How to Actually Be Productive While Spring-Cleaning

It’s that beautiful season again where you can finally go out and enjoy the outdoors. Spring is here, but along with it comes the need to start sweeping and dusting your home. Spring-cleaning may be an enjoyable activity to some, but not all of us are keen to it. More importantly, not all of us are doing it right and are actually making progress.

There’s more to spring-cleaning than just simply decluttering the home. Just as the air clears in the spring, your home also needs to have clean air on the inside, otherwise you or your family could catch nasty health conditions that you never want to be in. Just examine all the undisturbed furniture or display items at home and observe how dust easily collects on their surface. These could be accumulating probable allergens that could trigger asthma attacks and allergic reactions. With such a lovely day outdoors, those are simply the last things that we need.

Start anew and refresh your home environment by spring-cleaning, and might we say, spring-cleaning it right. There’s an art to it that you may have to follow in order to actually have positive results after a long day’s hard work. Make sure to do it right while you’re at it.

Don’t waste a beautiful spring season by being indoors sick. Below is a useful infographic shared by Microfiber Wholesale to us about spring-cleaning that you can learn from when you finally decide to give your home a well-deserved break from the harsh winter months. Your health and your home will thank you for it!
 

Make Your Home Sweet Home As Comfortable As Possible With These Simple Tips

It shouldn't really come as much of a shock that most people probably want to feel comfortable in their homes. After all, you're going to spend the vast majority of your time there and feeling tense and uncomfortable is going to make your life much more difficult than it needs to. Your home should be the place where you can escape all of the stress and tension that, like it or not, tends to be a big part of everyday life. If you don't have somewhere to decompress and relax at the end of the day, you're going to end up feeling tense all of the time which can have some pretty horrible consequences for your life overall. But what can you do? As much as many people would like it, your home isn't always going to be as comfortable and pleasant to be in as you might like. With that in mind, here are just a few things that you can do to feel as comfortable as possible in your home sweet home.

Keep an eye on the light

A lot of people tend not to realize just how much of an impact light can have on the quality of their home. The way that your home feels can often be significantly altered by the presence or absence of a decent amount of light. Have you ever walked into a room and it just felt kind of cramped and small, even when you had plenty of space to move around? If you have experienced this, then there's a pretty good chance that it was because of the lighting in it. A poorly lit room is always going to feel smaller than one with a plenty of illumination. Of course, not every room is going to need the same kind of lighting. Natural light is the only thing that you should be trying your best to get into every single room. Keep your curtains open during the day and try to get as much sunlight in as possible. However, think about the way you want to feel in each room. The energy of your kitchen is going to be pretty different from the energy in your bedroom, so you're not going to want the same type of light in both.

Get a good night's sleep

Speaking of your bedroom, there are few places where you want to feel more comfortable and relaxed than in your own bed. In fact, the quality of your sleep can have a huge impact on how you feel on a day-to-day basis. A lack of sleep can leave you tense and irritable, making life much harder than it needs to be. If you're struggling to sleep, then it could be because of a number of factors, but you shouldn't ignore one particularly large possible factor: your bed. Has your down pillow gone flat? Here are some tips to revive it. Make sure to fluff them every day. Make it a part of your regular routine to give your pillows a good fluff every time you make your bed. Not only that but putting them through the tumble dryer on a low heat from time to time can help keep them firm without losing the softness that you need to get a good night's sleep. You should also make sure that you're changing your sheets regularly. Nothing makes for a bad night's sleep more than musty, unwashed sheets.

Keep the house at a decent temperature.

No one wants to wake up every morning to a house that is essentially one large ice cube. Of course, you also don't want to spend your evenings unable to sleep because you're sweating buckets into your sheets. Whether you're using your aircon, central heating, or just opening a window, try to keep your home as a consistent, comfortable temperature as much as you can. Sure, for a lot of people this might not be the cheapest option, but there are plenty of ways that you can keep your home comfortable without having to waste huge amounts of energy. For one thing, set your heating up on a timer so that your home can get nice a warm just as you get home from work or wake up in the morning. The same applies to your aircon. That way you can always feel comfortable, but you don't have to worry about having them running all day long.

Tidy up

We all know the old cliche "tidy house, tidy mind." However, as annoying as it might be, it actually does have a pretty significant amount of truth to it. Being surrounded by mess is just going to make you feel tense. Nothing sets you up for a bad day more than coming downstairs and finding that there are still piles of dishes all over the kitchen from the night before. Even if you just want to dive into bed after dinner, take the time to do the washing up so that you can wake up to a clean kitchen. This same idea applies to every room of the house. You'll feel much happier getting into a well-made bed at the end of the day, and nothing will make you feel more stressed than spending your time running an obstacle course of toys, clothes, books, and anything else that are littering the floor. Taking the time to do a little bit of tidying here and there can make a world of difference to the way that your home feels.

