation that they eventually fall apart.

However, don’t let the preceding paragraph scare you if you’re a couple planning to get some renovation work done. Far more couples have survived a renovation than those that broke up. Here are some tips that we hope would help make your relationship survive a renovation project.

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Why Proper Attic Ventilation Is Important

When it comes to making our homes more energy efficient, we often bury ourselves in doing things like installing ceiling fans, changing light bulbs to more efficient ones, installing programmable thermostats and sealing and insulating our homes that we often overlook the attic, which is one part of the house that is actually an essential part of the overall energy profile of your home.

Many home owners actually don’t realise that attic ventilation is so crucial to keeping your home warm during colder months and cool in the summer. In addition, attic ventilation also helps deliver fresh air throughout the home, giving us a lot of comfort and allows us to save money as well.

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Dealing With Moisture Problems at Home

There will always be moisture in the air in your home, especially when you live in a place with a more humid climate. While moisture in the air in general is okay and, in fact, important for good health, too much of it inside your home can lead to several issues. Aside from causing health problems, too much moisture in the air inside your home could also be detrimental to the structure of your own home.

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Australians Love Renovating

If you’ve been doing some channel surfing lately, you’ll see that programs that deal with home improvement are becoming quite popular. Their popularity clearly shows how everyday Australians are becoming more interested in renovation. An article written by Cameron McEvoy for RealEstate.com.au talks about this love for renovation among Australians and more.

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Refresh the Look of Your Room

Sick and tired of the way your room is looking? Yes, we know the feeling. It is pretty common for people to feel that a particular room in the house is  looking somewhat flat and boring. So perhaps it’s time  to refresh the look of your room.

If you’re worried about the costs involved, then good budgeting and creative thinking is a must. If you just stick with what you already have and polish them, you won’t have to spend a fortune in making your room look fresh again. Couple that with smart buying choices for new things, and the cost for refreshing your room’s look will be significantly reduced. So how do you go about giving your room a fresh look?

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Renovations to Create Instant Equity

renovations to create instant equityHaving a home you can call your own is perhaps one of the best feelings in the world. However, there is one word in the world of real estate that somehow brings a euphoric home owner back to earth, and that word is equity. It is the one word that reminds home owners that they only own the value of what they have already paid for the house against its fair market value. That means for a home that has been appraised for, say, $200,000 with the owner still owing $125,000.00 on its mortgage, the equity is $75,000, and that is what the home owner actually owns of his/her home.

Of course, the natural way to increase your equity would be to pay off the mortgage, but unless you have lots of cash lying around that will help you pay for it immediately, that would take a really long time. There are ways that you can create instant equity to your property, and making renovations on your home is at the top of that list.

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Tips for Financially Managing a Renovation Project

If you’re a home owner, there will eventually come a time when you have to get some renovation work done on it. While planning a renovation project can be a rather exciting thing, it can also get really stressful, particularly in the finance department. Managing your budget responsibly can get a bit tricky. If financially managing a renovation project becomes a bit of a problem for you, perhaps this article written by Tony Rigby for RealEstate.com.au can help.

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