Beach House

Is there anything more relaxing than the beach? The warm sand, blue waters and picturesque sunsets combine to create an atmosphere that's casual, calm and worry-free - exactly the features you'll want to incorporate when decorating your beach house! The idea behind home beach décor is to keep it simple. You want to focus on creating a home that's welcoming and relaxing. This includes paying attention to the materials and finishes you select, as you'll be bringing plenty of sand, wet feet, and damp towels home after your days at the beach. You don't want to choose surfaces that you'll have to worry about damaging, like leather couches or expensive fabrics.

When choosing furniture for your beach home, wicker is the obvious choice for material. It not only fits the beach theme perfectly, it's also the a great low-maintenance and durable option for your home. You can even choose outdoor wicker furniture and use it in your dining and living rooms. Wicker can be uncomfortable, so be sure and invest in some comfortable cushions and covers. When making your selections, be sure to choose outdoor-rated fabrics so they will hold up to the sand and saltwater. unsecured loans

Another furnishing option that will work well with your beach décor is wood. Choose lighter natural woods like birch and maple to keep things feeling light and airy. You can also paint your wood furnishings white or light colors to maintain the summery beach feel.

The best paint options for your beach home are light, breezy colors. Look for inspiration from the colors of the beach....the sand, the ocean, the sunsets. Choose sea green, pinks, and pale yellows. Another option is to go with a nautical blue and white theme. Pottery Barn makes an entire line of beach inspired paints, so check into this option for more ideas. Whichever paint you choose, make sure to use a semi-gloss paint to withstand the humidity and sea breezes.

To invoke the old beach bungalow feeling, you can even consider clapboard walls in some rooms. These walls are relatively simple to install and made from board paneling placed horizontally. You can even choose to install clapboard walls on only one wall of your kitchen as an accent.

When it comes to floors, natural wood floors work best. These floors should be well sealed to prevent water damage. Low-pile rugs work great too.

To accessorize your beach home, turn to nature. Flowers, driftwood, shells, and small indoor fountains make great additions to any beach theme.

Remember when decorating your beach home that the decorating process should be as calm and worry-free as the beach itself. Keep your home low-maintenance, simple, and comfortable and you're sure to enjoy your new beach home décor. bad credit loans

espares

Samara Zittin, who is on the marketing team at eSpares, was kind enough to share the approach her company is taking with Social Media.    This small, London-based, company is seeing the benefits from their efforts, you will too.

Q. What is eSpares?
A. We specialize in providing spare parts for home and garden appliances. Our catalogue of spares contains roughly half a million spares and we carry over 500 brands. We’ve got bits that fit everything from toaster ovens and vacuum cleaners to dishwashers and pressure washers. There are 70 company members and we’re located in London, England, and we ship worldwide.


Q. Who is your average customer?
A. The majority of our business is direct to the consumer; however we also have quite a few business accounts using our services too. Generally we like to think that our average customer is an intrepid person who knows that they can save a bit of money through a bit of ‘fix it yourself’ knowledge.


Q. How does social media fit in at the highest levels of your business?
A. We’ve always thrived on the correspondence that we have with our customers. It’s our company policy that you’ll always receive a response from eSpares if you write us; which is strictly enforced by our CEO. It was clear to us from early on that customers wanted to communicate with us via channels other than the phone, email and occasional fax. 


From our email feedback it became apparent that our customers wanted to share fitting advice with each other. In 2008 we responded to this by launching ‘Ratings and Reviews’ and ‘Questions & Answers’ on our website which has enabled our customers to share their experience and advice for fitting individual parts. At the time this was justified to the highest levels of our business by citing the SEO benefits. Circumspect we did A/B testing that illustrated the products with customer generated reviews and fitting advice had up to a 14.2% increase in conversion rate.


