Comix For Young & Old

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Want a simple behind the scenes way to increase the comfort and value of your home? Soundproofing may sound like something only professional recording artists need, but you will be surprised at how much you will enjoy the added quiet that soundproofing supplies to your home environment.

Guest post today from Active Paving – Dublin patio providersfor many years.

soundproofing, home improvement, soundproofing material, acoustical foam, floor insulation, soundpro

Want a simple behind the scenes way to increase the comfort and value of your home? Soundproofing may sound like something only professional recording artists need, but you will be surprised at how much you will enjoy the added quiet that soundproofing supplies to your home environment.

There are many areas where soundproofing can be added in order to make for a quieter space. Sometimes it the outside disturbances of traffic or barking dogs that you would like to block out. Other times, you may want to keep noises from one room inside your home from seeping into other areas. Depending on the way you want to manage and control sound, there is a soundproofing technique that will meet your needs.

Keeping Noise Out

One of the most effective ways to keep street noise from entering your home is to soundproof your windows. Normal windows are given a sound blocking rating on a numerical scale. The percentage of noise that soundproof windows can block out increases substantially with these special windows.

The best part of the whole process is that it is easy. When you add soundproof windows to your home it will look just the same as the old windows. In fact, the old windows remain in place and the extra glass barrier is added to them. Windows will still open and close in the same manner too, but the panel of glass and the air pocket created by the double pane greatly reduces noise.

Sound proof windows differ from just plain double pane storm windows. The greatest effect is in the amount of space between the two panels of glass. It is just the right amount to trap unwanted noise, and it has the added benefit of staying clean inside because of the air block seal.

Keeping Sound In

Another area where soundproofing may be wanted is in a home theatre. If you want to keep the sound from the stereo system from getting distorted or disturbing others around the house, then there are sound proof panels that can be added to the room. These panels are usually made of foam, resembling an egg crate, but other materials are being made and tested every day. These look more like decorative panelling, yet offer the same noise control.

Ceilings and floors can help prevent the escape of noise between rooms. By adding insulation, similar to that which keeps the cold out in the winter and the heat in, you can reduce noise in and out of the room.

Soundproofing – Doing It Yourself

If you are good the DYI projects, then soundproof is one you can tackle. It is best to leave the windows to the professional installers, but during any renovation of your house, you should consider sound proofing as important a decoration as the carpet or wallpaper. When you need to repair drywall for example, consider adding the insulation that will reduce noise. After all, no one wants to be enjoying lunch in the kitchen or on the patio and have to listen to a teen’s stereo from the bedroom! Soundproofing may not be something you would have missed until you have it once. Then you will be thinking about it anytime a noise gets in the way of your peace and quiet.

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According to the National Association of Homebuilders, Americans spend approximately $215 billion remodeling their homes in 2005. So if you’re planning to renovate, you may want to remember one point: It can pay to make your home more energy efficient while you remodel.

Guest post today from Active Paving – Dublin patio providersfor many years.

Make Homes More Energy Efficient While Remodeling

According to the National Association of Homebuilders, Americans spent approximately $215 billion remodeling their homes in 2005. So if you’re planning to renovate, you may want to remember one point: It can pay to make your home more energy efficient while you remodel.

“Homeowners are putting extra emphasis on energy cost savings when remodeling their homes,” explains Danny Lipford, homebuilding expert and host of the television show “Today’s Homeowner with Danny Lipford.” “Projects that provide more energy efficiency have proven to help reduce heating and cooling costs, in some cases by up to 15 percent.”

Lipford says that homeowners would be wise to seek every possible way to keep their homes energy efficient and resistant to moisture. He recommends that early in the remodeling process you should ask the contractor plenty of questions. Find out where he thinks you can maximize energy savings, where energy can be lost during a renovation, how to protect against potential weather damage and if he plans to use innovative products such as DuPont Tyvek Weatherization Systems Products that can help save energy while protecting your home.

The three key zones Lipford identifies as those to focus on to cut energy costs are:

ZONE #1: The Attic

Attic insulation can result in significant energy savings, reducing heating and cooling costs by using innovative building materials like DuPont Tyvek AtticWrap. “Some of the most effective solutions that help make homes more efficient are the ones you can’t see and are important to focus on early in the remodeling process,” says Lipford.

