Your Home Maintenance Partner
A spa bathroom is a space that makes you feel good the moment you step in. You can shrug off the cares of the world and relax completely and you don’t have to spend a fortune to get that feeling. Here’s how to do it.
Thick, plush towels and fluffy bathmats go a long way to achieving a spa feeling. A few inexpensive luxury items such as soaps, a bath tray and bath brushes will add to the ambiance.
What do you do when you need a small home office or your kids need a place to do homework and there’s not much space to work with? Shelves are an inexpensive and easy DIY solution!
Combining shelves with a console table or laptop desk gives you enough space to work in without feeling overcrowded. If you don’t have a table/desk you can find them in the online classifieds for reasonable prices or you can install a deep shelf on brackets.
Supplies:
Enough long drawer divider trays to fit the shelves in your refrigerator.
Before you head to the store, measure the width and depth (front to back) of your shelves to make sure you get enough containers for your fridge. The ones I found were 16 x 6 x 2.04 inches. As you can see in the photo to the right, they have little rubber pads on the bottom to keep them from sliding around in a drawer. Our daughter’s shelves were coated wire so they worked well. If you have glass shelves you might need to remove them for ease of sliding them in and out to access what’s in the back.
The dust has settled and the numbers are in on which posts were the most popular from 2012. As always, we are happy to have you as a reader and that is what makes this list so important. It is the best posts voted on by the readers (albeit unconsciously). The list was determined by the total number of views over the course of the year. So here they are:
Everyone has hesitations when hiring a builder or contractor for a project. This list helps you wade through the possibilities by asking simple questions, like are they licensed and insured? Will they obtain and pay for the necessary permits? So on and so forth.
4.) 5 Tips for keeping Bugs out of your GardenGardens are wonderful places for relaxing and growing veggies. But bugs have a knack for ruining these sanctuaries. Use these five tips to keep the bugs out of your garden.
If you are like me, grocery bags pile up at home with the intention of being reused to reduce waste. I decided to take the initiative to put them to good use. Here is a list of different ways I put them into action.
There is no denying the importance of maintenance to help preserve the value of a home. The problem is finding the time to take care of these tasks. In this article are four easy DIY maintenance tips that any homeowner can find time to complete.
The most viewed post of the last year is another garden. Apparently people love their tomatoes. This easy project lays out instructions on how to build a trellis in order to keep tomato plants well supported.
Jason over at True Food Solutions has a great post I thought I’d share about building a simple cold frame garden box to keep your garden active even through the cold winter months.
I had a bed of lettuce still growing – volunteers from my harvesting of seeds from the spring crop – and I didn’t want to let it die when we could have fresh salad through the winter. So I grabbed two of the storm window panes I had picked up in a batch from someone on Craigslist, took measurements, and built a cold frame to fit the window dimensions.
A cold frame is a simple and inexpensive way to enjoy fresh vegetables without having a full greenhouse.
The Sharpie® permanent marker has established a strong reputation as the go-to tool for indelible marking on nearly any surface. As a homeowner and do-it-yourself enthusiast, a Sharpie should be a part of every tool bag or fix-it kit you have.
Here’s 4 quick uses for a Sharpie to help you around the house with projects and maintenance tasks.
1. Label your refrigerator water filter. Each time I replace my refrigerator’s water filter, I write the date I replaced it with a Sharpie, so that (in addition to my reminder in HomeSpot HQ) I can see how old the filter is every time I open the door. This can also work for your HVAC air filters.
2. Label your tools. Inevitably as a homeowner, the day will come when your neighbor calls on you to borrow a tool, be it a screwdriver, drill or tape measure. Using a Sharpie, write your last name in big, bold, capital letters so there is no mistaking your tools from those of the borrower. It will help you be sure to get your tools back.
3. Mark the direction switch on your ceiling fan. One of the frequent recommendations for helping save energy around your home is to reverse the direction of your ceiling fan according to the seasons. Unfortunately, it’s easy to forget which way you want the air to blow for summer and for winter. Use a fine point Sharpie to put a simple ‘S’ and ‘W’ on the appropriate end of the switch so you’ll be able to quickly toggle it for the season. (By the way, generally you want the air blowing down in summer, and circulating up in winter.)
4. Mark your cut line on PVC or glass. While pencils are great for marking where to cut on wood, they just don’t work so well on plastic or glass. If you are cutting PVC pipe (maybe to build a tomato trellis) or glass, a Sharpie is definitely the preferred instrument for marking the length.
No doubt there are countless more uses for this ubiquitous pen. Got a suggestion? Share your Sharpie secret uses using the comments area below.