Problem Solving
I’ll Have What She’s Having
When D over at G&D wrote about a few bedroom essentials she just can’t live without, well, let’s just say that we were more than intrigued. We’re no strangers to a soggy looking bed skirt that puddles on the floor instead of elegantly resting one sixteenth of an inch above it. And we’re also constantly wrestling with our duvet thanks to a shifty little comforter that refuses to stay in place. So you can imagine our surprise when D pointed out two super inexpensive products that swooped in and saved the day.
Miracle product #1: Bed skirt pins. Available everywhere from Linens N’ Things to Bed Bath & Beyond, we’d never even heard about these tiny swirly pins that can be twisted right into your box spring to hold your bed skirt perfectly in place about a centimeter off of the floor.
They take about two minutes to stick in place, and they actually make a huge difference in the overall look of your bed (read: more crisp & clean, less lame & loose). And at just $2.39 for a box of about 10, they’re really a no-brainer.
Miracle product #2: Duvet clips. Now these we’d heard of, but for some strange reason we never even considered bothering with them (even though our constantly shifting comforter annoyed us to no end). But somehow seeing them endorsed by D was just the kick in the arse that we needed to take ‘em for a test drive. $4.79 later they were ours.
Turning the duvet inside out and clipping each corner to the corner of the comforter allows you to flip the duvet rightside-out again with the comforter nice and secure inside the duvet. Spending about 5 minutes clipping the comforter in place has saved us about thirty minutes per week that we formerly spent shaking, yanking and chastising the comforter for moving around and ruining our lives. Gotta love a quick fix that actually works!
Now we’d like to use some of the time that these miracle products have saved us to send a big wet kiss to G&D for sharing such fabulous bedroom essentials with the masses. I don’t know about you guys, but sleep ranks up there with eating and rearranging furniture (in that it’s pretty darn important to us) so we’re eternally grateful to have discovered such fab finds that make our bedrooms even cozier (and lower maintenance to boot). And all for under eight smackaroos!
Something In The Air
You guys know we’ve been on a recent kick to make our home greener, including getting rid of harmful chemicals around the house and starting a compost bin. But somehow we failed to mention one of the biggest things we did in the name of good indoor air quality: test our house for radon.
The deal with radon is that it’s an odorless, colorless gas that comes from the ground and can leak into your home if it’s built on a spot with high concentrations of this radioactive killer. I say “killer” because radon, according to the EPA, is the leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers (even more dangerous than second-hand smoke). Click the map below to learn if your county lies in the red danger zones.
After reading about radon in a magazine, Sherry suggested we do the test almost immediately after moving in over two years ago. I resisted at first – seeing it as a waste of time and money - but eventually couldn’t argue with buying this $15 test that actually took little effort on our part. So we set out the little test kit somewhere inconspicuous and 3 days later sent it in for results (using the pre-paid packaging provided in the test- easy as pie). Then we waited a few weeks for the good news that our house was under the 4 pCi/L level that’s considered okay.
That news didn’t come. Instead, our house was found to have 10 pCi/L of radon present in the air. Baaad news. More than twice the acceptable level of radon was silently seeping into our home. So we contacted a certified radon mitigation professional recommended by our local radon office. After he confirmed our results, we began the process of getting a radon reduction system installed in our house.
I’ll spare you the details of this, but basically it means that all the exposed earth in our crawl space was covered in an airtight plastic sheet to trap all the radon emissions before they can leak up into our home.
Then a newly installed piping system blows this toxic air up through our house (by way of the guest bedroom closet and the attic) and out of a new vent in our roof. Peace out, radon.
The system set us back about $2,100 (which wasn’t small beans, especially right after closing) but it works like a charm. When we retested our home after the system ran for a few months we got back a reading of 1.0 pCi/L- over 10 times less radon! It was even far less than normal outdoor air (which typically registers 1.2 pCi/L). We still test our house once a year to be certain that our radon mitigation system is properly functioning, and we strongly encourage all of you to do the same. It’s only $15 and it could save your life- and anyone with pups or little people should be especially diligent in the fight against noxious (and obnoxious) radon.
Damage Control
Every house has a few utterly unsettling design challenges and ours is certainly no exception. And since we promised you guys the behind the scenes dirt in honor of our blogiversary week, we’re gonna give you the inside scoop about our home’s shortcomings (and how we went about turning a wackadoo design flaw into something a lot less visually offensive). Onward!
House Quirk #1: The window above our bed isn’t centered. Not even close. In fact, it’s over a foot too far to the right. So we racked our brains and came up with the idea to hang those tan curtains super wide on on either side of it, thereby cheating it to the left and making it appear centered. And that’s how a $25 set of curtains negated our first seriously obvious design flaw and made our built-in wall look a lot more balanced and serene.
