Category: General

Decorating your house for Christmas is a wonderful thing to do! You don’t need to have children as an excuse to put up a tree or string the house with lights.
Enjoy Christmas as much as you can with some of the great seasonal offers they have at John Lewis.
John Lewis have some wonderful Christmas lights

Whether you’re after indoor or outdoor lights, they’ve got some lovely designs as well as LED line lights to enable you to decorate around the items in your home or garden. There are some really fun items like the light up John Lewis Wooden Deer Head, or the John Lewis Light Up Church. Both of these will add a real touch of Christmas celebration to your home.

If you want more than just Christmas lights, then John Lewis has a huge Christmas section worth a browse. They sell real trees as well as artificial!

Design your Christmas with style with the Christmas Past range of elegant and stylish decorations that will give your Christmas a really traditional feel.
Their Vintage Vibrant style is lovely too, bright bold colours and shapes you’ll remember from no so long ago!  The croft collection is silver and white themes that will be an elegant and understated style you will love too. Copenhagen is their scandi style in simple designs and elegantly bold colours of black white and red.  The festive friends collection will appeal to anyone with a younger audience to impress, cheery bright festive snowmen, reindeer and santas.

They have everything your house needs for Christmas including Christmas trees, all the decorations you’ll ever need – baubles and tree decorations galore. Tree skirts to finish off the beautiful tree. Wreaths and garlands for your door, so everyone who visits knows just how much you love Christmas from the moment they reach your front door.
Table decorations and crackers for the best dinner of the year, candles to light and all sorts of lovely accessories.

They have advent calendars for the children to start the countdown off – make sure you order them so they’re there from the 1st December. Plus stockings and sacks to stuff with presents. Their children’s toy section is awesome too, and well worth a look for all those presents to stash under the tree! They have everything you need to wrap the presents up.
And for the grown ups they have amazing gift ideas for everyone.

You could get everything you need for Christmas from John Lewis!

The mood of a room can be influenced by the lighting. Ceiling lights can be bright and clinically harsh, floor lamps can lend a softness that makes the room feel cosier. Some designs are classics that just keep coming back – Anglepoise lamps are available right now at John Lewis as both table lights and wall lights. The classic design remains as stylish as ever.
I love the anglepoise lamp style and have an original one that I use regularly.

The entire lighting range at John Lewis is well worth a look for other styles and designs in both pendant lights, and more table lights such as this really unusual Ebb & Flow Glow in Dome Table Lamp. I think this would make a really stunning table lamp in a lounge or study.
Visit John Lewis’s lighting section for more inspirational ideas for your home. As always they have some really lovely items for your home.

 

London has overtaken Hong Kong as the most expensive city to live and work in, according to a survey by Savills. says the article in the Metro today.

Is this actually a good thing? Probably not.

About a man showing people round his house…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01d2q3z

Interiors
Johnny Vegas welcomes you to the tasteful home of Jeffrey Parkin.

“Now you may notice as we begin our tour in earnest that there are some design initiatives around the house that aren’t, strictly speaking, finished… I terms of the decor I’ve been playing around with some ideas. Not all the colour schemes have been finalised yet but I think you’d all agree, that’s a veritable bonus. Most of the hard work’s done so I’m basically handing you a colour-by-numbers dream home come true. You just paint in between the guiding lines that my vision has provided you with, and you’re laughing.”

Interiors shines a mis-wired spotlight on the structural flaws exposed in the recent demise of the British property market and sparks on the revelation that a house really stands up or falls down on the basis of its human contents.

Based on an original play by Johnny Vegas, Stewart Lee and Rob Thirtle.