Make it personal

Have you ever been to someone's home and felt like you may as well have just walked into a showroom? As though there's absolutely no personality in the house at all? It's a bizarre feeling, isn't it? This usually happens because whoever lives in that house hasn't taken the time to make it personal to themselves and their lives. Fill your home up with memories, and you'll find it becomes a much more comfortable place for your and your family. It doesn't take much, a few family photos here, a couple of mementos there, and you'll find that your home feels more like an extension of yourself, rather than just four walls and a ceiling. Little touches like this can turn your home into the kind of place that you would be more than happy to come back to every single day and escape the stress of your day-to-day life.

5 Ideas To Design a Windowless Bathroom

Has it happened to you? You’ve seen a house that you want to buy for a renovation; it has great indoor and outdoor space, it’s near to great schools and amenities, views to die for, and a windowless bathroom. You discount the house immediately. You draw the floorplan and try to work out how best you can move supporting walls to provide a window: it’s not going to be possible. Or do you already have a windowless bathroom in your home that makes you cringe every time you enter it? All is not lost though; there are some clever design tricks that you implement into your design scheme to transform your windowless bathroom from an awkward space into a bathroom you can be proud of.

Mirrors

The use of mirrors in windowless bathrooms is mandatory; you have no other option. Placing mirrors in unexpected places such as near the ground helps to not only reflect the available light, but offers a stretch of flooring that suggests a sense of space. A full wall mirror, or at least to the sink unit, can double the space visually. Using a gallery of smaller mirrors can be used as a feature and a smart way to reflect light (just be careful to avoid mirrors being placed opposite each other, you will end up with a fairground effect infinity reflection).

Glass and Lucite

Avoid restricting your eyes’ view of the room, use glass or transparent bath or shower screens or internal room dividers to add to the sense of space. To add interest to the dividers explore textured glass or metal mesh curtains: be brave. Choose your bathroom accessories wisely: lucite is a wonderful material for your functional items that you need and will demand less of your attention than opaque objects.

Sink unit

To encourage the feeling of space within the room, choose a sink unit that stands tall and allows the legs of the unit to be exposed, what you lose in storage, you gain in the feeling of openness.

Lighting

This is the most important aspect of a windowless bathroom to get right. Your initial reaction is to have an extended network of downlights; however, this can create shadows in places that do nothing to flatter either the room or you whilst you shave or put makeup on. The trick is to layer your lighting with the addition of wall fixtures or vanity lights that provide horizontal light to counterbalance the vertical of the downlights.

Color

There are two opposing schools of thought for choosing color for a windowless room. White to maximize reflection, or embrace color to act as a distraction to the fact there is no window. The braver option is to choose a bold paint or color, but be sure to choose the tone carefully to avoid the feeling of clutter. A white room can be the perfect place to showcase a statement piece of brightly colored furniture such as a stool or a chair.

Rent Both Truck and Driver For Long-Distance Moves

Long-distance moving is inherently costly, risky, and stressful. Isn’t it? But even if so, what is the best way to minimize these negative factors?

While we can’t promise a one size fits all solution to a problem as diverse as interstate and long distance relocations, there are a number of reasons why you are better off renting both truck and driver (with gas usage included in the price) instead of just renting a traditional moving truck.



Here are the most important factors to consider:

Using Professional Truck Drivers Is Safer and More Efficient

Unless the LA Times’ report on robotic truck drivers being set to populate our nation’s highways is true, you must choose between driving a rental truck and paying a professional truck driver to transport your possessions cross-country. Which is the better choice?

Consider that a professional truck driver does interstate driving on a regular basis, is fully familiar with the feel or operating a “big rig,” and is not nearly as likely to get lost or take a wrong turn as a non-professional. It’s clear where the advantage lies as to safety and time/fuel efficiency.

Self-Moving Is Affordable and Cheaper Than Full-Service Moving

Moving truck rental may cost you only a hundred dollars or so, but then you have to factor in gas usage and a usage fee of, perhaps, around a dollar per mile. That could be $500, $1,000, or more of additional expense on a cross-country move.

You might still rent a truck cheaper than hiring one, but consider the bigger picture. With “self-moving,” you pack and load your property on your own and save big compared to full-service moving. Renting long distance moving trucks, driver and gas inclusive, gets you more “bang for your buck” than truck-only rental. And prices can be comparable or even less.

Self-Moving Is Easy to Coordinate Logistically

If you have to rent a truck and then take a week or more to load it, you could be paying $2,000 or more with no real extra value added. And full-service moves cost the most and may require you to bend to the movers’ busy schedules during peak moving seasons.

A better option is to schedule your driver-and-truck enough ahead of time to ensure you can pack and organize volunteer loaders (friends and family!) before the truck arrives. You can pack and load everything according to your own preferences without having to repeat every thought to a hired mover.

Then, the professional trucker handles all of the highway logistics, any special issues with moving internationally or to/from a military base, and everything else. With some companies, like MovingPlace for example, you can even arrange to have your car moved by truck to avoid the long, unfamiliar drive.

What do you do after the truck pulls away? Just get to your new home ahead of it and relax a little while before unloading.

Conclusion

Avoiding the two extremes of full-service moving and truck-only rental, self-service moving gives you the important advantages of having a professional driver transport your valuables. And overall, it saves you money.