Chocolate Funnel Dispenser £129.99 from Nisbets

If you’re making your own chocolate gifts this Easter, it helps to have the professional equipment on hand. Melting chocolate to write messages or decorate cakes can be difficult, but not so with this professional chocolate funnel:

Chocolate Funnel Dispenser £129.99

Automatic confectionary funnel, quick one handed operation. Complete with 6 polycarbonate nozzles. Nozzle sizes 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 5, 8.5 and 10mm. 270mm high. 1.5 litre capacity. Chrome wire stand (Sold separately).

There’s also free delivery on orders of £30 or more from Nisbets, which supplies professional catering equipment on next day delivery.

Preparation

We’ve already talked about taking off wallpaper and polyfilling holes, but if you are painting directly onto old paint, you may well need to clean it first. Sugar soap is the detergent you will need for this. Follow the instructions on the tub or bottle, but you will generally need a sponge and a bucket of cold water. Take off any loose paint as well.

If you are painting onto old gloss, the best finish is achieved by lightly sanding the surface with a fine or medium glass paper.

Painting

Indoors house paint generally comes in two types: oil-based and water-based. Most wall paints are water-based. Paints with a glossy finish will often be oil-based.

If you are painting directly onto new plaster, you will often need to do a few undercoats. For light colours use a cheap bulk emulsion. You can even thin it down with water – many professional decorators do this.

For the colour coat, a couple of layers of paint should be sufficient – unless you are using Dulux Once or a similar one-coat paint. I used Dulux One Coat Gloss on our skirting boards and door frames. It was really thick and saved me a lot of time, since I was painting the edges of the whole house.

It is sensible to do the cutting-in separately using a paintbrush rather than a roller. This will get a clean edge to your walls before you roller the big spaces.

Handy Hint

Carry a rag with you at all times, to mop up mistakes and create clean edges.

Get all the tools mentioned here in one kit, the Draper 10 piece multi-task painting kit. For pesky radiators, there’s a great invention called the “Stanley Mini Radiator Roller“.

Window Frames

Either use masking tape on the glass to get a clean edge, or, if you are impatient like me, paint as neatly as possible and scrape the mistakes off afterwards with a window-scraper.

Cleaning

Cleaning is the most important part of painting the house. Not only will you save time, but you will also prevent wastage of expensive equipment.

Water-based paints, such as emulsion, can be thinned and cleaned off with water. Oil-based paints must be cleaned or thinned with white spirit or similar. Clean rollers, trays and brushes as soon as you finish painting to stop paint from clogging them up.

Leave a comment if you would like to be sent more information and photographs.

Clearing Out

After you’ve had a good look round and decided what you want to do with your property, you may well want to remove cupboards, sideboards and other fixtures. It’s a good idea to turn off the electric before you do so and to check where the pipes and wires are. You’ll need screwdrivers of the cross and flathead variety. Try to locate all of the screws before you start to remove the fixtures so that you know when the object is likely to come apart. Sometimes previous owners may have nailed things in, so use the back of a hammer to pull these out. Occasionally, the only option is to hammer things out of place, but before you do this, double check the wires and plumbing to make sure you won’t do any lasting damage.

Stripping Wallpaper

This weekend, we’ve removed an obscene amount of woodchip wallpaper because parts of it were peeling. Pull off what you can and then reach for the scraper. The long handled scrapers have a razor edge and are excellent for really getting through large areas. Whilst scraping the wallpaper off, you may well create a lot of dust, so wear a mask. Most good DIY sets will include some dust masks.

You may not be able to get the wallpaper off in one, in which case a steamer will come in very handy for getting those pesky bits of backing paper off. You can just sponge water onto the paper using a decorator’s sponge, but if, like us, you’re doing an entire house, this would take far too long. Look at a range of different wallpaper strippers here – they’re all different prices and some are only about £27.

Preparing Walls

Once you’ve stripped the wallpaper, you may well find all sorts of arrangements behind it; paint, plaster, artex, more paint and wallpaper, backing paper, wall sealant or wood. Once you’ve ascertained what you have, you will need to see whether you need to do some plastering, damp proofing or rebuilding before you start to paint – especially if it’s an old house.

Most often, DIY-ers just need to fill in the little nicks with polyfilla, then sand down the wall. If you’re sanding an entire house like us, you’ll need a sanding machine. Otherwise, just put some sandpaper onto a handle and put in the elbow grease. There are a range of handy sanding tools available.

