DIY Livingroom

How To Make Thermal Drapes At Home

HL — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:34:03 +0000

Making your own thermal drapes is a very easy do-it-yourself project. All it requires is a little bit of skills and a lot of attention to detail and patience. That’s because you’ll need to sew two big pieces of fabrics with different textures together, and that can be tricky if you are in a hurry.

For making your own insulating curtains or drapes, you can use your current drapes as a starting point. Then you go and buy that special insulating lining that improves the thermal properties of window treatments and sew it to the back of the curtain. The last step is to install a system that allows you to attach the insulating curtain to the wall, because you want to keep cold air away from the center of the room and prevent drafts formation. Velcro tapes are excellent. A more sophisticated option are metallic stripes and magnets attached to the edges of the curtain.

Home improvement is just that easy sometimes.

Electric Blinds, Extreme Laziness or More Control Over Our Windows?

HL — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:22:25 +0000

Is it wrong to consider that electric window blinds are only a luxury and not a necessity? Many people would think so, yes. However, since new technology is invented and becomes mass production, and since it can make our life easier, why not using it? Electricity was maybe one of the greatest discoveries of humankind. Thanks to electric power, we are now able to read at night, we can use the computer to write blogs like this one, we can travel and we can operate various items in our home without having to leave our comfortable seat.We are lazy, but who’s telling us not to be? The purpose of life is not to get us as tired as can be, so we can get a good night sleep, but to keep us happy and relaxed and to enjoy life.

Electric window treatments are surely a great aid for physically impaired people, allowing them a little bit of additional freedom that we, the healthy ones, often take for granted. This is how well-known players in the windows treatments industry came up with innovation like the bamboo blinds operated by remote control or like those state-of-the art Bali blinds that fit practically any kind of interior and can bring light filtering fine-tuning to extremely sensitive levels.

Insulate Your Windows and Doors for Winter

HL — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:43:03 +0000

Did you know that windows and doors are among the biggest energy wasters in a home? Glass is an awful thermal insulator, so it will always allow thermal exchanges. This means that in the winter, the air in immediate proximity of the glass panes of your windows will be colder than the air in the center of the room. That will generate air drafts. The fix for this issue is installing some thermal insulated curtains at all windows. It’s a simple trick that helps keeping your rooms warm and your energy bills low. Such curtains have a special lining on their back, which has excellent insulating properties. Moreover, thermal curtains are fixed on the walls on three sides, with the help of Velcro tape or magnets sewed inside the lining.

Doors are different, because you can’t obstruct them with curtains and still be able to freely use them. I’m talking mainly about exterior doors and garage doors, because they are the ones that are exposed to bad weather conditions. Newer models of such doors, like the ones made by Clopay, feature an excellent r-value, but older models will need insulating kits in order to be energy-efficient. A garage door insulation can significantly be improved by simply installing such a kit, thus allowing you to enjoy good thermal insulation for only a fraction of the price of a new, modern garage door. Kits are available for sale in basically any home and garden specialized store and I’m sure you can also find them online.

The Fascination of DIY

HL — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:40:56 +0000

I have to admit I find it amazing how many people enjoy to do work around their house. They take care of the garden, mow the lawn, fix the roof, or even install the stairs and the wrought iron balusters by themselves, with only a few tools and some help from neighbors and friends. I even know somebody who bought a house kit and tried to install it on his land. Unfortunately, the kit didn’t come with too detailed instructions, so he ended up by asking for specialized help. Briefly, a job that was supposed to take one month took a bit more than half a year.

However, we all like to try such things in our homes, like building an affordable vinyl fence with our own hands, and maybe this is for the better, because in this way we just have more opportunities to express ourselves and our personality in the place we live in.