The Dark Room Solution

Light! More light! Usually, people who want to paint their rooms get the advice to paint them in a light, neutral color. This can work if you like neutral colors, but if your passion is for saturated dark color, you can do a lot with it on the walls of your home.

Black is the ultimate neutral. Surprisingly enough, black walls can be a great alternative to the usual whites or beiges that most people think of when they ponder a neutral wall scheme. With the right lighting and furniture accents, black walls can be dramatic and sophisticated. Care must be taken, however, to brighten the room with light furniture and decorations. Consider pairing black walls with colorful accents like red, teal, purple as well as lighter shades such as pink, baby blue and lilac for interest.

Brown is an underrated color that can bring saturated warmth into a room and serve as a backdrop to just about any color accent. A chocolate brown wall is great for showing off brighter colors while lending some color to the room scheme itself. Chocolate brown and blue combinations have recently been popular, but chocolate brown goes great with reds, yellows and greens.

Red is a color that has long been used sparingly in the wall palette, except for red brick fireplace areas.. However, a rich, dark red can lend a room sophistication and elegance that's hard to beat. Burgundy is a great color to put on walls and goes well with many colors and textures. A good dark red is matched well with black (but not too much!), white, antique browns and accents of the cooler colors.

Blues have long been a part of the wall palette in their lighter shades. However, a deep royal blue can make a wonderful wall color when paired with white, yellow and other light accents, furniture and decorations. Blue panels can also lend a significant amount of color without being garish or blinding.

Greens also are a common wall color in their brighter varieties. A forest green, though, can be understated and soothing to the eye. Paired with browns, yellows and creams, the darker greens can provide an elegant solution to your walls.

Purple is somewhat hard to use for a room, as the color walks the line between warm and cool. Some of the darker purples, such as aubergine (eggplant), can work well with a variety of colors. The richer purples, such as royal, can pose more of a challenge to match so that the purple doesn't overwhelm the room. Light greens, creams, rich red browns and yellows can provide great contrast to a purple room.

The ceiling and the floors can offer some contrast, especially if you're worried about your dark room being too dark. Light colored ceilings and floors can give the illusion of height that dark walls accentuate. Another method of contrasting is painting the walls different colors. One wall can be used as an accent wall and painted a dark/light color, depending on how dark/light you want the room to be. Two-tone walls also provide a way to use dark colors without darkening a room too much.

Don't shy away from dark colors! They may require some more thought as to accents and dark/light combinations than your average light wall color, but they can make a room striking and unusual. Coming to the dark side, in this instance, isn't all bad!

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Simplify Your Life With a Cedar Potting Bench

Gardening can be laborious, back-breaking work. Get away from the sun and up out of the dirt with your very own cedar potting bench. This sturdy yet simple workspace puts the ease of professional gardening at your fingertips. Building your own bench allows you to have control over the size and design specifications. In this way, you can build the right bench to fit in your outdoor living space, with your specific needs in mind. Many people prefer to buy a cedar potting bench, because they are not as picky and most benches come with a very affordable price tag. In this case, the following should be considerations, a sort of basic buying guide before hitting the store. Here, for the buyer and the DIY builder are the main features that make up these potting tables.

Cedar can't be beat
Unlike resin potting tables, which can warp in the heat and get scratched, or metal potting benches which are heavy and hot to the touch, wood is the way to go. A cedar potting bench in particular has some unbeatable qualities that even other varieties of timber can't match. Cedar in its many forms, including white cedar and western red cedar, is a durable hardwood whose use in outdoor furniture construction is unsurpassed. The lumber is durable, so there is less chance of splitting, cracking and rotting of the wood. This means there will also be less maintenance, especially long-term. It's also a beautifully colored wood with a naturally fragrant aroma. Finally, the tannins produced by cedar wood act to naturally repel insects, like fleas and moths, so there is less chance of infestation.

Framework
A typical cedar potting bench consists of a main table and lower shelf, connected by a backboard which extends above the tabletop. The purpose of which is to easily complete horticultural tasks and store one's tools.

Workspace
The table of a cedar potting bench is where all of the proverbial magic happens; in other words, this is where the work gets done. These tables sit significantly higher than normal tables because the idea is that you will be working while standing up. Sitting down or having to bend over can be painful on one back. Prolonged activity might even lead to long-term lumbar problems. The surface of the table needs to be flush and even, with either a single piece of wood or closely fitted beams, so that no soil is lost while working. There is usually a lipped edge along all sides of the table that is also designed to catch any loose soil.

Storing Options
After you've finished working, there's the task of storing all of your tools and gadgets. You could put them in the shed or the garage, but then that would defeat the purpose of having a convenient workspace, a veritable one stop gardening shop. The tools of your trade may include, but are certainly not limited to the following: hand shovels, hoes, fertilizers, extra pots, work gloves. All of the different equipment comes in many shapes and sizes, so it's best to mix up your storage options so you can fit everything. As far as shelves go, stick to one lower shelf beneath the tabletop. That way you still have room for your legs and won't worry about kicking anything or banging a shin. Above the table, you can have multiple shelving units, cubbies, or whatever suits your fancy. You can also attach a latticework or pegboard to the back of your potting bench. This is a nice feature that keeps tools at hand's length, but out of the way. Plus, you can hang taller tools and oblong tools that don't otherwise fit on shelves.

Soil
The storing of soil is a separate category altogether when it comes to a cedar potting bench because of its special needs. Obviously, you will want to keep some soil nearby, as that is one of the main considerations that go into potting a plant. A lot of potting tables, in addition to shelving, have slide out or drop down compartments for keeping loose soil. If you have a simpler model or build your own table, you might choose to keep your soil separately from the bench. If that's the case, the main thing to remember either way about storing soil is that it needs to be kept in a cool, dark place with minimal moisture and ventilation.

Tonya Kerniva is an experienced research and free lance writing professional. She writes actively about Cedar Potting Bench and Potting Benches.