Archive for category Interior Design

I saw this Ezine article on choosing and buying a new sofa and thought it would be quite useful to all of you lot. If your like me then you want to buy things all the time and if unlike me you actually have money then you probably will be buying things all the time.

This little guide will help you to make the right choice. It has lots of cool little tips and bits of research that you should always do before you choose the sofa you want to buy. The tips include:

• Check the size. Multiple times if it doesn’t fit then you are in for an expensive mistake.
• Delivery. Will they deliver? Is it free? When it arrives will it fit through the door…
• Covering. Leather sofas will wipe clean quite well but if it is anything else it would work out a lot better if you can take off the covers and wash them.
• Longevity. Is the leather good quality? Will it last? Is it a good idea to get a white sofa…

It goes into detail on all the tips and would be a good one to keep in your bookmarks!

House prices have been going through somewhat of a dramatic slash in prices recently because of the recession but no house has taken a cut quite like the Lyons Demesne estate in County Kildare, it has taken a drop from 80 million euros to 50 million euros! That is a 30 million euro cut, think about that for a second and imagine how many houses you could buy just with the money taken off the original asking price!

The estate was owned by the late Tony Ryan who founded Guinness Peat Aviation and his son Cathal founded Ryanair. Tony Ryan was said to have spent 100 millions in restoring the estate before his death in 2007 and the restoration won several awards.

Ryan’s sons, Shane and Declan put the property on the market in 2009 with the highest price tag ever for an Irish home. Unfortunately the price was far out of reach for most peoples current accounts in Ireland and it has been on sale ever since and now the Ryan’s have decided to slash the price in hopes of selling the 600 acre property.

The house originally built for Lord Cloncurry in 1785 contains a drawing room, private cinema, half-Olympic sized pool, seven bedrooms in the main house and four extra bedrooms in a self-contained guest wing. Outside the grounds include formal gardens and a 22 acre lake.

So now that the price has been slashed by 30 million euros and it is a more (cough) affordable price of 50 mil are you going to be raiding your savings accounts to go off to the estate agents? I would love to if I had the money!

OK so when I first moved into my new house we got a lovely, comfy and pretty much mint leather sofa from my parents as they had just bought a new sofa themselves. It is a great sofa and better quality than anything me or my housemate could afford new but for some reason everything in our front room has slowly gone to a red colour scheme and our sofa is a very clashing shade of blue!

I really would like a new red sofa but because of the fact I’m not exactly flush with money I have merely been window shopping at the moment, the window of the web that is. It would seem for a single 3 seater sofa I’m going to need to save up around £400 to £500 and then more again for the single chair to go with it, but that could be something completely different (or my dream of a proper La-z-boy!)

I would ideally prefer a leather sofa because it is a lot easier to look after and I have seen a selection of sofas from Furniture Choice that all seem to have sloping armrests, I’m not sure if this must be the ‘in’ thing at the moment but I do like the look and it would make it a lot nicer to lie down on. They look like this one below.

Of course my housemate is a joiner so I could just make him create something a bit weird and wonderful like this

It doesn’t look particularly comfortable though and I’d still have to buy the fabric and cushions. Of course the last and cheapest option is some kind of leather dye. I’ve never used or experimented with dyes before so I’m not really sure what is out there but it sounds like it could work. Has anyone tried any leather dyes before? How do they work and are they actually any good? Comment below, I’d love to find out a bit about it.