It may not be the first thing that comes to mind when decorating or renovating, but lighting design can make or break a project. Lighting affects how well we can use our space, and how we feel in it. So this week we decided to talk to our friends at Verve Electric, who are experts at installing lighting and automated systems in new homes and renovations. Lighting Tips from Verve Electric Most frequent question We often get asked, “How many pot lights do I need in this space?” More often than not, clients underestimate the number of pot lights they will need to…

As November draws to a close and winter weather starts creeping in with the subtlety of a sledge hammer, my thoughts inevitably turn towards holiday decorating. I love creating a warm and cosy atmosphere in my home, but in this post, I want to talk about a source of holiday decorating stress: design photo spreads. You see them in magazines, blogs, and on social media. The lighting is perfect, the decorations pristine and coordinated, the effect magical. I love these pictures, but for inspiration. I don’t try to achieve these looks in my home, and here’s why: A picture is static, so the angle…

Zones are the starting place for layout design. They are areas where a particular activity or set of activities happen. We’ve talked before about zones in kitchens. Today, we’ll look at how we created several zones in an open-concept family room. Common family room or living room zones can include: a conversation area seating that you can watch tv from a desk or workspace a reading nook a place for games Any activity that is going to happen in the room needs its own zone. This includes the pathways through the room (circulation) and between zones. Open layouts create the biggest challenges for zones. Using furniture placements and…

Wasps are usually an outdoor problem, of course, but it’s summer! A time when interiors and exteriors are far more open to one another. Perhaps surprisingly, wasps are actually a beneficial insect. They eat virtually all pest insects and larva in your garden and lawn, and like bees, they are pollinators. But unlike bees, they are far more aggressive, and they can make a mess of your outdoor wood furniture, decks and fences. So, the best thing to do to get the benefits of wasps without the downsides is to keep them from nesting too close to your home or chewing on…

Creating a supportive environment is not a quick fix, so as much as I want to do a big reveal of the new office, it’s still a work in progress. Today I’ll share what we’ve changed and how we’re going forward, because working in stages is important when designing for ADHD or any highly specific needs. (You can read the start of the journey here) What has changed Colour We completed the painting for the whole room, which is actually a large multi-use space that includes a working area, a tv-games area, and a playroom area. When researching the little information about ADHD and design…

Hygge is a Danish word that is taking the world by storm. It is a philosophy of living that is being written about in books and even taught in some universities. It is pronounced Hoo-ga (just imagine the Swedish chef saying “hug”) and is the thing I turn to when tackling holiday decorating. Hygge loosely translates to “cozy” or “coziness” but is a much more encompassing philosophy that focuses on contentment in one’s environment, alone or with friends. The picture above, taken on a long-ago holiday visit to my grandparents, is what I think of as hygge: the warm comfort of…

I’ll be honest with you (Carmen here)… my summer has been a bit hectic! We found out that the improperly installed patio door had spent years leaking water onto the joists that held it up and those joists were no more… for about 6-8 inches back. Yikes! When we peeled back the insul-brick and found the rot, things went into a bit of crisis mode here. Now, luckily the LBD husband team managed to fix things up pretty well, sistered the joists, put in a new subfloor, waterproofed, insulated, and resided everything. We also got an exterminator in to deal…

Interior design scope and costs can vary a lot. Before hiring a designer, you will have a meeting to discuss the project and get a quote. There are three essential questions you should be prepared to answer in order too make the most of that meeting, and to be able to compare multiple quotes. One: What are your goals for this project? How you want to use this space will determine where your designer spends their time, what suggestions they make, and will influence each part of the project. If you have a room that functions well but looks dated, I will…

In my role as a colour consultant, I get a lot of questions about the best painting techniques. As an avid DIY painter of my own home, I do have several tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years. Perhaps the most surprising thing to most people is that I don’t use painter’s tape. In this post, I’m going to show how I paint without tape, as well as some basic coverage techniques using pictures from a recent repaint of my kitchen. The painting process: preparation makes perfect The success of a paint job has more to do with proper preparation than…

Clutter is a real and persistent problem for people with ADHD, adults and children alike. There are strategies that help, but figuring out which ones work for us and finding the motivation to start can both be difficult. To make it worse, we often realize we need a new strategy when the clutter in our homes has become overwhelming. In this post, I want to talk about something I don’t see discussed in relation to clutter very often, and which I learned from Lenore. The very first step of fixing a messy room is figuring out what’s making the mess! Before you try…

