Give Your Home a Summer Look. Aahh, summer! We are once more tantalized by the idea of taking time out to goof off. And it does not necessarily mean spending a fortune on a plane ticket or a posh beachside resort. Consider ‘summerizing’ your home for the long, hot days ahead.

You can bask in the beauty of nature in summer without out of town. You can create a refreshing summer atmosphere inside your home even if you can’t go to the countryside very often. Redecorate your home or make some changes by replacing old and jaded decorative objects with nature’s signs of summer. Here are 5 decorating hints for a summery home:

1. Put summer on your living room walls. Change old framed wall decor with paintings or artwork of summer symbols like beach treasures, shells, corals, driftwood, as well as mockingbird hills, harvest time in the green fields, gurgling brooks at the foot of the mountain, etc.

2. Change old, dusty flower arrangements, especially roses and other red and pink flowers that put your home in the Valentine mood last February. Instead, use radiant summer blooms, like sunflowers, birds of paradise plus fruits in season whose color and fragrance can liven up your arrangement.

3. In the toilet and bathroom, display your fancy soaps in the shape of shells plus other souvenir items you got in the past summers.

4. Create an alfresco dining place out of doors. Surely, your family welcome the idea since outdoor dining breaks the monotony of dining in a too familiar, unexciting place indoor. Sometimes, a change of atmosphere is all that is needed to stimulate the family’s appetite and put spice into the route of everyday life.

5. If you need more lounging space, consider the use of pillows and hammocks. Pillows can easily be made from fabric filled with pillow stuffing or shredded polyurethane. Large pieces of foam rubber also work. Several solid foam pillows can be laid out for a guest bed and held together by a fitted sheet. If storing the pillows when they are not in use presents a problem, make them so they can be stacked.
A good hammock, even one wide enough for two people, can be securely bolted to wall studs to provide an area for reading, lounging, or watching television. The great feature of a hammock is that it can be put up without any thought to overall design or furniture placement, because its presence is temporary. A hammock near a bay window on a sunny day will make for good dozing and daydreaming. When you getup take the hammock down and stash it in a closet.

Homes are so compact these days that there is hardly any sizable space for anything. Even the kitchen is squeezed into a smaller corner wanting in storage space.

Here are some tips on how to have additional storage in the kitchen:

• Opt for a corner kitchen. It starts with the basic design of the kitchen. With it, you will have two walls to work with for your storage space. Have above-the-head cabinets installed along the two walls. Besides, a corner kitchen gives you more design options, and the flow of traffic should also be a lot smoother.

• Choose for built-in ground-level kitchen units, in which you can fit the oven and other appliances snugly. So with the kitchen sink. The advantage of having things built in it is that it all looks so neat and so harmoniously united. You can even use the cabinet under the sink to keep your garbage can in so that you don’t rip over it. Another advantage of having a built-in oven and cooktop is that they are easier to clean than freestanding appliances.

• Mount a long, narrow shelf along the wall, just beneath the row of head-level cabinets. This shelf, you can use to store containers of herbs, spices, salt, pepper and sauces. The shelf also makes your little cooking utensils within reach at all times.
• Make a storage pockets along the edge of this long, narrow shelf by edging it with strong carpet binding. Tack firmly at intervals leaving gaps wide enough to slip spoons, scissors and other utensils into them.
• For your miscellaneous cooking aids, choose to keep them in elongated and uniformly shaped glass containers. Storage, therefore, becomes more methodical and economical because they do not take up too much space in between. As much as possible, though, use colored glass. Food items deteriorate faster when kept in transparent glass containers.

• Have wall-mounted wooden plate racks installed. Position at eye level and use them to store plates in.
• Install cup hooks under the upper kitchen cabinets or shelves, and hang your cups and mugs together. This way, they will add color to your kitchen and at the same time be out of the way.
• Wire mesh panels or hooks screwed onto the door add hanging and storage space to drawers and closets.
• For kitchen utensils, make a ladder rack storage panel for the wall. Check the kitchen wall for available space for it, and measure the height and width. Cut two battens of half-inch lath in the length you need for the uprights. Then cut a number of laths for the crossbars. Screw the uprights to the wall first, and then nail the crossbars onto them at right angles, making sure that you leave half-inch gaps between them. Hang wire hooks on the slats through the gaps. Now you can hang your kitchen utensils, such as ladles and wire whisks on them.

• Run a metal bar across the room. Then you have a place to hang your baskets and pans on.
• .Use wicker baskets for your fruit and vegetable storage. They are decorative as well as functional.
• Keep a small shelf for cookbooks and recipe cards.
• If your kitchen has a cooking island in the middle, make sure it has a functional design. This means that there are cabinets for storage at the bottom and not just a hollow base. Cooking islands are ideal in compact homes because they center meal preparations in one area and family functions, such as eating and simply eating around, in the opposite area. So the kitchen and the dining area can comfortably overlap.