indoor decorating

Whip up a dramatic-looking but deceptively easy display for all of those summer holiday photos by using a grid of identical inexpensive frames (those shown here are from Ikea). The tricky part is measuring precisely so that the frames hang flush with one another, but once you manage that, it’s a piece of cake – and the results are pretty impressive. TIP: Don’t have enough photos to fill every frame? Fill a few randomly placed frames with plain white paper instead – look closely and you’ll see that was done in the room he

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Put your own spin on typography wall art, like the pieces shown here, using scrap timber and letter stencils. Fasten the timber pieces together, then paint on a short quote or phrase using letter stencils and white paint.

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For a hardy, low-maintenance indoor or outdoor pot plant, place cuttings of a variety of succulents in old pots, biscuit tins or jars, then just sit back and watch them grow. You can easily take a cutting from a succulent plant by removing a short amount of stem that has some decent leaves. But be aware, if it breaks away without bringing the entire leaf with it, it will not grow new roots. Pop the whole cutting in a glass of water for a few weeks (with just the base in the water, not the leaves) and see it develop small roots – which should be enough for planting in at least five centimetres of soil. As succulents require so little water, there’s no need to add holes for drainage, so any container will suffice.

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If underwatering is your downfall, tough succulents like this jade (Crassula ovata)

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