Q. What were the benefits of “going social”?
A. For us the benefits of going social were multifold. As stated above the obvious benefit is that we can now have ‘real time’ conversations with our customers. The additional benefits to us have been:

• Raising awareness: Simply put, most people don’t know that you can buy spare parts to fix up your oven or that fitting a fridge door seal yourself is possible. We use Twitter to find people who are having trouble with their appliances and we do our best to guide them to the best course of action for their circumstances. Whether that’s simply watching a ‘fix it yourself’ video on our YouTube channel, helping them find a spare part or calling a repair person.
• Gaining consumer insight: being on Twitter has helped us improve the content and video on our site to directly meet what consumers want.
• 
  
• Cutting the cost of affiliate networks: In the past we participated in affiliate networks. We noticed the slow transition from our affiliates being sites with great content that led to new site visitors to sites that strictly featured voucher codes.  Looking at our traffic we could see that customers would select the items they wanted on our site, visit the voucher code website and then come back to our site. This meant that we were paying affiliate fees for the traffic that we already had. We’ve eliminated the use of affiliate networks and now strictly only release voucher codes on our Twitter channel and to those on our mailing list. Our customers still get the same benefits and it’s reduced our marketing costs.
• 
  
• Giving us a voice: we’re pretty passionate about what we do and sometimes this is hard to express through our website alone. Twitter and YouTube have allowed us to communicate that we genuinely are interested in helping people and that we want to ensure that they have a great buying experience with us. The individuals who make up our company are genuinely friendly people and communicating this has helped increase consumer confidence in our brand.

Q. What processes did you put in place to enable going social?
A. Going social for us was simple to implement as it required no resource from our technical team. We simply nominated people from within our marketing team to champion and run the social media channels. Samara Zittin is responsible for the Twitter account and our newly launched Facebook channel and Michael Hodge is responsible for the eSpares YouTube channel. unsecured loans


Q. How did you go about tool selection?
A. Having tried most of the free tools available the tools of choice are TweetDeck and the webclient for our Twitter account management. To track our traffic and sales from Twitter and YouTube we use Google Analytics.


Q. What social communication policies have you put in place?
A. We follow the Golden Rule of treating others the way that we would like to be treated when we use our personal social media accounts. We do our best to keep pure marketing messages to a minimum and to make sure that our tweets are relevant to our followers.


Q. How many people do you have monitoring the social channels today?
A. As not to confuse the message of our channel we only have one person tweeting from the eSpares account. Most people within the company have TweetDeck installed and monitor the phrase bad credit loans‘eSpares’. Alerts for our social media channels are sent to a group email address within the company.


Q. How do your customers react to you being social?

A. We’ve gained quite a few new customers through our YouTube and Twitter channels. Our YouTube video content has been particularly important for giving potential customers the confidence to fix an appliance themselves.

IKEA-fied

I’m a big fan of IKEA.  I think their products improve my life and are a good value to boot.  As a parent, I often wonder how people furnished their kids’ rooms before IKEA, especially when I see the prices at stores like Serena & Lily.  Half of my adult furniture is also IKEA, because my kids ruin my furniture, and I feel better about them destroying a $600 couch than a $4000 one.

All that aside, if I get divorced one day, I’m fairly certain IKEA will be a contributing factor in my marriage’s collapse.  IKEA furniture generally requires that it be assembled at home, by you.  And there is nothing more unhealthy to a relationship than the joint assembling of furniture.  In my house, the experience of shopping at IKEA is a gloomy one, because Tom and I know that no matter how awesome we feel about our purchases in the store, something terrible is going to go down during the assembly process back home.

I’ve thought a lot about why the process of building IKEA furniture is so unpleasant for us.  And I think it comes down to the combo of two factors: my micro-managing tendencies, paired with Tom’s apparent belief that the ability to assemble furniture is a part of his manly essence.  It’s a perfect storm, where tempers collide and egos are left in shreds.

The assembly process begins with the frenzied opening of boxes, during which some integral piece will go flying across the floor and down our heating register.  The haste is due to the fact we never return from IKEA before 4:00 PM.  It doesn’t matter if we start out at 10:00 AM, or 3:30 PM–we will not get home before 4:00 PM.  It’s one of the unsolved mysteries of shopping at IKEA, along with why the wheels on the shopping carts refuse to direct your cart in a straight line.  But I digress–we’re ripping open the boxes because it’s 4:00 PM and we want to get the thing built before dinner, which adds another level of stress to a situation already fraught with tension.

