Summer Maintenance Tips  

A little home maintenance can go a long way to keep your house in good repair. Follow the tips below to keep your home running the way it needs to be all summer long, no matter how busy you are.

Summer Maintenance

• Yard Maintenance is a must. Make sure to trim back those hedges and trees that could be potential safety hazards. Also, cutting your grass on a regular basis is important for a healthy lawn.
• Maintain the Exterior. Clean the exterior of your house to remove dirt and residue. Don't forget, your patio and deck area! If you decide to use a powerhouse, be careful (or hire a professional) as you can do significant damage if you are not sure of what you are doing.
• No Mosquito Breeding Grounds - Make sure there is no standing water in your yard as that will bring about the mosquitoes for sure.
• Service the Air Conditioner - the worse time for the A/C to go out is during the dog days of summer. So, be proactive about it and get it checked out. This would be a good time to change out the air filters as well.
• Check the windows and doors. The A/C bill is high enough in the summer; you don't want any extra escaping. Cold air can escape through any cracks in the windows and doors.  Make sure to caulk around any extras that look like it needs it.

Summer is certainly time for family togetherness and fun in the sun. However, A few hours of home maintenance can help improve the condition of your home and head off any potential problems and your summer can be worry-free.  

Following are some basic bathroom renovation tips to aid you with your remodel:

1. Recess It - For an older look, consider built-ins as such as recessed soap dishes, medicine cabinets, and even toilet roll holders.
2. Flooring - Wood floors are not the best type of flooring material for bathrooms, from a practical standpoint, but they do infuse bathrooms with great character. Properly sealed and stained wood floors are durable enough for normal bathroom use.
3. Sizing with Color - To make a small bathroom look bigger, make sure that your color palette stays in the white-to-cream color spectrum.
4. Think Lighting - It is ironic that, in a room where people need to visually inspect their hair and faces, lighting is usually very dim and concentrated only in one spot-namely, from a ceiling fixture. At the very least, consider having added lighting around the bathroom mirror in the form of sconces.
5. Fixtures and Color - Use white or cream colored fixtures (i.e., toilet and bathtub) is that colored fixtures tend to look very dated after only a few years. And while it is possible to switch out the toilet with very little effort, you will have a considerable demolition and cost issues involved with switching out a shower or bathtub.
6. Dim Lighting for Mood - A very simple device that can add mood to your bathroom is a dimmer switch. The dimmer switch is perfect for late night relaxing baths.
7. Extra Pieces - If space permits, many home decorators recommend having one freestanding piece such as a decorative chair or cupboard as a design element. To compensate for that space, you can recess other practical elements such as close hampers or simply move the hamper to another room. This "decorative" piece, of course, can also serve a practical use as a place to store towels, soaps, or other small items.
8. More Places to Hang Things - Hooks are the easiest way to add "surface area" to a bathroom without actually adding real counter top surface area. Hooks can be used for everything from clothes to bathrobes to towels.
9. Toilet Position - One feng shui tip: never have a toilet positioned so that it is facing the door. Even though we have not found this to ever be an issue, we repeatedly hear experts recommend that the toilet be positioned ninety degrees to the door or at least several feet away from the door.
10. Mirrors - Most people think of mirrors in bathrooms only for the purpose of checking makeup or primping hair. But it's also important to think of mirrors in bathrooms as design elements which expand the room visually and add light to the room. Many homeowners like to add a second mirror, in addition to the primary near located above the bathroom sink.