In many bedrooms, clothes make up a huge percentage of the clutter. One way to tame that clutter is to create a space where you can put clothes that aren’t quite dirty enough for laundry but aren’t quite clean enough to put away. We’ve put together some of our favourite finds from around the web for temporary clothes storage. Now, these pieces of furniture can be used in two ways: to set out the clothes you’ll wear tomorrow, or to hold the clothes that aren’t ready for the laundry. But whichever use you’re interested in, here are the things you want to…

Clients often want to know what to do with old furniture, appliances, or electronics that they need to clear out. When decluttering (or renovating!), sometimes we have to get rid of old paint or cleaning supplies as well—what can go on the curb, what has to be taken to the dump, what other options are there for things that we don’t want but aren’t worn out? This post is a resource guide for what goes where in Waterloo Region, with information and links about how to dispose of unusual items, as well as our favourite donation-accepting charities. Have we missed anything?…

Depersonalizing Once you’ve decluttered and deep cleaned, the final piece of the puzzle is to depersonalize. While the first two are relatively straight forward, I’ve found a lot of bad advice out there on the subject of depersonalizing. Sometimes staging advice articles will announce that you must neutralize your home in order to sell it. Spray it white! Remove all traces of your personality! Sound awful? I certainly think so. The difference between depersonalizing and neutralizing Imagine your favourite public spaces. Are they neutral? I suspect not. One of my favourite public spaces is the Central branch of the Kitchener Public Library, particularly…

  How To Deep Clean One of the first pieces of advice that you’ll get when you’re selling a home is to clean it. But the sort of cleaning you do to sell needs to go a little farther than your regular housework. I call this “deep cleaning,” and it’s one of the best ways to tell the story that your home is a well-maintained one. Buyers have to decide if they will make an offer after a very short inspection of your home, so everything you do to communicate the care you’ve put into it will help make that decision easier. When you…

How to Declutter I don’t know about you, but when I’m decluttering my house as part of my general housecleaning, this is usually how it goes: Sort the stacks of papers that seem to accumulate everywhere and put them in a “to file” pile or recycling Put things on desks and countertops away, assuming they have a spot to be View the remaining stuff and decide whether to keep it or toss it With the stuff I’m keeping, pile it neatly in a “figure out where this goes” pile, or stick it in a box/closet/otherwise out-of-sight-out-of-mind sort of place Call it good enough until it’s time…

When choosing appliances, there are a lot of things to consider. Whatever the budget and features you’re looking for, here are a few additional things to add to that list. How are they rated for noise? Kitchen appliances in particular can add a lot of noise to the home. Fridges, fans, and dishwashers can be particularly noisy, and when you’re choosing any of these, it’s good to think about how their noise affects people both in and outside of the kitchen. Appliances are rated either by decibels or sones, which are both measures of sound. Usually fans are measured in sones, and other…

In our post about decluttering, I mentioned that the Konmari method is often mistaken for minimalism, but it is actually a method for creating a highly curated collection of personal property. What’s the difference? Well, we find the Vogel’s a great example. They were a working class couple in New York who bought art pieces that brought them joy. Thousands of them! Over their lifetime, they collected one of the most important art collections of the 20th century, all crammed into their tiny 450 square foot apartment. It was anything but minimalist. But it was their life’s passion. Obviously, this kind of collecting is…

When some people hear “art collection” they think of Picasso, Emily Carr, Degas, or maybe a huge pink sculpture of a balloon animal. But an art collection can be whatever you want it to be. You CAN spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it, but you certainly don’t have to. My uncle’s favourite art piece is an owl done by my cousin, aged five, and he has over the years had many offers from people who wanted to buy it. If a piece speaks to you, if you like it, there is no limit to what can be considered…

Do you have a favourite spot in your house? A least favourite spot? Perhaps your guests tend to gravitate to one area, maybe despite your efforts to create a gathering zone somewhere else. In our last post, we talked about focus and flow. These are the starting points of good layout. But sometimes you set up a great flow and focal point, but people just seem to want to be somewhere else. When this happens, we look at the next level up in room layouts: protection and prospect. Creating Comfort in Room Layouts We all have moments where we feel uncomfortable in a particular…

Each year, companies like Pantone, Benjamin Moore and Dulux start rolling out their colour of the year with accompanying palettes. How should you incorporate these into your designs? Colour trends in paint and beyond Let’s look at what the colour of the year actually is: from Pantone, it’s Greenery, a bright but natural green that brings to mind sunshine filtered through lush leaves. This colour is Pantone’s interpretation of global colour trends, and it has far-reaching impact, affecting everything from weddings to wallpaper to web design (and also things that don’t begin with “w,” like golf!). This means that if you want to…