Brighter outlook

If pessimism is contagious (so they say), then presumably the reverse is true.

With all the doom and gloom in the news, a simple idea to lift the spirits is to add a bit of colour to your home. As we spend most of our waking hours in the home in the living rather than sleeping areas of the house, then your lounge is a good place to start.

Helping us escape the general belt-tightening will be brighter colors -- yellow in particular.

"The color yellow exemplifies the warmth and nurturing quality of the sun, properties we as humans are naturally drawn to for reassurance," said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute.
The year's top shade of yellow, she says, is Pantone's 14-0848 Mimosa.

More people are going to make do with what they have..
"Households will be making major lifestyle adjustments as they adjust to tough times, " she said

Cover My Furniture offers a great solution of providing a great do-it-yourself project and introducing colour into the home by offering made-to-measure furniture covers which you make and fit yourself.

If plans for new furniture have gone on hold, why not be proactive today and find out more. Great for the green feeling too. Recycling your sofa saves it from choking our landfill sites.

All in all, do-it-yourself loose covers are a great solution for fighting the current sense of economic doom and instilling some uplifting and positive colour into our homes and lives.

Loose Covers That Really Fit now at half price

What if your sofa gets damaged?
Who do you turn to when the chairs in your living room start to look shabby and tired?
Where do you go to shop for a new look for your suite?

Cover My Furniture can breathe new life into your furniture.

Loose covers that really fit can spruce up a room, add new color and reinvigorate a tired piece of furniture.

This is a great move for the environment too. By choosing to keep your old sofa out of landfill you are making a real contribution to the recycling movement. Positive re-use!

Maybe it's time to update and transform your weary furniture. With a great range of fabrics and a half price sale now on, take a look at covermyfurniture's website and order some free fabric samples. Problem solved.

Buenos dias amigos

'G'day' and 'have a nice day!'

Since the launch of the new Cover My Furniture website, there has been a flurry of enquiries from across the world. Great fun to see forums in America talking 'Cover my....'

The forums can be a bit of a mixed blessing however. When you pop up on free and give away forums, there is a flurry of interest from people who like to order free things, like swatches, just to receive stuff in the post.

The best forums for Cover My Furniture are the home interest, design and renovation forums. In America there are lots of very active forums in this area, but not so much here in the U.K. it seems. If anyone can prove me wrong on this then thanks in advance.

No doubt about it - that networking, social media and recommendation are just as important as advertising, particularly to an international audience.

So here's a subject for discussion.

Lot's of companies are out there at the moment saying - hey we're really green. Mucho jumping on the bandwagon me thinks. But then I look at what we're doing here at Cover My Furniture and well I have to admit it - that bandwagon looks awfully attractive.

Keeping the furniture you've got saves space in the landfill holes and the energy and materials needed to make the new furniture you buy. Refresh not renew!

So have we got a genuine case here for calling ourselves 'green' and do we really believe it when we say it?

For the population here in the U.K. I would say that yes, most people would like to act in an environmentally conscious way. How many of us are prepared to put our money where our mouth is and act in an environmentally conscious way? Quite a few - according to a new survey from Nielson called packaging and the environment, almost half of us would give up packaging for greener options.

But for businesses....call me sceptical but I think there is many a case made for being a green company, simply to sell more product. Discuss.

Unique, breakthrough concept in covering Leather Furniture goes online

Leather furniture has dominated the new-furniture market now for the last eight years, accounting for up to 60% of sales. Understandably, some of it is starting to look a little worn and tired. The upshot is that householders put up with the worn-out look - or throw their suites onto landfill. Now, thanks to covermyfurniture.com, an ingenious new alternative is released this week - chenille loose covers that offer a designer look and a sumptuous feel.

Loose covers for leather furniture have always been notoriously difficult to fit - most fabrics slip too much once fitted. However, after extensive research, covermyfurniture.com has located a new range of wonderful chenille fabrics. Their weight and texture make them highly suitable for covering leather sofas and chairs.

Research has shown that people might want to change their leather furniture for a number of reasons. They believe that, apart from looking worn over time, it becomes sticky in the summer and cold in the winter. Perhaps they simply want to breathe new life into their slightly tired-looking sofa. Or they might just fancy a new look.

