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 »

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 »

Hanging kitchen units on stud walls offers a small problem when fitting a kitchen as you need to ensure that you adequately support the weight of the wall units. Yes, you have the vertical studs, but the chances of them coinciding with the required unit fixing points is pretty small, and simply relying on hollow wall fixings for the areas in between studs, really is not an option. The following sequence shows a technique that will ensure you get strong fixing points, read more »

A good home maintenance schedule is essential for all of us, and exterior maintenance is of paramount importance as failure to look after things outside, may even cause structural damage. Even the jobs that don’t have structural significance are still vital, because if you let your outdoor features and surfaces deteriorate, it generally ends up costing you money to restore them, further down the line. The list of tips below is by no means comprehensive read more »

Lining walls prior to painting or wallpapering them is a subject that can stir up a bit of controversy with many decorators as well as DIY enthusiasts. For issues about why to use lining paper in the first place, check out my guide ‘Using lining paper’, but in this guide, I want to concentrate on some simple application rules as well as the reasons for cross lining, where the lining paper is hung horizontally, and vertical lining, where the paper is hung ceiling to floor, just like wallpaper. read more »