Without a quality set of blinds a well-furnished room can look just normal and plain. Blinds can add a dramatic style to any room or any area of the house as well as ensuring your privacy behind the windows. We all want windows in our homes. No one wants to live in a box, but once you have windows, you need blinds to cover them up. Get good ones that match your personal style and taste.

Even in this economy you can’t cut out all of your expenses. Home insurance is a very important part of your life and going without it could cost you a lot in the long run. Make sure that you don’t cancel your home insurance even if things start to get bad. Instead, make sure that you get the absolute best deal that you can with home insurance quotes for all of the things in your home that you need to protect.

We have some outdoor chairs with cushions that recently have started to fall apart. Thinking that they were designed as outdoor cushions, that I could leave them in the sun. Evidently the Arizona sun was not a part of the testing process. Thankfully, I’ve found an online outdoor cushion store to find exactly what I’m looking for in a cushion that will last a lot longer than the cheap cushion that came with the chairs. I’m looking at a woodland stripe.

Even though the economy is only just now starting to come back into a slightly more hopeful zone, it may be the perfect time to find a new faucet for your bath, sink, or kitchen. Or your faucet may just finally be too old to fix this time, and it’s high time to replace it. In any case here is a picture of one of my favorite faucets that I can hopefully get installed soon.

I recently tried to find out if ants can eat through tile grout like it appeared ours had but I had no luck. It just seems so unlikely and yet I really don’t know how else they could have ended coming up through there. I don’t think they just happened upon and really well rounded hole that was really close to the kitchen. I suspect it was by design but it’s really creepy to think that not even the hard tile is a barrier against these wretched invaders.

With winter coming and my husband’s love of the cold I know I’m going to end up with windows open and buried under 80 blankets every night.  My sister was the same way when we shared a room in our childhood but she offered to leave the window half closed.  Now I don’t know if you’ve ever compared sleeping through the winter with the windows half closed and the windows open completely, but I can testify that there’s no real difference.  Either way you ‘ll find yourself begging for an electric blanket.  At least with my husband I can suck him dry for body warmth  – something that would have been might awkward with my sister.

I found my husband vacuuming the a/c air filters the other day. It’s not like these things are super expensive but for some reason, he decided to vacuum it instead of change it out. I will grant you that shopping for them can be a little hard since you have to know the measurements before you go out. I’m notorious for forgetting that kind of detail and then bringing home a completely different size. Which then goes into the trash. I suppose instead of calling him cheap (or me forgetful) I should think of him as helping the environment (which means I’m not – I suppose our carbon footprints will cancel out).

If you have a pond as a water feature you know that perfectly murky pond water doesn’t come by just letting it sit there. You have to care for your pond especially if you intend it to include fish. Just like when you have them in a tank at home, the water has to be aerated. You might do this with a fountain or you could get your hands on a couple pond aerators specifically designed for the job. These things don’t have to be unsightly – some even just float on the water.

My nemesis has returned. That dreaded creature that has turned many a blissful night into a nightmare of stinging pain. The ANT!!

We’ve been invaded. We threw a 409 volley (the all purpose cleaner) across their bow to dissuade their presence but they kept coming.

We startegically littered our counters and floors with land mines of ant bait, but they seem to have access to our mine maps. Every time we redeploy, their tactics change. It’s as if they’re reading our minds (or this blog post).

We planted and dusted the exterior of this domicile with a variety of chemical weapons to no avail.

Just a few days ago we feigned surrender by putting a cup of jelly laced juice outside to attract them and have them give away their supply line. It worked and we traced them back to HQ where we used weapons of mass destruction (a shovel and more poison) to annihilate them. For two glorious days we believed victory was ours.

And then, today, our hopes were dashed. Like a swarm of locusts (except no flying thankfully) they have regrouped and returned. Our kitchen sink seems to be their main objective. I’m seriously considering giving it over to them. Maybe we can hold the line at the kitchen but I don’t know if it’s realistic to try to defend the whole house talking.

I know it’s un-American to think in such a way but when you’ve been in the trenches like I have you start to think a little differently. You start to feel sorry for them. You start to scratch at any little thing. And you long for things to go back to the way they used to be when the kitchen didn’t crawl and an itch was just an itch.