Moving into a new flat can be exciting and fun, especially when it means freedom of choice to decorate it the way you would like to decorate it.

My friend Cindy had recently had her flat redecorated and it looked amazing. The color combination and the furniture were simple but looked amazing and the minute you walked into the living room you got this lived in feel, making the flat cozy and welcoming.

So, when I moved into my new flat, I decided to redecorate each room in a different style. The master bedroom was decorated in the Victorian style, the guest bedroom was decorated with a garden theme to it and the nursery was in shades of blue with stars and a lot of cartoon posters in it.

The kitchen was in the French style, with a rustic look to it. The furniture was wooden and we decided to put up pictures and hang the pots and pans on the walls.

When it came to the living room I thought it was necessary to give it a warm lived in feel to it. We decided on rugs and cane furniture for the living room. That evening I invited Cindy over for tea to get her take on the way I had decorated my home. She loved the way the house had been decorated, and suggested: why don’t you use bamboo lampshades, this will help in adding a touch of class to your living room and sure enough it did.

Health consciousnesses, together with environmental conservation, seem to be the by-words of our times. We spend a large amount of our time, and money, on means and methods, to keep ourselves and our families healthy and to protect our natural environment.

Whereas numerous organizations have banded together to ensure that green stays green and biodiversity flourishes, we ultimately only have ourselves to count on when it come to the health and safety mechanisms in place in our own homes.

We buy organically grown food, take supplemental vitamins and get enough exercise. We make sure our homes are clean with a variety of environment-friendly detergents, anti-microbial liquids for our bathrooms and toilets, and ionizers in our air conditioners. We filter our drinking water.

We swipe down our kitchen counters and mop the kitchen floor to prevent food contamination; and we stop there as far as a healthy kitchen area is concerned.

We forget that even more than the bathroom, our kitchen, especially the floor, has the most potential for supporting a flourishing colony of microbes, not just because of the damp but because of juices that spill from the meats that we process.

It’s a good thing there are now products available for sanitizing our flooring material saving us hours of mopping and disinfecting. These are anti-microbial applications that coat kitchen tiles, some even making the tiles non-slip also, preventing another health hazard at the same time. Better yet are those that are also anti-static, a big help for those who like cooking barefoot in an area with a large concentration of electrical appliances.

I went to visit a ceramist friend who had moved to a semi-rural area to begin construction on his dream house. The design theme would center on his hand-made terracotta tiles and décor. It had been in progress for more than a year (and will always be, he says, while he lives) and several of us had made our individual trips to visit and lend our skills and manual labor.

That weekend, we, his friends, were all out there in force: his fellow-ceramists, painters, sculptors, weavers and carvers; even the musicians were there – only to entertain the peons, they said, as their hands were too delicate for such common work (for which they had to dodge banana peels).

The first thing our friend had had built on his property, even before the foundations of his house, was a huge kiln. Our particular program that weekend was to help him load for firing all the pieces we had made and shade dried over the last two weeks.

The ceramists had made a large batch of one-of-a-kind terracotta floor and wall tiles, dozens of slip cast platters, and three terracotta jackets (with holes for the electricals) to dress up his crock pots.

The rest of us had made free standing terracotta sculpture, vases, ash trays, free form plates, mugs, masks and other wall décor.

It was hot and back-breaking work (even the musicians helped) but at the end of the day, singing around the bonfire, occasionally adding wood to the kiln, bellies full, we were as excited as our friend and looking forward to eventually seeing our finished work installed in his house.

I like walking barefoot around the house, even while cooking in our small kitchen.  It used to be a problem because I don’t like walking on cold floors, and our house used to have tile floors. The tiles were beautiful and of very good quality, were easy to clean and water-proof, which was practical especially for the kitchen, but cold to bare feet.

When I saw a sample of laminated bamboo parquet flooring material at a trade show, I knew I had found the right flooring material, not just for our kitchen but also for the rest of the house. Its durability and beautiful warm glow, combined with the water proofing provided by the laminate made it ideal even for the kitchen area.

We still have our area rugs but they are there primarily because they look good against the flooring, and not because my feet need oases of warmth in an expanse of cold tile.

We had lived in a series of rentals before we had our own place built, and many of these were old houses on their last legs.

There was one house in particular that we rented because it had mosaic tile floors, a large yard with fruit trees around the house and a Bermuda grass lawn in front. It was newly painted and, although we knew it was fifteen years old, we didn’t suspect that it had anything intrinsically wrong with it.

