In these difficult times, we want to make sure the money we spend on our homes will add real value. Grainne & Michael need to get better use out of the space they have but with limited options and no room to extend, the balance between cost and value is going to be tricky to achieve.

Also featured in this issue:

• George Clarke of Channel 4′s ‘The Home Show’ & new series, ‘Restoration Man’, answers some common home improvement questions;
• Niall Browne of Browne Architects reviews current costs for hiring tradesmen and builders in Ireland;
• A Guide to Installing Solar Panels to reduce water and space heating costs;
• Making Budget Home Improvements – under 1k, 5k & 10k,

plus £1000 worth of reader giveaways and lots more!

If you have a space problem in your home and would like my help to find a solution that works for you, call me or drop me a line to book a 2 Hour Home Design Consultation – see right for contact details. Or if you know someone who could use some help in creating their dream home, we now offer gift vouchers – the perfect birthday, anniversary, wedding or house-warming gift.

Alternatively, if you’d like to be featured in a future issue of the magazine, we require the following info:

• photos of your house – an external shot of the front & internal shots of the problem areas;
• a floor plan, if you have one – even a rough sketch will do!
• a description of your home, highlighting the problems you’re experiencing.

Send these to anthea@decorateireland.ie, with ‘Property Potential Feature’ in the Subject line. Decorate & Improve Your Home is a Quarterly magazine and we can only feature one home potential project per issue, so if you aren’t selected initially, please keep trying!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in:

The Hidden Potential in Your Home

It’s Not About Looks: Good Design Works

Putting the Home into a Home Office

Did you find this article useful? Do you have any any pet peeves about housing? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement / design issues you’d like to know more about.

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January 2010 was the coldest in Dublin for 45 years. The snow brought transport, pedestrians and businesses to a halt, the threat of low gas supplies and then water shortages with the thaw – one snap of bad weather and we are all reminded of how reliant we are on our infrastructure systems and networks to live our lives in comfort and how vulnerable we are when they break down.

For me, this past month brought into sharp focus everything I’d learned whilst participating in the ‘Community Powerdown’ course run by the Cultivate Centre in Dublin, last year – an exploration of the challenges we all face as the supply of carbon-based fuels like oil and gas run out.

From 'Energy & Power' - a 1971 oil use projection

The phenomenon is known as  ‘Peak Oil’, coined by M. King Hubbert in the 1950′s as he investigated the rate of oil production over time – the bell-shaped graph above is a typical projection of how oil production will fall off sharply, as resources become exhausted. Since Hubbert’s time, world population has grown; technology is more advanced and prevalent and, as a result, our energy demands have more than doubled.

Schools of thought vary on the timing of Peak Oil but whether it is in our near future or our near past, we have reached a turning point where the resources we are reliant upon for our current way of life will steadily become more scarce:

• more difficult to access,
• more likely to cause friction and aggression as competition to find and control dwindling resources increases and, of course,
• more expensive as supply drops and demand increases.

To put this into perspective – in 2008, 80-90% of total worldwide energy consumption came from burning fossil fuels.

As part of the ‘Community Powerdown’ workshops, each week a dozen of us, from different age groups, backgrounds, interests and awareness of environmental issues sat down to look at how Peak Oil would affect us and what measures we could put in place to make our lives more resilient to this kind of change.

Reading this,  you may think changing your heating to something more sustainable like wind power, a couple of solar panels or a wood-chip boiler, in the future, will take care of the problem – as I did before I embarked on the course – but the impact of Peak Oil goes far beyond the question of how we heat our homes.

'Leavin' on a jet plane... don't know if I'll be back again'

Without oil, how do we travel? Cars, buses, motorbikes, mopeds, trains and planes all rely on carbon-fuels and the impetus isn’t there to develop alternatives whilst these fuels are perceived to be in plentiful supply.

Who made your lunch today?

What will we eat? It takes ploughs, tractors, sowers, reapers to tend the land in this time of large scale industrial farming. Ingredients have to be transported to factories, which have to be heated and whose machines have to be powered and whose products then have to be transported around the country and the world.

One of the facts I found most startling is that our current food chain is only 3 meals deep – if anything were to disrupt the flow of supply and demand, we have only enough food to last 3 days before serious problems occur. Think about the lorry drivers strike in the UK a few years back or the snow we’ve just experienced – this is how easy it is to disrupt the systems we rely on.

'Life in the fast lane...'