ZONE #2: The Walls

During construction, contractors can use a house wrap-such as DuPont Tyvek HomeWrap, which meets ENERGY STAR standards-under the siding. The wrap protects the house like a windbreaker, forming a protective skin around the walls, doors and windows. Installing house wrap can help lower heating and cooling costs by keeping outside air and water out while allowing moisture to escape. Without a quality house wrap, homes are more vulnerable to exterior deterioration, air and water infiltration and possibly mold.

ZONE #3: The Windows

Vinyl windows have become one of the most popular choices for superior energy efficiency and moisture management, especially when flashed correctly and installed with insulated glass panels.

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Bathroom maintenance is an integral part of good housekeeping. For some, bathrooms signify privacy and intimacy. Bathrooms are often decorated with a wide range of accessories. The objective is the same — generate a feeling that bathroom is no different from the rest of the house.

Guest post today from Active Paving – Dublin patio providersfor many years.

Bathroom acessories

Bathroom maintenance is an integral part of good housekeeping. For some, bathrooms signify privacy and intimacy. Bathrooms are often decorated with a wide range of accessories. The objective is the same — generate a feeling that bathroom is no different from the rest of the house.

Choosing bathroom accessories may be a difficult task for amateur housekeepers or families that have moved into houses independently for the first time. It is a difficult task since the bathroom might be crowded with a huge number of accessories, eventually reducing the space for the users. So make sure that the bathroom is not cluttered with accessories.

It is recommended that every household employ the services of a professional house decorator to decide what constitutes bathroom accessories. Professional house decorators can also assist in buying accessories. However, if that is not a choice, then purchasing bathroom accessories can be made busy by employing research work.

Most of the stores selling bathroom accessories are registered on the Internet. It is easy to visit any of these sites and check out the accessories. Most of the stores transact business through e-commerce. Create a personal account on the website for easy transaction. Most stores offer this facility of creating accounts on their websites.

Once you are convinced with the product, book it online. The stores will home deliver the product. Payment can be made online using a credit card.

It is always good to do a thorough examination of the products before deciding to purchase them. First decide, whether you really need a particular product. Evaluate its use and then purchase.

Some of the most common bathroom accessories at every home are: Shower curtains, clothe hangars, mats, waste baskets, toilet brushes, levers, shelves, holders, towel ring, shower accessories, bath tub accessories and mirrors. Ensure that there is adequate space in the bathroom for all these accessories.

If the house owner intends to go ahead and create an ambience of great quality in the bathroom, there are many options. However, there should be adequate space to create such an ambience in the bathroom.

The bathroom can be decked up with fashionable and ornamental lighting. Window furnishings and door textiles can be of high quality and colored in various combinations. Uninterrupted fragrance can be flowed in the bathroom using special dispensers. Bathroom can also have indoor ornamental plants.

Bathtubs come in various shapes and color these days. The bathtubs can have flashy and trendy external fittings like taps and shower tubes.

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Effective guidelines to clean your home

Guest post today from Active Paving – Dublin patio providersfor many years.

weekly household cleaning schedule, weekly household cleaning schedule, mops with hardwood floor cleaners, earth friendly floor cleaner

We all know how easy it is for our week to get away from us. It seems strange because we live in such a highly technical age. Sometimes it feels as if all those toys that are supposed to help us live easier lives have actually taken over the world. Instead of a little more down time, we’re constantly being called on our cell phones, beeped, paged, and generally at the mercy of others every hour of every day.

Our regular routines are more difficult than ever to keep. When we’re not at work or school, we’re driving the kids to events. We also try to schedule a work-out, lunch with a friend, and recreational activities. It’s not hard to see where a weekly household cleaning schedule can fall by the wayside. So how do we keep up with that aspect of our lives?

One key is to actually write out a weekly household cleaning schedule. Seeing something in black and white gives us a much better sense of just what needs to be done. Once you list your chores, you can decide if you want to devote an entire day off every week to doing them. You may find that there are some things you can do during the weekday evenings, thus freeing up a little more time to relax.

Floors definitely demand a lot of our attention. After all, there’s a floor in every room. Some are carpeted; some may be tile, marble, or linoleum; while others might be hardwood floors with area rugs lying on top. Chances are you use a variety of tools and products to clean them. Most likely you vacuum carpets and rugs. For the wooden floors you would use mops with hardwood floor cleaners. Hopefully you use earth friendly floor cleaner on hard surfaced floors.