After the initial splaying out of the box contents, we will inevitably come to the moment during the first 15 minutes of assembly where Tom will throw his IKEA wrench on the floor and state with utter conviction that the item we have purchased is defective and/or missing parts.  Usually the part in question is either taped to the inside of one of the particle boards, or Tom is sitting on it.  It’s best to ignore this initial tantrum, which is merely an amuse-bouche for what’s to come.

Assembly will continue apace for another half hour or so before we get to the point in the pictogram instructions where we can no longer figure out what IKEA is trying to tell us.  IKEA’s pictograms were presumably designed to strip the instructions down to their barest elements and to make things as simple as possible for the builder, by removing all words from the process.  But words are not a bad thing, especially when you are confronted with a pictogram like this:



I mean, what the hell is this telling me?  For starters, you will note that in the first picture, there are slats on the bed.  Then: no slats.  What happened to the GD slats????  After struggling for an hour to get to this point, a pictogram like this can be rage-inducing in the extreme.

We will muddle through, until somehow, we make it to the last page of the instructions.  And this is when it happens: the OMFG Moment (“OMFGM”).  The point at which it becomes apparent that one of the pieces from early on in the sequence has been put on backwards or upside down, so that everything needs to be taken apart and put back together again.  The beauty of the OMFGM is twofold.  One, IKEA doesn’t play around with its screws–those suckers are meant to be screwed in exactly one time.  Try re-screwing an IKEA screw after you’ve already screwed it in once.  Fun!  Due to those screws, during reassembly, you’ll have the demoralizing sensation that you are putting together a Frankenstein, something that will inevitably fall apart as soon as it is complete. unsecured loans

The second thing about the OMFGM is that, about an hour prior, I will usually already have hinted to Tom that the incorrectly assembled piece is on backwards, or upside down.  We built the bed in the pictogram above for Finn last week, and about 30 minutes in, I suggested to Tom that the headboard was on backwards, and he informed me, with withering disdain, that the unpainted side of the headboard was meant to face out.  Even though this made zero sense to me, I didn’t press him, because it has been my experience that it is kinder to tell a guy that he has a small penis than to suggest that he is improperly assembling something from IKEA.

Of course, an hour later, as we finished up the bed by trying to insert the mid-beam into holes that were MIA, we discovered that the headboard was, in fact, on backwards.  I consider it a measure of my personal growth in recent years that I helped Tom take the entire bed apart and reassemble it without once saying “I told you so,” even though I had to bite my tongue so hard that it almost bled.  And it’s a measure of Tom’s personal growth in recent years that once the bed was finished, he looked at me and said “I’m sorry, you were right.”  If this incident had happened five years ago, one of us would have slept on the couch for three days. bad credit loans

This week, we bought and built a sofa and coffee table, sans drama.  Never mind that the only assembly the sofa required was the insertion of the legs–it’s a thing of beauty when your IKEA assembly works as it should.  The thing is built, it looks ok, and when I sit on it gingerly for the first time with my quads bearing my weight, it doesn’t collapse.  Great success!  When things end this way, I am so elated that I don’t even mind the four leftover screws laying on the floor and Tom’s scary assurance that “all the necessary parts are in.”  In that way, building IKEA furniture is a little like giving birth.  The end product is worth it, and you forget all the trauma you went through to get there.

people living underground las vegas

The Daily Mail claims that 1,000 people live underground in the flood tunnels beneath the city of Las Vegas. While tourists and the rich flock to palace-like casinos, the tunnel people live below in darkness, amongst poisonous spiders and individuals with names like The Troll.

Deep beneath Vegas’s glittering lights lies a sinister labyrinth inhabited by poisonous spiders and a man nicknamed The Troll who wields an iron bar.

But astonishingly, the 200 miles of flood tunnels are also home to 1,000 people who eke out a living in the strip’s dark underbelly.

Some, like Steven and his girlfriend Kathryn, have furnished their home with considerable care – their 400sq ft “bungalow” boasts a double bed, a wardrobe and even a bookshelf. They have been there for five years, fashioning a shower out of a water cooler, hanging paintings on the walls and collating a library from abandoned books. Steven was forced into the tunnels three years ago after his heroin addiction led to him losing his job. unsecured loans

Matthew O’Brien, a reporter who stumbled across the tunnel people when he was researching a murder case, has set up The Shine A Light foundation to help. “These are normal people of all ages who’ve lost their way, generally after a traumatic event,” he said.