Where and how will we work? In their book, ‘Microtrends – Surprising Tales of the Way we Live Today’, Mark J. Penn & E. Kinney Zalsne identify not one but two trends around the commuter lifestyle – Commuter Couples whose jobs dictate almost separate lives and who are reliant on travel just to spend time together and Extreme Commuters who travel at least 90 minutes each way daily to get to work. There’s even a Mega-Commuter trend, especially in Europe, where people are reliant on flying to and from work.

Without cheap independent transport, the long-distance work commute, a reality for many in Ireland who could not afford to buy boom-time housing in locations where they worked, becomes completely unsustainable.

'Eeny, meeny, miny, mo...'

Where and how do we live?  The construction industry is one of the largest contributors to carbon dioxide emissions in the world and that’s before we move into our homes and face the challenges of heating, lighting, powering TVs, DVDs, X-Boxes, computers, printers, washing machines, dryers, fridges, cookers, dishwashers etc.

Here today, gone tomorrow?

What kind of communities will we have to create? These are huge problems and whilst each of us can change our behaviour as individuals, there is also a need for us to come together and agree changes that will work at a larger scale – sharing of resources, reduction of waste, sustainable living systems.

At a time when we prize our independence so highly, these are frightening prospects. But it is much more frightening to have change thrust upon us than to look ahead, anticipate a new set of circumstances and start planning for it ourselves.

If you’re interested in learning about these issues, Cultivate are running the course again as ‘Community Resilience – 10 Active Learning Lessons’, on Tuesday evenings from 16th February to 27th April at the Greenhouse, 17 St Andrew’s Street. To book or find out more, contact Cultivate at 01 674 5773 or on the web-site – it costs €180.00 for 10 weeks and there are 2 free places available to those who are passionate about or active in sustainability or resilience development.

In the past 2 years, we’ve seen all too clearly what comes of short-term thinking – there is always a price to pay. Our current thoughts and actions create the world we live in tomorrow – so take a moment and ask yourself, what kind of future am I making today?

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in:

The DIY Energy Efficient Home

Dublin Open House: A-Rated House by FKL Architects

Is Your Home BER Ready?

Do you have any any pet peeves about housing or home design? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to read more about.

In these days of mobile working, flexible hours and reducing overheads, more and more people are based from home at least part of their working week. I’m lucky enough to have a whole room for home working and this week was delighted to open the door to living:room’s home office to UK interiors blogger, Will Taylor for his regular Office Inspiration feature on Bright Bazaar.

To me it’s very important the work side of things doesn’t take over and that my house still looks like a home, as I discussed with Will – it’s also great to be able to close the door at the end of the day, switch off and enjoy my home.

But not everyone has the luxury of being able to dedicate an entire room to this purpose and part of living:room‘s philosophy is to make space work harder by doubling up on complementary uses wherever possible. By ‘complementary’, I mean those that can co-exist side by side without one interfering with one another – so a home office in the living room where other members of the family may want to watch TV etc., is probably not ideal! Here are some things to consider when setting up a home office and some ideas on how to integrate it seamlessly into your home.

Traditional style home office armoire (Pottery Barn - US)

Location

The increase in the number of people working from home is largely a result of new technology, so most existing homes are not designed to include an office or work space. It may not be about choosing a location so much as squeezing it in wherever you can!

If space is an issue then look for ‘natural’ locations within your home – space under the stairs, an unused cupboard, a wall recess etc. These leftover spaces could be the perfect location to either locate a piece of furniture containing all the office essentials (see image above) or to have something built in to suit your needs. If you have a spare bedroom, then look at building the office into the room’s wardrobe space or cupboards (as designer, Karin Draaijer’s home office, below) – this way it can be closed over at the end of the day, without affecting the use of the room. Just remember to keep some of that storage space for the clothes!

Home Office by Karin Draaijer

Other possible locations might be in a kitchen, integrated into workbench storage or a full-height cupboard; a storage wall in a wide hallway; a large landing at the top of a flight of stairs or a converted roof space, where it may be possible to bring natural light in by means of a roof-light.

Wherever you choose, it’s important that the space be comfortable – well-lit, no draughts or distractions and enough space for your needs, otherwise you won’t use it and could be wasting your money.

If your business is based from home full-time, then good natural light is non-negotiable – it is easier on the eyes, reduces the need for & expense of artificial lighting and, if you’re working on a computer, it’s important to able to rest and adjust your eyes regularly by changing your focus to something located at a distance.

