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If you are planning to up your recycling efforts in the new year, this Bosch XEO is a great Christmas gift. Use it to cut down cardboard boxes, plastic packaging, carpet or tough fabrics – those feeling creative can even fashion their own Christmas decorations from coloured cardboard. Priced from £34.99, the Bosch is available from Focus, B&Q, Homebase and all other leading retailers.

A fun and surprisingly handy website, Yahoo! Answers provides an interactive platform to indulge in one of man’s best virtues; curiosity.

With helpful categories such as the home and garden, health and computers to the more adventurous and opinionated such as politics, social sciences and parenting, Yahoo!

Planning some DIY?

If you are working up to a self-build or renovation project for the New Year, get along to the National Self Build & Renovation Show (18-21 October 07). There is a packed programme lined up with seminars, product demonstrations, presentations and practical skills workshops from some of the industry's leading experts and professionals - a wealth of hints and advice to ensure your home improvements go without hitch. Tickets to the event are £8 per adult, and under 16's go free. And there is a two for one offer for readers.

If a Bank Holiday weekend of DIY has left you feeling hungry for more, you might be ready for the ultimate challenge: building your own home. Like anything else, cutting out the middle man saves a lot of money, and self building offers huge potential savings. Which is where the Self Build & Renovation Centre in Swindon can help. A temple to all ambitious DIYers, it offers reams of free advice with educational displays, advice centres with experts on hand, an interactive Renovation Zone, two audio tours/guides, plus weekly seminars, live demos and events.

Operating out of its huge warehouse in Hendon, Elite Tiles and Interiors sells quality floor and wall tiles and is one of the largest importers of porcelain tiles in the South East.

Sourced directly from around the world, its porcelain floor and wall tiles are sold at trade prices from just £19 per square metre plus VAT.

Stone and porcelain floor tiles are all very well in hotter climates, but they can be pretty chilly in the seemingly sunless Britain. Luckily the Siesta Cork Tile Company is on hand with an alternative. Importing from Spain and Portugal, it offers a huge range of Cork Tiles – environmentally friendly, warm and insulating to boot. Whilst ‘Siesta’ waxed tiles prove a hit with allergy sufferers, ‘Pinpanel’ self-adhesive tiles are useful for notice board areas.

Light bulbs, vacuum parts and batteries are just some of the items that always get forgotten when you go to the shops – the food aisles of the supermarket tend to be distracting in that way…..Luckily needonenow.co.uk can help combat this frustrating habit. It sells all manner of domestic consumables such as energy-saving light bulbs, vacuum bags, i-Pod batteries and cooker hood filters – necessary yet mundane items that are a chore to shop for.

Hot weather and intense sunlight can make some rooms of the home truly unbearable in summer, but Brume Basics has a solution. A specialist in window film, it offers a choice of Frosted, Decorative, Coloured or Graphic films to provide extra privacy and security without sacrificing natural light. Its Solar Film can also help combat heat: whilst Silver gives and reflective mirror effect externally; Light Grey provides heat control without the visual impact of the Silver.

If a Bank Holiday weekend of DIY has left you feeling hungry for more, you might be ready for the ultimate challenge: building your own home. Like anything else, cutting out the middle man saves a lot of money, and self building offers huge potential savings. Which is where the Self Build & Renovation Centre in Swindon can help. An temple to all ambitious DIYers, it offers reams of free advice with educational displays, advice centres with experts on hand, an interactive Renovation Zone, two audio tours/guides, plus weekly seminars, live demos and events.

If the summer sun is showing your laminate floors to be lacking lustre, it’s well worth snapping up a bottle of International Paint’s 2in1 Laminate Floor Reviver and Restorer. Working like a conditioner (and us girls well know the importance of that), this brings a new sheen to old laminate by adding gloss and smoothness to the surface. And it only takes half an hour to dry. Priced from £6.99 for a 500ml bottle.

Better weather lends itself to weekends spent doing DIY jobs in the garden or around the home – but DIY isn’t just for the boys. Encouraging you to tackle odd jobs as a couple, Loctite (Making DIY Easier) is giving away 20 his and hers toolkits as well as a selection of the latest Loctite superglue products (worth £50 in total). Its famous ‘Hanging Man’ advertisement showed that the strongest superglue available can stick a man to the ceiling in just three seconds.

Unsightly holes or blue tack stains on walls are a sure fire way to make your room look unloved when it needn’t. Offering a handy solution are these Command Picture Hanging Strips from 3M™. Quick and easy to put up (no hammer, no nails), the strips feature a double sided adhesive allowing you to hang pictures and coat hooks etc with a weight of anything up to 2kg. And when you want to move a picture, there’s no oily residue or damage left behind. Phew. Priced at approx. £2.99 per pack (four sets per pack for small size; three sets per pack for medium size) at your local hardware store.