Green Home & Office Policy

Why Should We Implement a Green Home & Office Policy?

If you own or manage a small business, you should consider implementing a green office policy. There are numerous reasons why you might do this and numerous ways to do it. For example, if you run a small SEO company that doesn’t absolutely require people to come to the office every day, you could add a work from home section that allows employees to telecommute when appropriate.

Similarly, things like recycling, sustainable resource use and end-of-day procedures should be outlined to reduce your office’s environmental footprint. In the rest of this article, I’ve explored exactly why you should implement a green home or green office policy and how to do it.

Why Are Green Office Policies Useful?

There are numerous benefits associated with green office policies. The obvious one is that implementing them will help you and your employees understand exactly what they need to be doing in the workplace.

For example, a well-written green office policy will deal with a range of things, such as:

  • Waste disposal, including what is disposed of, where to put it and how things like paper and plastics are recycled.
  • Electricity and other resource use, including what things are done at the end of the day.
  • Printing, especially with respect to when it’s appropriate to print documents and when they should be kept in digital format.

As you can imagine, the exact details of your policy will depend on the type of business you run.

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Save Water

How Can We Save Water in Our Building?

In the face of changing climates and ever increasing populations across the world, water shortages are becoming more and more common. It’s therefore a good idea to get a plumber to pay attention to your plumbing system and its condition to ensure you’re not wasting water in your office building.

There are numerous things that you can do to conserve water at work. We certainly haven’t covered all of them below, but we’ve put together a short list of our favourite actions. Good luck, and remember to speak with a professional plumber if you do run into problems.

  1. Stay on Top of Leaks

Most people don’t realise just how much water a leaky tap can waste. Unfortunately, even small leaks can waste litres of water per day, which is quite significant over the course of a year.

For example, let’s say that you have three slowly dripping taps in your office building. If each of them wastes 10 litres of water per day, you will be wasting more than 10,000 litres per year. Pretty significant, right?

  1. Use Low-Flow Faucets

In the modern world, many taps and faucets come equipped with low-flow settings to reduce the amount of water you use. However, if your office building contains old plumbing systems, you might not be benefiting from these.

It’s therefore worth speaking to your plumber and asking them if it’s possible to restrict your water flow somehow. The chances are that, if you’re just using your taps to wash hands and fill the kettle from time to time, you won’t even notice a slightly lower flow.

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Landscape Design

How to Improve Indoor-Outdoor Flow with Landscape Design

Achieving the right look with landscape design is no easy feat. If you’re a home owner looking to spruce up your property or even starting a new project from scratch, you will probably need a professional landscaping contractor.

Landscape design and landscaping, in general, can be quite the balancing act.

It doesn’t get any easier when it comes to indoor-outdoor flow, either. You may have a beautiful outdoor area and an even more lovely home, but how do you get the two to talk to each other? You can either consult expert landscapers in your area or read on.

Light it Up

If your goal of improving indoor-outdoor flow is so that you can enjoy both areas equally, then think about lighting. You may be less likely to utilise your outdoor entertainment area if it’s poorly lit. No one wants to sit in the dark when your home has plenty of lighting for everyone.

Consider installing solar lighting, fairy lights, and permanent ones that enhance the connection. A well-lit entertainment area is welcoming and warm.

Provide Cover

Your outdoor entertainment area should be a seamless transition from your home. You should be able to walk out of your living or kitchen area, directly into an equally as sheltered and covered outdoor space. Consider building a pergola-type structure to enhance that cover. Otherwise, look at shade cloths and archways to connect the two areas.

Furnish Smartly

Just because you added decking or paving stones to the outside of your home, doesn’t mean you’ve mastered landscape design. It might look kind of like an outdoor area, but it’s not finished.

If you want to improve indoor-outdoor flow, then make your deck area an extension of your home. Add comfortable seating, plants, outdoor rugs, lighting, and even outdoor cooking appliances such as a barbecue.

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Electrical Appliances

Your Electrical Appliances

Life has been made so easy for us these days. It all started with that guy Edison turning on the lights in New York city about 135 years ago. We suddenly had electricity and that was the beginning of the end of the dark ages – literally. That was also the beginning of the technicians that learnt and worked with electricity – electricians. It’s all very well having great technical advances but almost everything is run by electricity and when stuff goes wrong, we need expert help to get things fixed.

