News – Monica Groop

How to Choose a Colour Scheme For Your New Home

Colour is a big part of design, whether you’re getting a new landscape design or doing an internal renovation, it can seem a bit overwhelming to choose a colour palette for the whole house. Having the same neutral colours for every room is what you find in rentals. When it comes to your own home, you want something a little more distinctive and up-market than that. Here are some tips on how to choose colours that go well together without being bland and boring.

Walk through the home with a pen and paper and jot down which other parts of the home can be seen from each room. This will ensure the colours chosen for each room will go well together with the colours that can be seen from there. Using a rough sketch of the floor plan is an easy way to keep track of it. It is not only the adjoining rooms that may be seen but places like the hall through to the kitchen.
Choose a colour for the room that is the biggest and most central to the whole house. Feeling stressed? Choose a soft, neutral hue for this room and that will make it easier to choose colours for the other rooms. But if you love colour and want to have at least one room painted in bold colours, start from that room. Then looking out from that room, choose somewhat softer colours for the rooms or spaces you can see from there. That’s not to say you can’t use bold colours next to each other, but there is an element of risk in doing so. You don’t want the colours to clash.
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10 Key Questions You Must Answer When Choosing Glass Balustrading Fences

The use of glass balustrading fences inside and outside properties has increased significantly in recent years. Their appeal is their modern appearance, as well as their practical use, given that they are durable, lasting for many years and can be easily installed by glass company. Glass balustrading fences are also important safety features in certain locations such as around pools and balconies.

If thinking of glass balustrading fences for your home, we hope you have asked yourself and answered some important questions. These questions ensure you make the right choice relating to your glass balustrading fences including who is going to install them. Here are ten of those key questions you must be able to answer before proceeding.

What Locations Around Your Property Do You Want Glass Balustrading Fences?

It should be obvious that before you make any other decision, you must first decide which locations around your property are suitable for glass balustrading fences. If you need some ideas do some research online or call a local glass balustrading company for advice.

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4 Ways To Ensure Your Landscaped Garden’s Pavers Look Good For Longer

One of the most common requests landscaping companies receive when discussing a landscape design with their residential clients is for paving. Whilst the local climate is such that the risks of continuous rain making lawns unsuitable for walking on are minimal, there is still a huge demand for paving stones and slabs to be included in landscaped gardens.

The two main reasons for the demand for paving are the practical use of them for walking safely and comfortably through a garden, and the aesthetic value the paving brings to a landscape design. One important point we must alert you to from the outset is that no matter what type, size, quantity, and design of the paving you have in your garden, there is a need to maintain them so that they retain their appearance for longer.

If this is not done, then the risk is that a combination of them being walked on frequently, plus the heat and sunshine can cause pavers to diminish in terms of their appearance. Thankfully, there are ways you can prevent this from happening such as the four we have outlined below.

Ensure Paving Is Laid Correctly

One of the main causes of pavers losing their appearance, or worse, becoming unsafe, is that they were not laid properly in the first place. The issues created by paving stones not being laid properly include them sinking, loosening, or cracking, all of which have the potential to make them unsafe for those walking on them and to make your paving look less than appealing.

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5 Tips For Keeping Your Residential Lift Looking Great

As with any significant investment in your home, if you have a residential lift we presume you want it to look great for as long as possible. One advantage you have is, unlike a commercial lift which may see hundreds of people using it every day, your home lift may only be used on a handful of occasions within the same period of time.

Nevertheless, if you do not take the appropriate steps to care for and maintain your residential lift, it will soon start looking far from new, and the risk is that it will start developing aesthetic problems that either cannot be rectified or which require a large amount of money to fix. So, to help you avoid those costs, and to help keep your residential lift looking great for as long as possible, here are 5 tips that we strongly encourage you to follow.

Regular Maintenance

It might seem strange that we talk about the maintenance of your home lifts first, rather than some of the tasks to keep it clean. However, as any technician, engineer or mechanic will tell you, if you want something to look as good as new for as long as possible, then you must maintain it properly.

By ensuring regular maintenance of your home lift, it means that it will function properly and the chances of any kind of fault developing such as it getting stuck are minimised. Repair work on lifts can occasionally mean they suffer from superficial damage, so the fewer the faults and repairs, the better.

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8 Tips For Caring For Your Landscaping During Long Hot Summers

One of the problems that landscapers and gardeners have in some parts of the world is the weather, and in particular dealing with cold, wet, wintry conditions whilst creating and then maintaining landscaped gardens Conversely, here in Australia, the problems Perth Landscapers from martincuthbert.com.au face with weather are rarely that it is wintry but instead it is the hot, sunny weather that creates issues.

Whilst most people are happy when the sun is out, they are not so keen when the temperatures reach unbearable levels. That same mindset is held by many gardeners, including those who have landscape designs. Although the sun is most welcome as it helps flowers and plants to grow, too much of it, and the excessive heat which is generated, are most definitely not healthy for gardens.

So, if you live in a part of the country which is especially prone to lots of excessive heat and have a landscaped garden to look after, what can you do? Well, to start with, you can follow the eight tips we have outlined below for caring for landscaping during long, hot summers.

