It's a distinct home design trend today to set up "outdoor rooms." This podcast episode explores the huge movement to bring the indoors outside and to colonize lawns, gardens, and yards with additional living and entertaining space. Nicola and Irwin, our Design2Share Q&A co-hosts, offer their usual nuggets of wisdom and opinionated barbs as they tackle how to determine the function of different outdoor spaces, how to define outdoor rooms with a variety of landscaping and hardscaping materials, what furniture and features define today's outdoor spaces, how to accessorize the great outdoors, tips on when and where to shop for good outdoor buys, and the importance of outdoor lighting and other details. And there's even a tip on decorating with mosquito netting!
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If you're looking for a magical color palette, forget about it. Everyone gets tired of the colors of their clothes, and some people weary of their hair color. That's only natural. So the bottom line is: decorating with color isn't rocket science. You're going to change it around frequently, so you might as well have fun with your color choices, and even risk choosing brave and bold schemes. In this Design2Share Q&A episode, Irwin and Nicola look at classic and monochromatic room schemes, ways to choose color schemes that inspire different moods (uplifting, dramatic, romantic, etc.), how to paint your home's architectural details, finding color inspiration from different countries, how to pick up on color trends, ways to use contrasting colors in a room, and a host of additional hints and tips surrounding decorating and color selection.
Kitchen remodeling jobs often provide strong returns on investment. But where should you start and what projects should you undertake when facing an intrusive gut-job or (at the very least) an inconvenience for your family during a kitchen makeover? Irwin and Nicola demystify this process in the latest Design2Share Q&A episode. Their tips and advice cover the importance of kitchens as the heart and gathering place for the home, how to make a multi-functional kitchen plan, ways to use open plan layouts to help tie in kitchen decor with adjacent rooms, the average costs for remodeling, specific details you can change or refresh to achieve more impact on a limited budget, appliances that will help you achieve a better look, and the welcome groundswell for using eco-friendly building materials and recycling in your kitchen project. Finally, our "tip2share" segment recommends new resources that won't strain the environment. Go green!