I really like the way Bates Masi Architects created this built-in bench in a bedroom of the Noyak Creek House (click image below for more), as it could easily do double duty as both a dressing table and a low-key work space – with its drawer storage and fantastic natural light and views. This solution will work best in North-facing rooms where you won’t be blinded by sunlight and glare – on those few days a year we see the sun in Ireland!

Noyak Creek House - Bates Masi Architects

Size

Both size and location will depend on the type of work you do and whether your home office is required for full-time, part-time or occasional working. There are some great cost-effective options designed for occasional use and don’t take up much space – here’s one of my favourites from IKEA:

Slimline Computer workstation by IKEA

Or for a more traditional writing desk-style alternative take a look at the ALVE bureau & cupboard, also by IKEA.

Furniture

I have a horror of the pale wood veneer or glass / metal type office furniture that many retailers provide for home use – they rarely reflect the design choices we make for our homes and end up looking out of place. There is no reason why a home office should look like a corporate one – why not think of it instead as an opportunity to reflect who you are and the values of your business? It can still be a professional space but one that works for you, your business and your home. The example below, by Craig Spencer Design, makes excellent use of a left-over space in a hallway and by using a limited colour palette – black and white, with red detail in the picture – ties in with the look and feel of the rest of the house.

My tip would be to add folding doors, even if only from bench-height upward, to ‘close’ the office at the end of the day – open shelves can look cluttered and untidy and having doors will take care of that, until you’re ready to tackle the housework!

Built-in Home Office - Craig Spencer Design

Storage

Most businesses require file storage of some kind, so think about those needs as well as the work-station itself. Again, this doesn’t need to be a traditional filing cabinet – look for opportunities to integrate storage in a discreet way by using existing shelving or storage boxes in colours that match the existing decor. In the living:room home office, I’ve combined open and closed storage, where homely items like books and knick-nacks are on display and the more officey items hidden away. If a filing cabinet is the way you want to go, think about locating it in a cupboard or building it into the work station, so its office credentials don’t dominate the look of the room.

One of the cleverest uses of a small space, I’ve come across is the Finger Apartment in New York by Noroof Architects – I love this ‘invisible’ surface that folds down from the wall creating a table or desk and revealing lots of storage space behind. It’s a great example of how to get double value from a room and could easily be adapted to create that ideal, low-profile workspace at home.

Finger Apartment - Table in concealed position

Finger Apartment - Table in open position

Spot the difference? Genius.

For more ideas, check out the Office Inspiration posts on Bright Bazaar. Will has been blogging since early 2009 and is also a freelance writer for various interiors web-sites and national newspapers. His passion for interiors grew out of working for Habitat as a student journalist and he is now working for US home and lifestyle store, Anthropologie, as they expand into Europe, where he puts all his social media savvy into translating the in-store experience to the on-line world.

If you found this article useful, you may also be interested in:

The Elephant in the Room: Spaced Out

The Hidden Potential in Your Home

It’s Not About Looks – Good Design Works

Do you have any any pet peeves about housing or home design? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to see featured.

As both houses were to be occupied by different generations of one family, the project offered a unique opportunity to make visual and physical connections linking the design of each property and to explore both a shared language in the use of materials – brick, concrete & timber – and the emotional context of a shared history.

5 Ideas to take from TAKA’s House 1 | House 2 (after pics):

5 Ideas to take from TAKA’s House 1 | House 2:

Brick Doesn’t Have to be Boring

Dublin has a rich tapestry of residential brick buildings primarily from the Georgian and Victorian periods, but its use in modern housing as a whole has been less than inspiring. Here, the mews house uses brick as a reference to the main house but in a playful way also shows how construction methods have changed in the intervening centuries. The sculptural ‘extruded’ brickwork to the front and the ‘perforated’ facade to the rear are polar opposites – positive and negative – but sandwiched together, they would form the standard ‘stock bond’ pattern of the brickwork on the original house. Innovation in building often involves an unknown quantity, something untried – a scary concept for home building and renovation. Here, it is the use of a familiar material in an unexpected way that is innovative – reminding us that even humble or everyday building materials have the potential to surprise and scooping the ‘Best International Project’ prize for TAKA at the BDA Brick Awards 2009 in the UK, in the process.