“Many are war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress…It’s not known how many children are living there, as they’re kept out of sight, but I’ve seen evidence of them – toys and teddy bears.” bad credit loans

making a pond

If there’s one feature in the garden guaranteed to attract wildlife with astonishing speed, it’s a pond. And at a time when ponds have all but disappeared from farmland, it’s a hugely helpful thing to do.

Mature pond. Credit: Rupert Paul

The reason ponds develop so fast is that many of their animals (and even plants) are highly mobile. Within a short time your garden will attract birds, amphibians, insects, mammals and a host of mini-beasts you might never otherwise see. Even if you haven’t got room for a pond, or have young children, a small water feature (even a bird bath) makes a huge difference to the number and types of animals that will visit your garden.

Build a pond step-by-step

Choosing a site

You can build a pond any time of year, but it’ll establish fastest if you start in late winter. For most people it’ll take two or three weekends to complete.

Choose the sunniest site you can; dragonflies worship heat, and tadpoles wriggle over each other to reach warm shallows. Most water plants thrive in bright sunshine too. Try to avoid picking a place where autumn leaves collect, though it’s not the end of the world if you can’t (see section on maintenance below). More important is to hook up a pipe or hose so that your water butt overflow can auto-fill the pond during heavy rain.

Mark out your shape with a warm hosepipe, remembering that the finished article will look about two-thirds the size. The pond can butt up to a lawn, a border or a path, but make sure that at least one side slopes shallowly and that a fair chunk of the edge can be given over to dense waterside planting, and that this area in turn has a ‘corridor’ to borders, log piles, hedges or other sheltered areas. Come July, your emerging baby frogs will thank you.

1. Get digging

   Your objective is a deep area in the middle (two or three feet) for hibernating creatures, and a gently-sloping, shallow shoreline. Nearly every book tells you to dig this shape, but don’t do it! A gentle slope is very difficult to get level, and ensures you’ll be staring at an ugly black pond liner every time the water level falls (as it will) below the ideal.
   
   Instead, dig the entire area straight down 12 inches. Try hard to cut cleanly with your spade, leaving the un-dug soil compacted; it’ll be easier later. Use the topsoil to make a raised bed or extend a terraced border.
   
   Your job now is to dig a deep central hole, while leaving at least 18 inches (two feet is even better) undisturbed all the way round. Think of a gigantic, inverted fried egg. If you’re having a bog garden area, leave it 12 inches deep everywhere; it needs a flat base for its dam of bricks or stones.
   Keep the subsoil on a piece of sheeting for later.
   
   

   Digging a pond. Credit: Andrew Thompson

2. Fit the liner

   Many books recommend butyl rubber for the liner but some experienced pond builders reckon the latest PVC is even stronger. Tell the supplier your pond’s maximum length and depth and they’ll calculate what you need (if you’re really thrifty you could find out what sizes the liner comes in, and dig your pond accordingly).
   
   Choose a day with no wind, invite some friends round and get to work. It’s easy to cut the underlay with big scissors and fit it in the hole to protect against sharp stones. Next, open out the liner and drape it over the pond so that you’re certain there’ll be spare all the way round. Then add water, smoothing, pulling and folding the sheeting neatly as the level rises. Use a few rocks to subdue the bigger pleats. Try to keep the folds as simple as possible as they near the surface.
   
   

   Lining the freshly dug pond. Credit: Justine Thompson

3. Sort the edges

   Once the pond is full, cut off the excess liner at water level, leaving an extra foot (lying horizontally) all the way around. It’s a nerve-wracking job, so take your time, using a scalpel or a sharp knife.
   With the excess removed, you can see how level (or not) the surrounding ground is. Ideally the water is pressing the liner outwards onto solid, compacted soil all the way round. If you have to build up any areas, make really sure you ram the soil down hard. If you don’t, it’ll settle later, and drain some of the water away.
   
   Tricky bit over. From now on, it’s a piece of cake. Fill in the right-angled shelf all the way round with subsoil to create a gentle slope. It’ll make a hideous mess, but don’t worry. Add a little extra soil to hide the top of liner as you go.
   