House Quirk #2: We had a crazy steel fuse box in the middle of our den. Enter our make-shift mudroom stage left. Sure it does a great job of corralling our coats and scarves, but it also hides that doozie of a fuse box which was painfully obvious when we moved in (don’t mind our cute realtor below).
But thanks to paint, paint, more paint, and a row of hooks to further obscure the big hunk of metal in the corner of our den, now no one’s the wiser. (And widening the doorway to the sunroom and the passageway into the kitchen along with laying hardwood floors throughout the adjoining rooms made the whole space a lot more open too).
House Quirk #3: Oy. Our living room sported a weird wooden divider of sorts near the front door (check out the center panel with stained glass- so classy) along with a faux stone linoleum floor (!) in the corner. The design solution here was obvious- get ‘em the heck outta our house. So when John went to work the day after we moved in, I got out my trusty hammer and…
…knocked the snot out of that hideous divider (thereby making it pretty easy to carry out to the curb). But as for the “stone” linoleum, we thought our design fix would be an oversized natural fiber rug for the entryway to cover that serious faux stone fax pas. But it wasn’t an easy size or shape to come by.
Then one strange and wonderful day I realized that the linoleum might have been installed right over our existing wood floor (instead of over the subfloor) meaning that I just might be able to rip it up to expose a perfect wood floor underneath. Of course every fiber of my being knew that this was an extremely optimistic outcome- who would cover hardwood with linoleum? And wouldn’t it be coated in glue and nail holes if it was? But I pried up the linoleum and discovered flawless wood flooring that was living in secret underneath that hideous fake stone! And even though a tiny welcome mat lives at the entryway for practical reasons, it doesn’t have to be crazy big and square to cover anything that’s pretending to be stone underneath.
House Quirk #4: Our den was an obvious addition. That’s right, it’s back to our former hunting lodge for another major design flaw reveal. This room was added on (along with our second bathroom, laundry area and sunroom- thank God!) back in the 70′s and while most of the space worked pretty seamlessly (there’s not a step down or up, which we love), part of the den wall that used to be an exterior window was bricked over in a not-so-subtle way when they built the addition.
The bricks were dusty and the wrong color- in essence there was an obvious patch job going on. But since we never intended to leave any of the oppressively dark brick unpainted (or those beams and the paneling for that matter) this flaw was fixed in no time flat.
House Quirk #5: I used to have to dry my hair in the sunroom, which got pretty cold in the winter. That’s right, when we moved into our house neither of the bathrooms had a single outlet in them- in 2006! Who lived here before us? Hippies with dreadlocks? Bald people? Anyway, the sunroom was the only room with an available outlet and a mirror nearby. Needless to say this was the most apparent flaw to our first few guests (sorry Cat!). But it was easily fixed the right way, by hiring a licensed electrician to pop a double outlet right next to the bathroom mirror for $65. Best 65 clams I ever spent.
What about you guys? Does your house have a design flaw that you just can’t seem to conquer? Or have you remedied even the stickiest of design challenges? We showed you ours- now it’s your turn.
Power Of The People
We relish in the kindness of strangers, and we especially love watching this play out in community swap forums, like yard sales and flea markets or even virtually on sites like eBay and Craigslist. That’s why we had to revisit one of our very first (and still all time favorite) posts: The Power of Craigslist.
I’m still amazed that this experiment worked, but basically we got a bunch of strangers to laboriously dig up all the bushes and haul away the pea gravel from our heavily manicured backyard (seen below during our wedding) to make way for the grassy, puppy-playground that we now enjoy (pictured further below last November).
You’ll have to read the post to find out exactly how it all went down- just forgive us if anything looks majorly amateur – it was only our fourth post!
Just like some of the original readers back in September of last year (all 8 or so of you) – you may be feeling some heartburn over us destroying the beautiful garden that the previous owner had painstakingly groomed. And I’ll admit that we even had some hesitations ourselves when we started the process last fall…
But now that it’s been a year, I can say with 100% certainty that it was the best decision ever. It’s totally easy to maintain (no more weeding that gravel path to nowhere! no more trimming a million hedges!) and it makes our yard look much bigger (while creating Burger’s own personal outdoor paradise). There’s not a day he’s not out there chasing squirrels, fetching sticks and otherwise running amuck. And since I can’t seem to get a good photo of him in action, I can only submit this shot of him catching his breath (and some rays) in the grass as evidence.
Now we wanna to hear all of your great Craiglist, eBay or yard sale stories. Got an amazing find to share or another smart tip for using sites like those in unconvential ways? Give us the goods, kind people. And share the hope that some of the best things in life are, in fact, almost free.