Sustainable Use of Land

We hear the word ‘sustainability’ bandied about a lot these days – to me it’s about using resources in the best way to ensure we can carry on using them for as long as possible. In urban environments, one of the scarcest, most valuable resources is land. Building a second house on an existing plot not only makes good use of available land but also of other existing resources like schools, public transport and services like water and drainage. Increasing ‘density’ – the number of households within a given area – guarantees continued local authority investment in these services and, therefore, their long-term sustainability.

Memory

The creation of these new homes was also a time of sadness as it meant saying goodbye to a long-term family home nearby – a place full of memories of their shared lives together. Both houses contain markers – reminders or experiences to tie back to the earlier life.  Alice and her siblings have memories of the staircase in the old house being like a room, where they played as children. The wide wooden staircase in the mews house echoes this, with built in seats on the lower steps, like the an amphitheatre, and opens onto a generous landing on the first floor. Making these spaces larger than necessary creates the opportunity for other activities to take place there  – for the next generation to discover the house in new ways and create their own memories. We often think of a home in terms of size – number of rooms or activities – but the idea of creating spaces that evoke memory takes ‘putting your own stamp’ on a home beyond mere style statements into more emotional and unique expressions of individuality.

Ritual

Down-sizing to a new home, the parents worried they would see less of the whole family and a large altar-like concrete dining table was created in a glazed extension to the original house to bring everyone together around the ritual of eating. The solidity of the table gives a sense of being grounded in a time of change and upheaval. So many rituals form part of our everyday lives – bathing, cooking, eating, sleeping. As with the idea of memory, recognising the rituals that are important to us is another way of approaching how we design our spaces to reflect our own individual needs.

The ‘Hearth’ of the Home

Both houses play up the domestic rituals of the hearth and cooking. In the mews, the staircase wraps around the exposed brick chimney of the fireplace as it rises up through the house, forming a central core to the home; the activity of cooking is separated from the kitchen and brought into the centre of the living space forming a focal point to the room. A nice touch is the specially designed ceramic tiles on the wall beside the concrete table in the main house – the same tiles are used in the open fire hearths of both houses. This idea could easily be adapted to suit a house extension project – taking a detail or feature from the original house and incorporating it in the new space, creating subtle links between old and new.

If you found this article of interest, you may also like:

Dublin Open House: A-Rated House by FKL Architects (and 5 Ideas to Steal…)

It’s Not About Looks – Good Design Works

The Hidden Potential in Your Home

Do you have any any pet peeves about housing or home design? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to see featured.

Well, 2010 is off to a rollicking start here at Chez living:room! We’re in the latest issue of Munster Interiors – their regular ‘Blog Watch’ feature, written by the lovely Lorna Sixsmith of Garrendenny Lane Interiors, highlights the on-line movers, shakers and dreamers of dreams in the world of home design. Needless to say, we are honoured and privileged to have made the cut!

Featured this month, along with yours truly, is one of living:room’s fave on-line home boutiques, Mabel & Violet, which you may have seen recently in House & Home‘s Irish Hot 100 and if not – where have you been? Written by M&V owner, Paula Asple, the blog covers a miscellany of home design, vintage, furnishing and lifestyle topics, including her own home renovation projects.

Of the ‘Blog Watch’ picks, I was delighted to discover ‘Nestled In‘ for the very first time – a Finnish interior blog featuring twenty-somethings Katja & Minna and their home renovation along with DIY projects and interior, art and design faves. Having visited Helsinki many years back, I’m a sucker for Scandinavian design – and not just the stuff that comes in a flat pack – so this blog is destined to become one of my regular reads!

And, of course,  Lorna knows a thing or two about blogging… In addition to scribing for Munster Interiors, managing her interior design business and on-line shop, being a mother-of-two and mucking in on the hubbie’s dairy farm (phew!) – she also finds time to write a regular interior design blog over at Garrendenny Lane. For specific decor or furnishing quandries, Lorna does a Friday Fix-It post where she answers specific reader queries like choosing light fittings for a double-height hallway or decorating a girl’s bedroom – if you’re in need of help, just drop her a line.

If you found this article of interest, you may also like:

The Hidden Potential in your Home

It’s Not About Looks – Good Design Works

Dublin Open House: A-Rated House by FKL Architects (and 5 Ideas to Steal…)

Do you have any any pet peeves about housing or home design? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to see featured.

People tend to call on me when they have a problem with their homes – a long-standing issue they can no longer ignore or something new created by a change in circumstance. Either way, it’s just human nature to have a problem with problems. Often we don’t even want to acknowledge they exist for fear of discovering bigger, uglier problems lurking beneath!

