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Five New Year’s Resolutions for Your Home
January 5, 2018 /I love that each year New Year’s Day and the month of January bring transformation, renewal, and possibility. As everyone returns to work after the holiday bustle and the weather in Seattle remains chilly and gray, the world feels quiet and peaceful. While we tend to focus on New Year resolutions that have to do with career, health, happiness, etc, we often overlook resolutions for one of the most important spaces in our lives–our homes. Setting and achieving goals for your home can significantly improve your finances and your general wellbeing (for more about the connections between architectural spaces and mood, check out this fascinating article). Here are a few of our favorite New Year’s resolutions for your home in 2018. 1. Create a budget for home improvements. Because it’s easy to rack up credit card charges when working on home improvement projects, this is the best place to start. Create a list of projects in order of priority. Be sure to devise a home improvement budget each year–HouseLogic suggests that the owner of a $250,000 home set aside $2,500 to $7,500 per year for maintenance and repairs. 2. Cut your energy use. Energy Star has an informative guide to…Read more
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New Year’s Reflections (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Broken Toilet)
January 6, 2017 /If you had been in my family’s living room at about 2:30 on Christmas morning, you might have heard urgent mutterings and a disturbing hissing sound coming out from under the bathroom door. Had you ventured to inspect the situation further, you would have observed my stepfather and I as we removed the cap of the toilet tank, endured a generous vertical explosion of water, and fumbled with the toilet’s innards for several feeble minutes before replacing the cap and catching our breath. You would have watched us repeat this cycle for quite some time. It’s hard to come up with fresh ideas when your face is repeatedly doused with cold toilet tank water, after all. You might wonder how I got myself into such a situation in the wee hours before dawn on Christmas. It all began when I woke up at about 2 o’clock in the morning to the sound of the toilet running upstairs. Now, the bathroom in my childhood home has been subject to all kinds of problems (sharing one toilet and shower between 7 people puts quite a lot of stress on the pipes, as it turns out), and though the house’s plumbing has limped…Read more
