Julian Cassell's DIY Blog

Painting a feature wall in your home uses the same basic techniques employed for painting any wall. However, it’s worth taking into account a few little extra considerations, just to ensure you get a top quality finish. Feature walls are used to add an extra dimension, or a bit more impact to a room’s colour scheme. As a result, there is a tendency to use accent colours, which are often bolder, darker or even brighter than the paint colour applied to the other walls in the room.  read more »

Charcoal cooker hood filters are used to help remove the odours from cooking fumes in your kitchen. They are essential requirements if you have the type of cooker hood extractor fan that is known as a recirculating fan, because it doesn’t vent cooker fumes through a hole in the wall directly to the outside. Instead, cooking fumes are sucked up into the hood, passed through the charcoal filters, before being circulated back into the kitchen as fresh air. read more »

Drill dust can be a niggling DIY problem when making holes for wall fixings. It’s not a huge issue if the holes are made pre-decorating, but if you’re hanging pictures or curtain poles as finishing touches to your newly decorated room, then spouting a load of surface staining brick and mortar dust over the walls and skirting boards is not ideal. My simple masking tape technique below is one method I commonly use to catch drill dust and dispose of it, before it has a chance to sprinkle itself over surrounding surfaces. read more »

Shims are quite simply little pieces of plastic that you can use for any number of ‘packing out’ jobs in your DIY activities. Why am I giving over an entire blog post to shims you may be wondering, well, call me sad, call me obsessive, but give me a pack of shims, a pile of wood, and a job to do, and I really am the proverbial pig in muck. Why? Because they make jobs easier, quicker, more accurate, and save enormous amounts of time. My primary use for them are as aids for fitting a door lining, but there are any number of predominantly carpentry based jobs where I find shims to be invaluable. read more »

Having the right wallpapering tools, not only makes hanging wallpaper much easier, but also ensures you will get a better, and longer lasting finish. You’ll need a fair few items from your household toolkit such as a spirit level and stanley knife, and in the guide below, as well as highlighting a few points about such tools in relation to wallpapering, I’ll also point out my preferences with some extra pieces of kit that are specifically designed for all wallpapering projects. read more »