   By the time you’ve finished, you’ll find yourself staring at a muddy, unpromising wallow. Welcome to your new wildlife pond.
   
   
   

   Trimmed lining edges. . Credit: Justine Thompson

4. Get planting

   Wait for the sediment to settle a few days. If you’re getting plants from a friend, you can add them any time – even the scraggy bits left over after a hard winter. Otherwise, May is the ideal buying season.
   
   You can be pretty slapdash about planting; your new charges will take off regardless. Floating plants such as hornwort, ivy-leaf duckweed and water soldier can simply be chucked in. For marginals such as water forget-me-not, brooklime, spearwort and water plantain, just use a rock or stone to hold the roots in contact with the subsoil. Only the big, pot-grown marginals need careful siting – usually in the bog garden section.
   
   If you fancy a lily, pick a small one. Weight the rhizome down in a basket with some subsoil and lower it in, on ropes if necessary. That way you can haul it up and hack it back in a few years. Three things will now happen. The water will turn pea-soup green. The wildlife will begin to arrive. And then, almost overnight, the water will be crystal clear.
   
   
   

   Freshly settled pond. Credit: Justine Thompson

5. See the pond develop

   The actual dig was in late January, and the first toads arrived in April. Now we’re in early May. The plants are in and the pea-soup colour is beginning to clear.
   By early June the tadpoles are wriggling and the water crowfoot (top) is growing and flowering.
   It’s now late August, and the young toads have developed and left the pond. The water soldier plants have multiplied furiously, and most will need removing before winter.
   
   

   Developing pond. Credit: Justine Thompson

6. Keep your wildlife pond beautiful

   As soon as you build it, your wildlife pond will start filling up with plant life. And it will do this with such enthusiasm that, if you ignored it for a decade or so, there would be nothing left beyond a damp hollow. This is a natural process known as ‘succession’, and if you let it carry on even longer you would eventually end up with a mature forest where your garden used to be.
   To keep the kind of pond we all love – dragonflies, water beetles, newts and the rest – you need to ‘set back’ the process of succession over and over again.
   
   So be brutal. When more than half the surface gets covered by plants, haul some of them out and sling them on the compost heap. Likewise if the underwater greenery gets too thick. It feels harsh, but in the long run you’ll be guaranteeing the pond’s future ability to sustain as many different species as possible.
   
   Pulling out excess growth also helps keep algae down. When you first build a pond the water goes bright green. This ‘pea soup’ is a bloom of algae (their spores are everywhere) feeding frantically on the nitrogen in the water. Eventually these tiny plants use all the food up and fade away, leaving the stage set for your slower-starting pond plants. But they can always come back, especially as the well-known ‘blanket weed’, so the trick is to keep the nitrogen down to a minimum. And every time you remove green growth you’re doing just that.
   
   Where does the nitrogen come from? Three main sources: tap water (hence our suggestion for a water butt overflow system – rain contains few nutrients); fish (a good reason not to have them in a wildlife pond); and decaying plant matter (which is why we use subsoil for the pond edges). Keep hoiking out the excess and you’ll have no trouble, year after year. And you’ll never need to ‘clean the pond out’ either.
   
   Of course to yank out the plants you need to be able to reach all of the pond area safely. It helps if you can fix up some rocks or blocks on the edge at the build-up stage, so that you can throw a ladder or builder’s plank across the surface and reach in two or three times a year.
   What about the creatures that come out with the plants? You may find you’ve just got to inspect each handful and pick out the beasties you treasure the most. Unfortunately, leaving a mass of plant material on the side ‘so they can escape back to the water’ does little good. Few creatures can worm their way out in time.
   
   Lastly, there are the birds. You’ll find they all want to use a particular part of the pond to bathe, which is fine until their enthusiasm scrapes away the soil And exposes the liner. The best solution seems to be a big, flat rock (or two) just below the surface. unsecured loans
   
   ‘Surface’ is, of course, a movable concept where ponds are concerned. It’s quite natural for the water level to fall dramatically in summer, as evaporation and transpiration speed up. This is why a ‘right angled’ pond edge design is so useful. Where other shrinking ponds show yards of exposed liner, yours just reveals… more subsoil. Even your plants will adapt to the changing conditions, moving up and down the banks with the seasons. And when those summer rainstorms come, your water butt overflow refill system comes into its own.
   