Me – I love problems. Once you clearly identify a problem, you’re already half way to solving it. The key usually lies in understanding the problem itself, and applying a little bit of creative thinking to unlock it.

I got to thinking about this after watching ‘Dancing on Ice – The Story of Bolero’ on TV last night – a documentary about Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s record-breaking routine at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. As a teenager, I watched them skate to victory and remember both the beauty of the ‘Bolero’ routine and the acclaim that followed when they were awarded full marks by each of the 12 judges – a feat that hasn’t been matched before or since.

But what I found intriguing, watching the documentary, was how this extraordinary performance essentially started out as a problem. The original ‘Bolero’ piece by Ravel is 17 mins long – the competition rules only allow only 4 minutes skating time. Torvill & Dean hired a composer and worked with him to condense the key elements of the piece to meet the competition requirements. After working on the piece for 3 days, they managed to reduce it to 4 mins… and 28 seconds. No matter how hard they tried they couldn’t make it any shorter without losing the things they loved about the music.

Many might have given up at this point, picked another piece and worked with that instead but Torvill & Dean knew this was the right music for them and were determined to use it. When they examined the competition rules, they discovered the ’4 minute’ clock on the routine only started when their skates made contact with the ice – and so they designed a routine where they didn’t make contact with the ice for the first 28 seconds! What they created as a result was iconic, ground-breaking and, of course, Olympic Gold.

Had they been able to condense Bolero into 4 minutes exactly, would they have come up with as memorable an opening? The need to solve the problem of the extra 28 seconds made them look at their work from a completely different angle. It was creative thinking at its most elegant – a response that not only solves the initial problem but enhances and improves the whole, taking it to new heights.

I know I’ve struck gold when a client tells me I’ve presented them with an idea for their home they’d never have thought of themselves and, instead of seeing a problem, they start to get excited about new possibilities. Next time you’re feeling dissatisfied about your home, remember this – as troublesome and annoying as a problem like lack of space or natural light may be, it also brings the opportunity to create something new and better. All it takes is a little creative thinking. Now isn’t that music to your ears?

If you found this article of interest, you may also like:

It’s Not About Looks – Good Design Works

Elephant in the Room 1: The Bad Extension

Elephant in the Room 2: Spaced Out

Do you have any any pet peeves about housing or home design? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to see featured.

Wishing you all a very

Happy Christmas

&

Best Wishes for 2010!

As part of the Dublin Open House event in October, I took a look around FKL Architects‘ ‘A-Rated House’ in Rathmines, Dublin – a concrete built 2-storey home, designed to respond the physical and planning restrictions of a small North-facing mews plot in the South Dublin inner city suburbs.

The 3-bed house was designed for Michelle Fagan and Gary Lysaght, both partners at FKL Architects, and their family, and besides setting a new aesthetic brief for environmentally responsible design, it also offers some interesting spatial ideas to meet the challenges of modern family living.

5 Ideas to take from FKL’s A-Rated House (after pics)

Front View from Laneway

Entry and Stair

View from kitchen toward garden

Double-height 'Slot' thru House

Stair & Rooflights

Upstairs Living Room

Balustrade around double-height 'Slot'

View from Living Room toward Landing 'Bridge'

Master Bedroom

Rooflight in Bathroom

Rear View from Garden

5 Ideas to take from FKL’s A-Rated House:

Green Credentials:

Eco- friendly concrete, external insulation, a green living roof to replace the building footprint, solar panels, heat recovery, vegetable plot and a lively suburban location, eliminating the need for a car as fundamental ingredient in daily life – all go to show creating a beautiful, modern home doesn’t have to mean sacrificing environmental credibility.

It’s Not White:

For anyone who’s ever tried to co-exist in a minimal white interior with grubby-pawed toddlers or to impress aesthetic appreciation upon crayon-toting kids, the passing of this particular trend must surely meet with a chorus of Hallelujiahs! The A-Rated House’s concrete interior creates a neutral background that’s easy on the eye, with timber cabinets and wall panels providing an added visual warmth.

Upstairs, Downstairs

The most interesting idea at work in the A-Rated House is the central double-height slot that divides the building in two – bridged only where the stair lands at first floor level – creating a visual and spatial link between upstairs and downstairs. Wherever you are in the house, you are aware of this relationship to everything else – a truly open plan type of living. The advantage is that everything in the house feels connected – the disadvantage could be a lack of privacy.

