Planning an extension or a renovation project can bring up so many mixed emotions - it’s exciting and can lead to your dream home, but it can also feel overwhelming with so many decisions to make and such pressure to get it right!

For most of us, the biggest challenge with curtains is how to hang them. We often see the same mistakes made over and over, and they are easy to avoid.

Interior design is an exciting and creative process that can transform a room into a beautiful and functional space. However, it is essential to avoid common mistakes that can derail your interior design project.

No one wants to get it wrong when it comes to updating their home. It’s costly and demoralising. It’s definitely not what you set out to achieve and yet when we meet new customers, we often get asked ‘why doesn’t this room work?’, ‘why doesn’t it look how I imagined?’ and ‘what’s wrong with it??!’.

We love adding a mirror to our designs at The Living House. They almost always bring something extra to a room - and perfectly combine both the practical and the beautiful.

We have been writing The Living House blog for the past 18 months on everything from how to hang your curtains to sharing our favourite independent shops with you. Over this time 5 blogs stand out as our most widely read with views in the thousands! These are the blogs that you have found the most helpful and inspiring, tackling advice on paint colour, room layouts and how to avoid mistakes - there’s plenty of top tips here that you might have missed.

Big changes have been happening in the way we want to live in our homes over the last 20 years. I can remember when the only open plan living we saw was Madge Bishop's house on the set of Neighbours!

But our desire for separate rooms for each function has been fading. We started to realise the dining room was seldom used and often became the ‘junk room’, and the kitchen was not a fun place to be, isolated from the rest of the house. So we began knocking down the internal walls, extending into the garden and embracing open plan living. Hooray!!

We get asked questions about interior design all day every day - and we love it! There are some questions that continually crop up over and over again. In this week's blog we have compiled a list of our most frequently asked design questions.

You’ve moved into your new home. It’s taken almost all your savings and now you need to furnish it and transform it into your home on a tight budget. You feel with no money to spare, getting help from an interior designer would take a large chunk of your cash and be a luxury you can’t afford. You’d have to go without essential items or risk compromising on the look you want. And why spend extra money on a designer when you can do it yourself? Right??

Nearly every home has one… a small bedroom! Sometimes it’s the spare bedroom or junk room, but very often in modern homes every bedroom can be on the skimpy side. And it can be a really tricky space to design without looking cluttered or cramped, or just boring. We have seen many mistakes made in these little rooms - so we wanted to share with you 9 of the most common for you to avoid.

Have you ever seen your dream interior in a magazine or whilst scrolling Pinterest and think - I would love to achieve that look in my home, but it might also leave you feeling that it’s out of your budget or looks too hard to achieve. That’s where we can help you…

Obviously no one wants to get it wrong when it comes to updating their home. And yet so often we get asked ‘Why doesn’t this room work?’, ‘Why doesn’t it look how I imagined?’, ‘What’s wrong with it??!

Wallpaper can be a fantastic addition to your home, adding instant colour, personality and style to your space. It can make a dramatic difference, and create a talking point in the room. However it can also feel overwhelming to choose from the thousands of different designs, colours and patterns available and, when it’s used in the wrong way, the results can be dramatically underwhelming.