Cleaning Your Floors

Most of us feel a lot better about the whole house when all the floors are clean. There’s something really unpleasant about looking down and seeing dirt, stains, and piles of objects that aren’t in their normal place. In terms of our weekly household cleaning schedule, floors can take up a fair amount of time.

As with anything else, keeping up with problems as they happen, is an important factor. For instance, if you spill something on your tile flooring, grab your earth friendly floor cleaner right away and clean it up. If your pets shed regularly on your carpet, vacuum every couple of days instead of waiting until your weekly household cleaning schedule tells you it’s time. As with most things, preventative maintenance and prompt action can be big time savers.

Wood floors are beautiful and always add a special something to the appearance of a room. Just as with your carpeting, they don’t require a huge amount of work if you stay on top of the job. Usually, you can do them when you do the rest of your weekly household cleaning schedule; or maybe you’ve elected to do all of your floors on a certain day or night. Generally using mops and hardwood floor cleaners will do the job.

Fortunately, one of the things technology has done for us is to make our weekly household cleaning schedule easier. For instance when it comes to floor care, you can often do it in one step. In times gone by we’d have to wash the floor, often on hands and knees and then follow up with a wax or polish. It’s also great to know that research and developers are creating more in the line of earth friendly floor cleaners.

Kitchen and bathroom floors often take the brunt of the abuse in our homes. It’s usually better to work on them more often than our weekly household cleaning schedule dictates. When we cook, we often spill food and drink, as well as splash water around while we’re scrubbing vegetables or washing our hands. In the bathroom, hair spray and other products go with gravity and head for the floor. These rooms are ideal for combined cleaner/ polisher. Many homes use hardwood flooring or look-alike tile in which case mops with hardwood floor cleaners are appropriate.

Regardless of the flooring combinations in your home, you want to save time and make all the chores as easy as possible. You already have plenty to do on your weekly household cleaning schedule, so plan for it to go as smoothly as possible.

Whenever you can use earth friendly floor cleaners as well environmentally safe cleaners everywhere that you can.

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Bedrooms form the core of the house. Everyone wants to decorate the bedroom very elegantly and nicely so that it looks beautiful and cool. The bed is the center of attraction, but sometimes the small size and lack of space of a bedroom makes it look cluttered and untidy. In this situation platform beds are the best option one can go for.

Guest post today from Active Paving – Dublin patio providersfor many years.

platform bed,platform beds,wooden platform bed,metal platform bed,platform bed plans,

Bedrooms form the core of the house. Everyone wants to decorate the bedroom very elegantly and nicely so that it looks beautiful and cool. The bed is the center of attraction, but sometimes the small size and lack of space of a bedroom makes it look cluttered and untidy. In this situation platform beds are the best option one can go for.

A platform bed is a bed which consists of a mattress placed on a solid platform raised off the floor by legs or framing. The space below the platform bed can be utilized for storage purposes. Platform beds do not have springs.

Types of platform bed:

One can select a platform bed from the two varieties available.

* The wooden platform bed – Wooden platform beds are usually made from oak wood or maple wood. They offer warmth as well as beauty to any type of bedroom decor. They are available in many different sizes like full size, king or queen size, and twin size. Though they are usually designed to support a mattress, they can be changed and customized for use with box springs. Altering the height of the headboard and lowering the size of the slate board allows for this. The wooden platform bed is generally given a Danish oil finish.

* The metal platform bed – Metal platform beds come in many varieties from the contemporary metal platform bed to the traditional ones and they are all available in a variety of colors. The beds have predrilled holes to allow for the adjustment to the height of the bed.

* Special quality steel is used for more strength and durability of the bed. To avoid stripping and over tightening of the bolts a special Allen key is used. Steel cross bars sheets of Masonite are used for support at the side railing.

* DIY beds, from plans and instructions available on the internet

Advantages of platform beds:

1. You can make a platform bed yourself from readily available plans found on the internet

2. They provide a better mattress support area since it does not have a box spring underneath.

3. It increases the storage space and makes the room looks clean and tidy.

4. These beds are very affordable.

5. Allergies to dust can be avoided, as dust does not get collected under the bed.

6. They are portable and comfortable.

To buy a platform bed:

There are many web sites and on line merchants from where you can buy a platform bed. These web sites offer the latest designs for platform beds at very reasonable prices.