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Maintenance Guidelines for Colorbond Roofs

All homes need maintenance of some kind to keep their value throughout the years. If you don’t maintain your property you will find that when you want to sell it, the price you had hoped for may not be there. Meanwhile, your home is going to pieces around your ears and a big storm could well bring it crashing down.

The roof is one of the most important parts of the home, but unfortunately it is also one of the most neglected, mainly because getting up on it is beyond many people. They either don’t have the agility any more, or they don’t have the time, or the right equipment. This need not be a problem; there are many professionals out there who can do the job.

The cost of having your roof inspected for damage is much smaller than the cost of replacing the ceilings or the frame that has rotted due to leaks that were not found in time. It is also cheaper than having to replace a roof that suddenly blew off in a storm because the screws holding it on were rusted and no one knew.

Maintenance for Colorbond roofing is not difficult. You simply have to keep sticks and debris such as leaf litter off it and check the screws to make sure they are not rusted. If there is a build up of mould or moss on it, this should be cleaned off after wetting, with a soft bristle brush such as a household broom – not a straw broom, though.

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10 Factors That Create Shade Sails Damage And How To Counter Them

If there is one description that shade sails cannot be labelled with it is fragile. In truth, if you were to ask most people who have shade sails they would describe them as robust, durable, and strong. However, despite shade sails being invariably reliable, they are not invincible. In other words, there are some factors that, if they were to exist, could compromise shade sails and their durability.

Some of these factors occur naturally, others are due to their owners making mistakes, and a lack of care and maintenance of the shade sails is also a major issue. The results can include shade sails looking grubby, them becoming damaged, and ultimately the need to replace shade sails arises long before they would normally have needed replacing, especially if certain preventive measures had been taken.

To know what some of these preventative and remedial actions are, you must first know what damaging factors they address, and so, to ensure that you do know them, based on the advice from the professionals at One Shade, we have outlined ten of the most commonly occurring ones below.

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Does Your Landscape Architecture Firm’s Website Design Have These 7 Essential Features?

Whether you are building a car, a house, or a website, they each have core elements or features which they must have regardless of what they look like or how they function when completed. In the case of building a website for your landscaping architecture firm, the expert web designers will advise you that whether it is the most complex of websites, or the simplest, it must have certain essential features.

The question now is if you feel that your website is not performing in a manner that you believe to be beneficial to your landscaping architecture firm, then is it the case that it is missing one or more of the core features necessary for it to do so? To help you identify what these core features are, and confirm if they are present or not, here is a brief explanation of each of them

All Onsite SEO In Place: If your website is not appearing on the first page of the search engines and there is no sign of its rankings improving then there is something wrong with your SEO. Check that the onsite SEO of a quality website is all in place, 100% accurate, and optimised for all of the keywords that you want to rank for.

Simple Navigation Throughout: A great website will never have a confused visitor, wondering what page they are on, and unsure how they can navigate, either to another page or back to the home page. This is achieved using simple navigation, with the most common being a menu appearing at the top or the side of each page of the website.

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A Guide To Making An All-New Green Kitchen

With changing times, changes our responsibilities as well. Cooking is no more just about manufacture and consumption of food; rather, cooking is one of the most necessary components for survival and should be performed accordingly. What is a home without a kitchen? The answer is incomplete. Therefore, in order to make your home a place you feel most comfortable in, it is important to take care in designing of your kitchen.

With increasing workload, the cacophony of an industrial work life seems to get onto our nerves at certain times; and during these times what we crave for the most is a little bit of nature, a little bit of green, a little bit of pure organic life, that would give you the comfort of a mother, unadulterated.

As responsible and conscious human beings, it is not just enough to survive; it is important to ensure a healthy survival of the generations to come. To be precise, sustainability is essential, and it requires us to live in a more environment-friendly manner so that we do not affect the plants/animals/atmosphere around us adversely.

Why should I have a Green kitchen?

An environment-friendly kitchen is a kitchen that cooks eco-friendly manner so that balance is retained between our lifestyle and the outer environment we are living in. In respect to that, an eco-friendly kitchen deserves proper cleaning in a manner that would not disturb the ecological balance of our nature.

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5 Great Outdoor Lighting Ideas For Your Concrete Swimming Pool

One of the great things about having a concrete pool on your property is that you have an almost unlimited choice of how to design it and the surrounding area. Not only does it add value to your property but the way in which the aesthetics of your property can be enhanced by a concrete pool is incredible.

Landscape Designers tell us an option for enhancing it further is with the use of outdoor lighting, which can turn what might look like a pleasant and attractive pool area during the day, into a stunningly beautiful location at night. To get the wheels turning in your mind in terms of ideas, here are 5 of our favourite options for outdoor lighting for pools.

Underwater Lights

This is one of our favourites as nothing makes a pool more appealing for a swim at night than the lights that are underwater. Not only can they make a pool look stunning, especially if they are coloured lights, but they perform a more practical function in terms of making the pool safer. With the water lit from underneath it is easier to see that someone is in the pool especially if the surrounding light is not particularly bright.

Spotlights

These are great when you want specific features in and around the outside of your property to be highlighted at night. You may have a tree, certain flowers, or it could be some items of the gardening and landscape design or poolside furniture that you want to shine a light on. If you install some adjustable spotlights they can be positioned to shine on the pool when it is being used, and again the use of coloured lighting will enhance the atmosphere.

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