Vacuum Cleaner
It all started with the foot in the door salesman spilling a heap of trash on your carpet, then turning on the cleaner, which sounded like an old Boeing 707 starting its jets, and then sucking up all the spilled mess like magic. Now, we have Lux Living robot vacuums which not only clean your floors automatically but are a source of great enjoyment for cats to ride on and get filmed for YouTube. Regardless of the style and fancy attachments, when it stops, call an electrician.

Microwave
Gone are the days of cutting firewood, lighting the fire in the stove, and cooking your food. Keeping the home fires burning made sure you had hot water and a hot house, even in the midst of summer. Now, you open your microwave, adjust your settings and you can reheat leftovers, cook a whole chicken, and explode eggs, popcorn and small animals, if that’s your thing! When the microwaves stop waving – call an electrician.

Toaster
This appliance goes hand in hand with the best thing since sliced bread! We still use a forked stick poked into a piece of bread hung over a campfire when we are ‘roughing it’, but at home, we place the sliced bread into the slots, push the lever down and Voila! We get toast. When the bread gets stuck you put a knife in the openings and try to lever it out. Bang! Call an electrician –  if you’re still alive.

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Fire Protection

3 Reasons Why You Should Always Have Fire Protection Gear On Your Premises

If you are the owner or manager of a business or a commercial building, you have a few responsibilities under Australian law. The most important of these is to ensure the safety of your employees, customers and any others in and around your building. Fires present a significant risk to workplace safety, which means that you should always take appropriate precautions – such as installing fire extinguishers – to reduce the risk of fire damage.

However, fire protection equipment comes in a lot of different forms, not just as fire extinguishers. Depending on the type of business you have, you should consider installing things like fire alarm systems, hydrants, fire blankets and fire hoses. Some of the reasons why you should always have fire protection gear on your premises include:

  1. Fires Can Be Dangerous, And Potentially Fatal

Fires have the potential to be deadly, especially when they aren’t managed properly. A fire in a workshop or office setting is always unexpected, and it is important to be able to react quickly and cooly to make sure that preventable damage or injury doesn’t occur.

A fast response to a fire can be aided by making sure that your building contains the most up to date fire protection equipment, and that your staff and team members are trained to use it fast and efficiently. If someone is injured because of lax preparation, you, the business owner or manager, will be held responsible.

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Bathroom Basin

Spectacular Bathroom Basin

These days, with a greater emphasis on personal grooming than there may have been in the past – we are spending increasing amounts of time in the bathroom. Homeowners usually don’t need too much persuading that they should give some thought to decorating their bathroom, but the questions that then arise are ‘how?’ or ‘what bathroom decorating themes should I employ?’ and will I need a plumber?

Modern (Contemporary) Bathroom Décor
Contemporary bathroom décor is best characterized by its clean lines and gleaming surfaces. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that this type of décor is more commonly found in your modern urban apartments. Stainless steel fixtures such as –
• basins
• mirrored cabinets
• bathrooms
• shower walls
• taps

All feature heavily in contemporary bathroom decor and are available in a wide variety of shapes. Glass and ceramic fixtures are also very popular these days. Lighting also plays an important part in the bathroom with fixtures ranging from simple to funky and available in all colors, shapes and styles.

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moving-into-new-office

5 Things to Do Before Moving

Moving to new business premises can be a stressful process, and it’s one that takes far more planning than a standard house move. You often have to factor in the needs of several different staff members, plan the new floor area, and then pack up hundreds of items. This is all before the removalists even arrive! Because it’s such a hectic time, it’s no surprise that very few businesses actively choose to move if they can avoid it.

However, if the time has come to relocate your business to smaller or larger premises, there are several things you and your staff must do to make the process go as smoothly as possible. If you can avoid letting your stress levels peak, there’s every reason to do so. We’ve outlined five top moving tips to do before moving offices below.

  1. Have a clear-out

Every office has a room that no one uses or even enters. It’s that room filled with odds and ends, outdated software, old fax machines, filing cabinets, and broken chairs. It’s a dark and dingy space with floppy discs lining the shelves, and a flickering light that makes it seem all a bit spooky. While you avoid that place, except to discard your broken furniture, it’s now time to clear it out.