Wallpapering / Painting

Master One Coat Washable Matt Emulsion 2.5l Sweet Pea £15.65 from Wickes

Once the walls are prepared, you can do your Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen bit and choose your decoration. For the best wallpaper finish, hang lining paper horizontally around the room and paper your chosen design over it vertically. Depending on your plaster and paint, you may need to do a few undercoats – but it is important to discern between different paints. Wickes are one of the few online retailers to sell paint for delivery – you can browse their selection by clicking on the paint pot on the right. More on painting in future posts.

Although the organisers may have sold out of tickets, fans can still get their hands on tickets for the Chelsea Flower Show though fan-to-fan ticket exchanges like the ones featured on our event ticket site. The Queen has already cast her eyes over this year’s attractions, which will attract around 157,000 people and many more bees and butterflies! Chelsea is renowned as the busiest and glitziest gardening event of the year with celebrities such as Joanna Lumley, Chris Tarrant and Michael Caine being spotted in recent years. The shops of Sloane Square also pitch in with their own RHS judged competition to celebrate the event.

You can see the show from the RHS’s live webcam coverage here.

The Chelsea Flower Show began in 1913 and was a chance for the great and the good to show off exotic breeds and chat over the delphiniums. Small garden plots for exhibitors these days cost around £250,000 and can make or break horticultural careers. The big hats are usually now reserved for Monday afternoon VIPs – when only a select number of exhibitors, RHS committee members and trustees can attend.

RHS members then have the chance to visit on the Tuesday and Wednesday. The general public are then invited to view the gardens on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

During show week, visitors knock back 49,000 glasses of Pimm’s, 5,000 bottles of champagne, 54,000 cups of tea and coffee and 28,000 sandwiches. An afternoon tea hamper costs £29.50 and tickets are now selling on the internet for around £69.

There are lots of canopies and temporary garden structures to choose from and a wide array of lighting and heating options. Click on the images below to find out more:

Garden Arches from B&Q

Garden Party Gazebo £99.98 from B&Q

Don’t get lost in the garden – light the way with these subtle little path lights:

Solar Powered Outdoor Garden Lights from John Lewis

Keep your guests warm with this handy patio heater:

Outdoor Heating from £265

Small patio heater £265 from NotOnTheHighstreet

This patio heater is 2.3m tall – meaning that guests can stand underneath it.

Seating from £9.99

Resin Chair £9.99 from Focus DIY

Focus DIY do a range of outdoor furniture from gazebos and canopies to chairs and garden furniture of all kinds. To browse their range, just click on the image above. If money is no object, you could opt for some serious sculptural style with this range of varnished steel cafe furniture from Graham & Green:

Classic French Chair £175 from Graham & Green

]]> http://shop-online-4.com/wedding-shopping-4-marquees-garden-structures-seating-29/feed/ 0 http://shop-online-4.com/dyson-ball-11/ http://shop-online-4.com/dyson-ball-11/#comments Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:42:49 +0000 admin http://www.shop-online-4.com/uk/?p=11 You can now buy Dyson Ball vacuum cleaners direct from Dyson online.

You might remember these incredible Dyson Ball vacuum cleaners from the recent adverts on TV.

Everyone’s talking about the Dyson Ball vacuum right now – but where to buy them? Well, we’ve tracked down what we believe to be the very cheapest Dyson Ball vacuum cleaners available anywhere on the internet! Why? Because that’s what we do – connect people with the best products they can buy online, and try to track down the best deals, in a simple, easy to read format.

Here are our available best priced options:

• Dyson DC25 Animal / Ball – from Dyson – £293.61
• Dyson DC25 Animal / Ball – from Comet – £293.59

• Dyson DC25 All Floors / Ball – from Dyson – £274.03
• Dyson DC25 All Floors / Ball – from Comet- £273.99
• Dyson DC25 All Floors / Ball – from Iceland – £271.86
• Dyson DC25 All Floors / Ball – from John Lewis – £237

Still Undecided?

Feel free to leave a comment before, during and after you make your purchase – let us know:

• Whether you like the Dyson Ball;
• Whether you felt you got the best deal;
• If you found a cheaper one elsewhere (we’ll try to get that one linked up too!)
• Anything else about the Dyson Ball vacuum that you would like to share with the world! For example, you might have a great tip for cleaning the vacuum or how to get the best performance out of it. The more info the better.