Directed by Dirk Maggs
Produced by Sally Harrison
A Woolyback Production for BBC Radio 4

Affordable Homes Bill 2014-15 is making it’s way through parliament. You can watch the progress here

Mr George’s Private Members’ Bill will include: –
i) Extension of the Government’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme or the creation of a new Affordable Homes Investment Bank to underpin the ‘intermediate’ market (shared equity/shared ownership/mutual housing) to construct a new lower rung on the housing ladder for those who cannot afford the full cost of full market ownership housing.
ii) Negating an effect of the spare room subsidy/‘bedroom tax’ – on basis that poor families are as entitled to a stable family home as better off families. This would limit the bedroom tax to exclude those who have been living at an address for more than 3 years and where disabled adaptations have been completed
iii) The introduction of a new ‘Use Class’ in the planning Use Classes Order for ‘non-permanent residential use’ (second homes) which would empower local planning authorities to control the number of second homes in their area.
iv) Enhance powers of compulsory purchase for local authorities where either developers land bank development sites or fail to use sites for which planning permission has been granted but developments not advanced or where need for affordable homes cannot be met on ‘exception’ sites through community land auctions/trusts.

Story here about Kate Bush’s house Grief cliff: Massive landslip leaves Kate Bush’s 17-acre home on Devon coast at risk of crumbling into the sea
House at risk since a ‘significant landslip’ last year

Devon County Council subsequently closed off a half-mile section of the coastline that runs by the foot of Kate’s land,

You could look through this list of footpath closures and see if you could track down where it was.

I’ve spoken to someone in the last week who is looking for land to place his pre-built Huf House. It’s in Germany costing him storage at the moment of about £250 a month.
He can’t sell his top floor duplex flat even though he’s dropped the price by 1/3 because of the high service charges.
He was looking at a bit of land near me with a view to buying it. Me? I just wondered if it was suitable for keeping bee hives on.
The land in question is enclosed behind houses and probably a very glass filled Huf House is not what planning would consider. They might allow a bungalow that wasn’t going to look in at anyone, but probably not a 2 storey building. The idea of squeezing builders lorries down the little alley, let alone getting services put on seems a nightmare. There was also the problem with people having adopted land over time.

Adverse possession – a very interesting subject! And not something I would want to embark on with solicitors fees!

Parker Morris 1961 minimum space standards – lovely page showing these figures

The wiki page for the Parker Morris Committee is worth a read too

If you’re decluttering and don’t want to throw everything away then look at self-storage as an option.

Decluttering allows you to rpesent your house better for a sale. By removing all your personal nicknacks that clutter up your home, or excess furniture you can leave more of a blank canvas for viewers to see how their lifestyle could fit in.

How much room do you need?
Safestyle sizes – which is similar size to:
Small [10sq ft]Estate car boot
Small [16sq ft]a telephone box
Small [25sq ft]a 1/4 of a single garage
Small [35sq ft]an average garden shed
Medium [50sq ft]half a single garage
Medium [75sq ft]a Luton van
Large [100sq ft]a single garage
Large [125sq ft]a 7.5 tonne lorry
Large [150sq ft]a double garage
Large [250sq ft]a 30ft articulated lorry
Large [500sq ft]3 x 20ft shipping containe

This helps you work out what size storage you might need. Upgrading is easy when you need more room.

How does Self Storage at Safestore work?
You can store your goods or possessions from as little as a week for as long as you need. Storage rooms can be booked in advance to make sure the size you require is available on the day you need it. You can also easily switch to a smaller or larger room whilst in storage if you need to. Self storage at Safestore is flexible, secure and hassle free, and they can help and advise you to make sure you get the best service and value for money.

If you’re downsizing you might like to use storage to hold on to items you can’t bear to throw away. Or if you’re about to embark on some major DIY project then you can protect your belongings by putting them in safe storage.

Elizabeth Hurley has put her Cotswolds manor house for sale for 6million pounds


The 48-year-old model, who bought property which is set in 450 acres of farmland for 3.3 million pounds is hoping to make a 3 million pound profit

Hurley, who also bought Donnington Hall estate in Ledbury with her former boyfriend Warne, revealed the reason behind her selling the property, admitting that she was keen to do up the house that bought with Warne