Have all heads of departments take a walk through their own areas to determine what needs to be thrown out, and what can be sold before the removalists arrive. Anything not of use to anyone both in your current premises and your new one can be discarded. By removing all the unnecessary clutter, you’re saving time and money with your removalist company, while also ensuring you go into your new premises with a clean slate.

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Timber Flooring

Add Value with Timber Flooring

With good home design, timber flooring not only looks great in your home, but adds significant value. It is so hard-wearing that it’s more than likely it will outlast the residents! Unlike carpets which retain dust, they are far easier to keep clean, and as a result, they are a good choice for allergy sufferers.

When a homeowner chooses timber flooring, they end up with the most beautiful and long-lasting floor that adds value to the home, be it a new one you are building or an old one you are renovating. The timber comes in many different shades and hues so matching with existing home colour schemes will make life easier. There is a natural ambience with timber and it has a sort of golden glow that seems to fit in with many different styles of décor.

Cleaning
With just a quick mop or a vacuum to remove the dust, the timber is easy to keep clean. Unlike carpet spills that will leave a wet patch or a stain, spills on a timber floor can be wiped clean in a jiffy. There’s nothing like timber flooring to enhance the looks of any room. In rooms like the dining area or the kitchen spills of grease and food can be easily wiped clean. Even in the family or living room, the timber floor can make it easy on the eyes with no reflection, unlike vinyl or tiles.

Décor
Bedroom furnishings look super over a timber floor – and you can add a pretty mat if you like to opt your toes on something soft when you first get up. Timber can even be used in the bathroom and laundry if they are properly treated to keep the damp out. Sometimes it’s not hardwood that is used for the flooring. In the case of softwood, the timber can absorb moisture, so humid or damp conditions might make it warp.

The Weather
Nothing like timber flooring to walk on during a hot Western Australian summer as they are cool to walk on and also provide nice insulation in the chill of winter, in addition to the traditional insulation.

Colours and Hues
Different woods have different colours and textures. It’s a natural product, so don’t expect a consistency of even colouring all over. Of course, that’s part of its charm. When the timber flooring is all laid, the darker and the lighter shades seem to blend into one another and look just fine.

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Lawned Garden

Get the Best out of Your Lawn

After a hard day at work, there’s nothing like retreating to your garden to get the stress out and relax. Your garden, be it the turf in your front lawn or in your backyard with plants and flowers, is more than just a feature that enhances your property. Your green space, your creation, is part of your character and it can have a number of different functions, depending on your lifestyle.

You can transform the whole yard into a great, enjoyable living space. Apply a bit of creativity and a few resources and you will have an exciting as well as relaxing place to spend your downtime.

Here’s a few tips that might help:

Tip #1: What do you want from your lawn?
It doesn’t matter whether you are redesigning an existing area or starting from scratch, what is your overall plan? Do you want some water elements, as they will add energy and peaceful sounds? How about a porch or a patio where you can sit and look at your view? You might love flowers, so flower beds will be the go. Vegetables? Everybody loves growing their own vegies. A herb garden?

The design is up to you. You have to make it work, so don’t do a half-hearted job or make it so the garden needs more maintenance than you have time to spare.

Tip #2: Speaking of maintenance…
It’s not a project that ends when the fat lady sings. Keeping your garden in tip top condition is an ongoing labour of love. Keeping your lawn healthy and your plants looking as though they belong in a flower shop is all about maintaining, watering and positioning – sunlight and shade. Make sure you have put down the right type of turf that grows best where you live.

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Commercia Shade Sails

Commercial Shade Sails – Plan Before You Buy

Without customers a business will go broke, not matter what kind it is. That is why most businesses try to cater to the needs of their customers, including providing shade sails in an outdoor setting. If you are considering such a purchase, it is wise to do some planning beforehand so you know just what is needed and where, before you go ahead. After all, no one understand your business the way you do.

One thing you have to realise about shade from a sail and that is, it will not be there all the time. As the position of the sun shifts throughout the day the shade the sail throws will move.  So when planning on the position of the sail, you’ll need to have shade in a specific area at the time when you have most customers.  That way you’ll be able to please the most people and get the most value from your investment.

The reason for the sail is important
However, you may be installing the sail for a different reason. It could be to stop the glare of the late afternoon sun shining through your shop window where it not only fades the colour of goods displayed, but makes it difficult for customers to see the floor display from inside, if they are looking towards the window.

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