Whatever the motive, thanks to covermyfurniture.com, the result is a complete transformation of leather furniture and a cutting-edge look at a fraction of the price of buying a new suite.

“This is really a unique, groundbreaking product,” says covermyfurniture.com Online Media Manager Simon Blackburn. “Not only can it transform old or damaged leather suites, but it can protect it, too - from pets, children, wine and food. Even better, we’ve made it really easy to buy it online, with a simple, five-stage buying process that you can see on our website.”

That process simply involves choosing from a wide range of new, fashionable fabrics online, with the ability to zoom in to see detail or even order a swatch.

Householders can then order online and leave only a small deposit. Next, they send some photographs of their furniture for visual reference (covermyfurniture.com can even supply a free camera), and receive a personalised measurement chart, made specially for their furniture. From there, they send back the dimensions and wait for their beautiful covers to arrive. Simple Cushion Covers and Throws can be bought direct online.

“It’s a very 21st-century solution to an old problem,” says Simon. “The half-leather, half-fabric style is very trendy, very ‘designer’, at the minute, so this is a highly cost-effective way of achieving that look.”

Eco Friendly Furniture Refinishing

Author: Shelly Cruz
Eco friendly furniture refinishing helps to reduce our demands on the environment by preserving furniture created long ago, and prevents cutting down and wasting trees growing today. It also helps us to improve our homes with updated fine quality pieces of furniture that might otherwise be overlooked, and clog our waste dumps and landfills. Fine, old trees were cut down in decades or centuries past, and utilized in the production of furniture that is eventually in need of maintenance, not discarding. Old furniture finishes, especially twentieth century finishes including lacquer, turn dark, translucent, and finally semi-opaque, hiding the beauty of the wood beneath. An old finish is then susceptible to whitish heat and humidity marks, becomes brittle and scratches easily. If a new, natural wood finish strikes you as unappealing, then a vibrant, more contemporary colored lacquer finish may be applied instead. Perhaps a glossy bright yellow, orange, or blue is more what you have in mind for your old, tired looking Danish modern furniture ?

If you prefer a natural wood finish, keep in mind that beauty is skin deep, the damages are just to the finish, and you will start over when the finish is removed. If the old finish is removed using Eco friendly furniture refinishing techniques, then a new finish applied, the furniture can display the original beauty of the wood when it was created, with an antique patina that is irreplaceable. The quality and species of wood available and used then was generally better than what is available today.

Whether colored lacquer or natural wood finish is more attractive to you, there is little comparison between craftsmanship of yesterday with today’s shoddy manufacturing. Old furniture you find that was made more than twenty years ago, will outlast just about anything made today.

Eco friendly furniture refinishing is about more than just preserving old furniture, and not wasting resources to produce new flake board, melamine, laminate, or MDF and their waste products in the production of new furniture. Critical to Eco friendly furniture refinishing involves the use of less toxic strippers and removers to take off the old finish, prior to applying a new finish. Over the past fifteen years or so, removers have been developed to strip off old finishes, that are not lye based, or methylene chloride based. These modern, environmentally improved furniture removers include N Methyl-2 Pyrrolidone, or NMP, and other enzymatic removers that facilitate the removal of finishes without such toxic or ozone damaging chemicals as the older generation of furniture finish removers. Other Eco friendly furniture refinishing removers include the use of ceramic or quartz emitter infrared lamps to remove paint and heavily built up finishes, leaving no toxic remover waste or organic solvent to evaporate into the atmosphere at all.

Living on our planet today, we have a responsibility to tomorrows’ generations. Preserving our heritage and the environment is something all can appreciate. The vintage antique, or designer furniture we admire from the 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s, including Eames, mid century modern, space age, op art or pop art is often available in local thrift shops, or from eBay, from yard sales, or flea markets. Often, you need look no further than in your own homes to find candidates for refinishing. Open your imagination to wider refinishing possibilities for such handsomely designed furniture, and you will be helping yourself, our society, and the environment for a brighter tomorrow.

About the Author:

Olek Lejbzon & Co. takes care of all your furniture refinishing , restoration and re upholstery needs ranging from a single kitchen chair requiring re caning to refinishing, reupholstering, and repairing all of the furniture. For more information please visit: Eco Friendly Furniture Refinishing