Author: Good Art & Design

Veranda-Design
House Design

Home Veranda Design

Good Art & Design

Many homes have a veranda or deck out the back or a porch on the front that rarely get used. This seems a shame because every homeowner would agree that they want more floor space in their home. Even a deck or veranda can only be used with the weather is not too hot, cold or rainy.  This can change by adding aluminium sliding windows to fully enclose it.

This will allow anyone to use the veranda no matter what the weather is like because you can add heating and cooling as well as lights.  The windows can be fitted with flyscreens, so when they are open flying insects cannot enter. You’ll be able to use the space for dining, relaxing, playing and hobbies with no worries about the weather spoiling anything left out there.

Windows can be fitted from ceiling to waist height or they can go right to the floor, depending on your preferences. The smaller windows allow more privacy, while the larger ones let in more sun and light. If the veranda is facing the sunny side, in the winter the sun will shine right in, warming the veranda and the home.

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Carpet-Tips
House Design

Flooring Design: Carpet Tips

Good Art & Design

Even though they are some of the most expensive, wool carpets are still popular due to their superior look and feel. In addition, they are ideal for anyone looking for organic and eco-friendly choices.  Wool is a natural substance that is renewable, making it a sound, environmentally friendly choice for your floor coverings. However, carpet cleaners like brilliance carpet cleaning will tell you that cleaning procedures need to be undertaken carefully.

Just like a wool jumper, care must be taken in cleaning it, not only because of it being wool, but in some cases due to the type of loop the carpet is made with.  So here are 7 tips to help you clean your wool carpet in a way that will not harm it. Its life will then be extended, giving you many years of beauty and the pleasure of soft but strong wool underfoot.

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Removalist
Interior Design

How to Keep Your Mirrors and Glass Safe When Moving

Good Art & Design

Mirrors and glass are two very fragile items that can easily break in a move if not packed properly. Even if they are only chipped this can render them unsafe to use as well as being unsightly. For instance, a chip on the edge of a glass table top would be highly visible and could cause a cut on a child’s hand if it was kept in use. So here are some tips from the removalist to keep your glass and mirrors safe on moving day.

  • Use wide packaging tape to make large Xs on the back and front of the glass item or mirror. If the glass is dropped, this can help stop it from shattering and potentially save the frame if it does break.
  • The corners are most likely to take the knocks, so buy corner protectors or make them from thick cardboard. Tape them in place before wrapping the item in bubble wrap.
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Clean-the-Pool
House Design

How to Get Your Kids to Help Clean the Pool and Like It

Good Art & Design

Having a pool is great and the people who use it most are very likely the children. Cleaning the pool regularly is essential and the easiest way to do it is to use an automatic pool cleaner. Even then, you’ll still need to scoop leaves and debris from the surface daily. You may even need to manually scrub the walls and other surfaces that are in the water. This is a hard job, so why not get the children involved by making it a competitive game. Do it like this:-

  • Divide off the wall into manageable sections. Use string or coloured wool slightly longer than the depth of the pool. Attach a weight to each end and have one end on the edge of the pool and the other end right below it on the base.
  • Have a brush for each child, preferably all different colours.
  • Use witches hats or some other marker with each child’s initials on them to define ‘their’ section. Once each section is cleaned, the hats get stacked somewhere back from the edge.
  • No child is allowed to cheat by placing their competitor’s hats back on the edge.
  • Supervise so each section is properly scrubbed. Smaller sections are the best.
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Carpet-Types
House Design

Flooring Design: 4 Different Carpet Types

Good Art & Design

No one wants to become a slave to carpet cleaning so in order to make the best choice, it is essential for consumers to know all the ins and outs of the different types of carpet as far as their cleaning methods and soil resistance is concerned.  This will help them to make the right choice of carpet and carpet cleaner. There are 4 main types of carpet and they are: –

  1. Nylon
  2. Olefin
  3. Polyester and
  4. Wool

Each one of these products has good and bad points in their durability and resilience as well as their ability to resist soiling – or not, as the case may be.

  • Nylon is the most popular carpet choice due to its affordability and durability. It is also known to be the easiest type of carpet to clean and usually looks amazing afterwards. However, it does tend to stain more easily from the usual food and drink spills and is especially susceptible to acid spills such as from some soft drinks.  While it is fairly colourfast, chlorine bleach will remove the colours. For this reason it should not be used where pool water is likely to be tracked into it, or in bathrooms or the laundry.
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Art

Female Artists

Good Art & Design

A month or two ago someone sent me a comment criticizing the lack of any female artists on my site. Of course that’s a silly claim since I have quite a number of paintings by female artists here, and since I judge paintings by whether they are good rather than whether they are made by men or women. Be that as it may, I did a little checking just to see if there were any female artists whose work I had overlooked and I found a few interesting paintings that were on my list of things waiting to be considered and so I decided to scan them and post them for all to see. Ordinarily, I dislike exhibitions of art organized by sex, race, or similar irrelevant characteristics, but in this case they just happened to come to my attention at about the same time because of these silly allegations, so here they are…

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Art

Art Teacher Suspended for Recommending Figure Drawing

Good Art & Design

In December Middletown, New York art teacher Pete Panse was suspended for recommending that some of his advanced students take a figure drawing class that included nude models, on the grounds that mentioning such a thing constituted a potentially sexually unfomfortable situation for some students or their parents. Since January I have been assisting Mr. Panse in his efforts to fight this procedure and we are making good headway so far. You can read all about the case, learn how you can help, and sign an electronic petition.

Please help any way you can!

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Art

Christie’s Auction

Good Art & Design

The same day I went to Sotheby’s I also went to a pretty similar showing of auction items at Christie’s. Here are a few highlights…

I was particularly impressed by the Monsted landscapes I saw that day, though I had not heard of him before then. There was a particularly impressive one called A Wooded River Landscape, Deer Grazing in the Distance at the Sotheby’s auction that was similar to this, but which was impossible for me to scan because of how it was printed in the catalogue (it spanned the spine of the book). He was definitely an under-appreciated genius!

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