Light Matters

One of the biggest challenges of building in this location is the orientation – the house faces South onto a narrow laneway, with the living rooms and garden facing North. Light from the front of the house, and from strategically placed rooflights, travels down through the central double-height space bringing sunlight into the rear of the house – the family can enjoy the tracking of the sun’s path through the course of the day across this space. Dividing the living space between ground and first floor levels  also maximises natural light and views at the upper level.

Flexible Space

At the rear of the house at ground floor level, addressing the garden and only partially open to the kitchen dining space, is a family living room or snug. This space has a doorway linking it to a discrete ‘service’ corridor giving access to a Utility and storage area, the integral garage and also downstairs WC / Shower room. The snug can therefore double as guest accommodation complete with en-suite bathroom, when required.

Final Thoughts

My only concern about the open plan nature of the house would be a lack of privacy that could become an issue as the family grows older. When puberty and the woe-ridden adolescent years hit, a place of retreat becomes essential to the sanity of teenagers and parents alike.

The saving grace here comes in the unlikely form of the City Fathers and their insistence that off-street parking be provided as an integral part of the design, despite the owners not owning or wishing to own a car! The ‘garage’ (although this seems too mean a word for the clean, bright space created for this purpose), already separated from the main body of the house by the service zone, provides the possibility of sanctuary – the final component  to make this a truly sustainable and flexible home.

If you found this article of interest, you may also like:

Dublin Open House: House 1 | House 2 by TAKA Architects (and 5 Ideas to Steal…)

The Hidden Potential in your Home

It’s Not About Looks – Good Design Works

Do you have any any pet peeves about housing or home design? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to see featured.

'The files are *in* the computer?!'

Well, it’s only taken 9 weeks, 2 USB cables, umpteen file download drive searches, 3 near misses, 1 borderline manic episode, a brief period of rest and medication, followed by a couple of tantrums but the Dublin Open House pics have finally been wrested from the top security vault that is the ViviCam 4345 digital camera, by cunning, guile, ingenuity and well – by accident, if I’m completely honest.

Turns out the key to copying the pics in the camera memory to the memory card is to copy the completely irrelevant pics on the memory card to the memory card…

Eh?

Exactly. A model of rational thought and ease of consumer use worthy of Microsoft itself.

So, enjoy the following posts – I’m off to lie down in a darkened room for a while.

Dublin Open House: A-Rated House by FKL Architects

Dublin Open House: House 1 | House 2 by TAKA

It’s been a very busy month for living:room as word about the blog has spread across the country and beyond!

Firstly, we were featured in the ‘Around the Block’ section of the Irish Times’ Property Supplement, where  our ‘good design is good value’ message was emphasised along with our use of social media and the free advice offered on the blog, to help homeowners make better use of their space.

Living:room then took to the road with the Denny Home Is campaign – offering free home design and planning advice in their Pop Up Homes in Galway, Letterkenny & Dublin, all in aid of the Simon Community to help the homeless. Denny are asking what home means to you and contributing €1 for every comment, picture or video received – here I am at the Galway house, doing my bit:

Today’s the last day to contribute as Denny will be handing a cheque over to the Simon Community tomorrow – so there’s still time to add your tuppence worth on what home means to you on the Home Is Facebook page.

The living:room blog was also featured in a presentation to the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, as an excellent example of how architects can use social media to communicate about their work with clients and the public at large.

The presentation was given by Su Butcher – Practice Manager at Barefoot & Gilles Architects and one of the most prolific architectural voices using social media in the UK. Su was so taken with the living:room story and how I came to set up living:room & start blogging, tweeting et al, she even featured it in her blog, ‘Just Practising’, to inspire other architects to make the leap. How did it all come about? Simply by chatting one day on Twitter…

And last week, Silicone Republic included living:room in a feature on blogs offering useful tips for a leaner lifestyle in these recession weary times, with our articles ‘The DIY Energy Efficient Home’ & ‘It’s Not About Looks – Good Design Works’, being highlighted.

Thanks to everyone for reading and supporting the living:room blog – it’s very much appreciated and there’s lots more good stuff to come! As ever, if there is anything you’d like to see featured here, just drop me a line…

If you found this article of interest, you may also like:

Looking for Home Design Inspiration?

The Hidden Potential in your Home

What Does Home Mean to You?