We had already settled in and were starting to add our own personal touches to the house décor when we had our first inkling of the problems to come.

There was water on the bedroom floor. At first, we thought it was because it had just heavily rained and there was condensation, but it worsened after a series of sunny days, and the tiles started to loosen. We pulled up the tiles and saw that the under surface was the old wooden flooring, rotting in places.

We found out that the water pipes, which were embedded under the floors and in the concrete walls, were made of PVC which had become brittle through the years and cracked.

Instead of changing the plumbing, the owners had just tiled over the wood.

We thought of by-passing the interior plumbing with exposed pipes until we saw the condition of the pipes coming in from the water main under the road.

We had to move out, but the experience served to make us aware so that  we involved ourselves more in the building of our own house, and, before choosing flooring material, we made sure that no pipes ran under the floors.

It is always heartening to see drab apartment high-rises sporting ornamental and flowering plants on their window sills. Some are planted in make-shift window boxes, others in a variety of pots and kitchen containers while still others are in conventional clay pots.

Among all these mini-garden efforts by city folks, the best one I’ve seen so far is a thriving herb garden outside the kitchen window of a fourth-floor apartment in an almost-seedy part of the city.

The herbs were so lush in their varying shades of green — draping down from hanging pots, shooting out from plastic pitchers, even bursting out of old basketballs with sliced tops – that I could almost smell them from the street three floors down.

It seems that if you can’t have a garden lawn, and you don’t have the floor space to bring nature indoors, a window sill or a window box can host just as verdant a growth of plants as any public park in the city.

What used to be just the TV/game-room of our house, with the TV, DVD player/recorder, video and audio DVD’s and board games, has become the computer room.  The board games are all but forgotten.

At first we had a problem with the wires snaking across the floor ready to trip the careless, until we came up with the best floor plan suitable for a room full of electronic products.

We decided that the TV and DVD’s should be on one side of the room while the desktops, laptops, notebooks and printer would be ranged on the other.  The “geeks” and the “gleeks” would be facing away from each other.  The geeks, of course, have headsets with padded muff-type ear phones, so the gleeks can listen and sing along to their favorite show without having to muffle the volume.

With the help of an electrician, we placed sockets a foot above the floor in the walls behind the computers and the TV, and have no more spaghetti wire traps on the floor.

There is a table off-center, nearer the computer side, where printed material can be collated, homework can be done, and, (hope, hope) board games can still be played.

Oval area rugs are available in many varieties, colors, fabrics and designs. Depending on how you your oval rug looks, this can provide you with many uses. For example, if you want to put a small oval rug in the bathroom, you buy one that is washable and durable like polypropylene or acrylic materials that are both resistant to moisture and dirt.

When it comes to classic styles, one of the most beautiful oval rugs is the one that is sculpted. This has a keen look and almost like three-dimensional. Sculpted oval rug looks best on hardwood or tile floors. Thus, if you are moving into a new place with wooden floors, this is probably the best idea.

The big advantage of using oval rugs is its flexibility. If you want to change the look of the room regularly, you can put oval rug in a different place or beneath an item or furniture. In fact, oval rugs sometimes provide you the finishing touches that you want.

One of the best ways to fight winter blues is to change your environment and the overall atmosphere. There is a famous phrase that says: ”A change is as good as a rest”, and this can be easily performed. When it comes to redecorating your room, you do not need to buy expensive furniture; instead, all you have to do is to brighten your home. Make your home a happy place, which can also make your family happy too.

To start, get some nice accessories that are relatively cheap like new area rugs for your flooring. Area rugs can add character to your floors, making it look like new and can also help define various working spaces in the room. Placing area rugs on your floors also help patch some unwanted spots on your worn out carpet. There are several area rugs you can choose for your home like oriental rug, floral rug, or bamboo rug.

It really does not take a lot of effort, time or even money to set-up your own cozy little space. All you need are a few simple touches and little details such as bright red carpet or colorful area rugs to make your small space comfortable. Area rugs are great for any small space whether they are placed as art decor or simply as floor covering. You can feel the place become cozier with area rugs especially when winter is near.

However, when it comes to decorating small space flooring, a lot of homeowners cannot simply afford to replace their old floor tiles with wood parquet. Thus, if this is the case, you can simply resort to innovative flooring in order to put on the final touch in your room. The perfect symmetry in small spaces works in a triangle with the eye from one side to the other and vice versa. For example, what completes the red blanket and the red tasseled lamp is a choice of warm orange flokati rug or any red area rug.