They are available in a wide range of prices so its very easy to choose a bed that suits our budget. Alternatively you could make a platform bed, the plans are readily available on the internet

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Bathroom and toilet officially speaking is a bathroom unit. A space it takes makes only 6-8% of the general flat area, but considering its importance it is out of competition.

Guest post today from Active Paving – Dublin patio providersfor many years.

bathroom, bathroom design, bathroom cupboards, sink, shower

Bathroom and toilet officially speaking is a bathroom unit. A space it takes makes only 6-8% of the general flat area, but considering its importance it is out of competition. It is possible to imagine an apartment without any room or even without a kitchen (there is no kitchen as such in “studios”, it is joined with the living room), but it is quite impossible to imagine an apartment without a bathroom unit. Major repairs of a bathroom unit is technically quite a difficult task, it is not a joke. You should leave this work only for highly skilled specialists.

At first, if a quality of mounting and finishing works can be checked by anyone (for example, a wall is curved, a window or a door does not close, or tiles are put roughly), then a quality of plumbing mounting, sewage and electrical systems you can’t check.

And secondly, as a result of bad work your neighbours can be flooded, constantly clogged sewage system, short circuit failure in the electric wiring due to the contact with water and other serious problems.

We have already written a lot about floors, ceilings and walls, therefore I will remind you briefly that all the materials must be water proof, and there must be damp proofing on the floor. It is also very important to observe the geometry of your bathroom; otherwise it will be difficult to put tiles and to place sanitary equipment in a right way.

Electric wiring and electrical equipment.

A bathroom and a toilet impose the special requirements on everything that is related to electricity. An electrical equipment, used in a damp room, must have grounding, wiring must be three-wire (phase, zero, ground). Lamps, wall outlets, switches are used with the degree of protection.

Water supply and sewage system.

Steel, copper, metal-polymeric and polypropylene pipes are used for hot and cold water supply. PVC pipes are used for the sewage system. Water is cut off by ball stop valves. If plumbing specialist uses screw-thread connections, it is important not to brick them up in a wall to have an access to them. The welded connections of steel pipes must be grounded to avoid corrosion. It is necessary to put pre-filters on all water-pipes to avoid damages of expensive sanitary equipment. It is better to set filters with drainage, as it facilitates their service.

While connecting towel dryer “childish” error is the wrong supply of hot water.

If sanitary technician says that it is impossible to supply hot water to a towel dryer, trust him and set an electric towel dryer. Sewage-pipes are mounted with a slope of about 5% and if possible avoid corners of 90 degree. I strongly recommend buying all the pipes and sanitary engineering armature only of the known producers and preferably in the specialized shops.

Revisory access holes for the maintenance of plumbing-sewage system must not be too little, otherwise their purpose is lost and in case of some problems it will be necessary to break the walls.

All of these are basic moments of plumbing and sewage system mounting, and in general all of this must be the business of your sanitary technicians.

Let’s discuss ventilation.

It is obligatory to mount drawing ventilation.

What should be considered when buying a ventilator? First of all it is its power, it must correspond to the size of a room, and second it is its noise (measured in decibels). Both descriptions are specified on a ventilator. Sanitary engineering equipment. Here we will discuss mixers, water heaters, ceramic bathroom fittings and etc.

For a shower and a bath pay attention to the models with a thermostat. There are two regulators in them. One regulates a temperature, and another regulates water pressure. To my mind, it is exceptionally convenient.

Pay attention to toilets flushing systems, which are wall mounted, and wall toilet sinks for them.

Electric water heaters. They are divided into running and storage. Running water heaters are smaller, but are more powerful, than storage ones. It can reach 16 kW. Having a lot of other electric devices in an apartment can create heavy load on your electric system.

Whether to have a spa or not – I will not advise anything, because a good bath is a very expensive thing and it’s up to you to decide, whether to pay ?1000-?3000 for it.

I will only tell you, that connection of a spa does not differ from ordinary bath connection.
I hope that these information will help you during repair works, when buying materials and dealing with builders.