Also if you're moving clothes that are on hangers use the very large and heavy garbage bags to transport them. Just open the bag and slip it up over the clothes from the bottom up the make a knot at the top around the hangers. You can get up to 10 pieces per bag (more or less), then once you're ready to move them just lift the bag off of the clothes rack, move to your car and when you get to the new place hang them on the new rack. All you would have to do is slide the bags off. Trust me I moved 2 months ago and it made moving what seemed like hundreds of clothing items so easy! Then you can can the bags for garbage. Now that's recycling!

The last home we had was a very small workers cottage so I kept the walls a light off white, table and to unit tops were gloss white to bounce the light around. My dining chairs and bar stools were clear acrylic so that I could see through them, the ends of my island bench/brekky bar were mirrored and my curtains were textured white sheers so that they also didn't take up too much visual room. All of my furniture was on legs so that I could see under it and the lounge room rug was pulled away from the lounge just a teeny bit so that I could see a little bit of timber flooring all the way round it, that all made the floor size look just a bit bigger. Bedrooms had mirrored wardrobe doors and bathroom was almost completely white (except for dark floor) and had frameless shower screen and oversized vanity mirror to reflect as much light as possible. Friends and visitors would comment that the house was bigger than they had imagined from the outside.......it wasn't, it was just styled inside to make it look larger.

I would place the sofa in front of the fireplace and armchairs either side. Pur a colourful throw over the back of the sofa or add a console at the back of the sofa to add interest. While the sofa loses some of the open plan look, you need to be functional unless you have a TV room. The bookcase will add a real warmth. If you use swivel armchairs, you can swivel to watch TV or swivel to face the sofa when just talking. We have these and they are very functional.

we do as much of the demolition as possible including collecting all the rubbish and doing the tip runs so that workers arrive to a nice clean worksite, we usually sell or give away surplus goods on Gumtree (anyone want some old Velux roof windows?) and we found that careful salvage of old wiring and other scrap metal helps offset dumping costs BUT all this work takes time away from earning a living and looking after home and family so you have to weigh up the cost in time and money against the builders' demolition charges but i have to say some of our intentions have been disappointing as after carefully salvaging six 8mx 200mm x 50mm beams from our last reno our builder told us that they couldn't be reused in the new work without being chemically treated but, despite all the hard work we think demolition is fun and ripping out old plasterboard and tiles and concrete etc (after the asbestos removal has been done by professionals) is really great fun and dismantling buildings is a great way to help understand how they fit together