   
   

   Developed pond plantlife. Credit: Justine Thompson

7. A frog-friendly garden

   So your pond’s up and running – what about the rest of the garden? Well, if you want your new amphibians to do well, you can help.
   
   The trick is to think like a frog. By the time they creep out of the water in March, the poor things are utterly knackered. Some even die from exhaustion, which isn’t surprising when you consider they may not have eaten since the previous October. What they need is food and shelter. So ditch the chemicals (slugs poisoned by pellets are lethal), and encourage plenty of dense growth in your borders. bad credit loans
   
   Best of all, start a log pile or three, using the biggest logs you can get. As summer warms up, the stable humidity and temperature inside the pile become a life saver for all sorts of beneficial creatures – not just amphibians but slug-slaying ground beetles and centipedes, and those arch recyclers of organic matter, the woodlice and earthworms.
   Try to resist using cobbles and hard paving near a wildlife pond. Baby amphibians are incredibly delicate; on a hot day they’ll cook to death on such surfaces inside a minute.

Replacing a door handle

You've completed your door installation and the final touch is installing the door knob or handle. Maybe you just want to replace a knob with a new one. When using a handle, be sure it is a universal handle for both left and right hand doors, or be sure to purchase the correct hand. If not, it will not fit properly. Nothing bugs me more than seeing a door handle installed upside down, because the wrong handle was purchased.

 

 
Start by inserting the backset (latch) into the door with the rounded edge facing the latch hole. You may need to tap it slightly with a hammer to get it to seat properly. The door may already have a mortise for a face plate on the latch. If it does, use the 3/4" screws to secure the latch unsecured loans to the door. Also, be sure to adjust the latch for the backset depth. Interior doors are normally 2-3/8" and exterior doors are normally 2-3/4" depth. Check the instructions that came with the knob on how to adjust the backset size. Most knobs now have adjustable backset to accommodate both sizes.

Once the latch is in and secured,  it's time to insert the knob through the backset and screw it together. Be sure to insert the stem from the handle correctly into the latch. This is vital to proper operation of the knob. Now that everything is aligned and the knob is fitted against the door, screw it together with the screws provided.  Be careful not to over tighten the screws as this can hamper the operation of the knob. bad credit loans

 

 Close the door to see how tight the latch fits in the latch hole. If it fits loosely, place the latch plate slightly back in the hole. If it fits snugly, then move the latch all the way forward to the front of the hole. Minor adjustment may need to be made as you check the fit.

how to put up blinds

Step  1:   Measure the width
and height for brackets

Measure the opening width of the patio door using a steel measuring tape. If there is room on the wall, add at least 4-inches bad credit loans on each side of the door opening to ensure a minimum light gap around the blinds. Then measure the opening height from the top to the floor adding a minimum of 2 1/2-inches to the height so the mounting brackets can be placed above the door. Make a pencil mark at these locations on the wall where you'll position the brackets. Most vertical blinds have mounting hardware for installing them on either woodwork (wood screws) or walls (plastic hollow wall anchors). Use the plastic hollow wall anchors to install the hanging brackets on the walls.

Step  2:   Install the mounting hardware on the wall

Install the hardware as called for in the manufacturer's instructions. If you are attaching the hardware to window or door casing, drill a pilot hole for the wood screw to prevent the casing from splitting. Drill a slightly oversize hole in the drywall or plaster for the hollow wall fasteners or toggle bolts. unsecured loans

Step  3:   Install the head rail

Each manufacturer has their own method of attaching the head rail to the wall brackets. Some systems snap in place, others hang from brackets, both methods are easy to do.

Step  4:   Attach the vanes to the head rail

Then pull the traverse cord so the vane holders (small studs protruding from the head rail) spread out evenly across the head rail. Lay the vanes down on the floor so the seams and curves face the same direction. Then pick up and hold the vane near the top and gently push it up into the vane holder so it's locked in place. Do this one at a time until they're all attached. Some vanes are designed with a small weight or chain installed in their bottom. If that's the case you may have to thread the small bead-like chain through the vanes once they're hanging in place.