Recycling means reusing what you no longer need. It’s a great concept but often we don’t know how to recycle the many things we’re ready to toss at home. You can easily find a Salvation Army or similar thrift store in your community, and many churches operate thrift shops too. There are also sites like FreeCycle.org to help you find new owners for things you’re ready to give away.

As children grow so quickly, we’re always buying new clothes and need to find new homes for the clothes they’ve outgrown. One of the easiest ways to recycle these clothes is to find children nearby — relatives, friends or neighbors, with children one of 2 sizes smaller but what if they don’t want the shoes? READ MORE

Wood floors are very popular with homeowners but they need to be cleaned and treated carefully, i.e. using rubber glides under furniture legs. Wood floors that aren’t well maintained can become an eyesore and unfortunately we take our floors for granted as we don’t really look at them, so it’s easy to forget to clean and protect them.

When wood floors aren’t maintained properly, re-finishing the floors is necessary to remove the many small nicks, ground in dirt and more. One of my customers knew they were making this trade-off with 2 small boys. When it was time to get their home ready to sell, this punch list included re-finishing the beautiful hardwood floors on the first floor of their home. READ MORE

Refinishing hardwood floors is really hard if you’re going to do it correctly. It’s far more complicated than running a vacuum cleaner and just moving your furniture around. That’s because refinishing wood floors creates an incredible amount of fine dust (see below) that gets into everything nearby.

Depending on the condition of a wood floor, repairs and even replacing wood may be required. The beautiful living room floor at right needed extensive work on stains when the elderly couple moved to a nursing home. Replacing just a few pieces of flooring is a challenge, especially when you’ve got to find the right stain to match the look and feel of the wood next to it. READ MORE

Refinishing hardwood floors is really hard if you’re going to do it correctly. It’s far more complicated than running a vacuum cleaner and just moving your furniture around. That’s because refinishing wood floors creates an incredible amount of fine dust (see below) that gets into everything nearby.

Now that we’ve moved all the furniture and wrapped all the rooms in plastic, it’s time to get the sanding equipment out. Some homeowners might want to do the sanding themselves but it’s not recommended. It takes time to learn how to use the equipment properly and what you can rent will never produce the results of professional equipment (costing $5,000 to 10,000 per sander) used by pros. READ MORE

Most homeowners find it easier to hire a carpet cleaning service to clean their carpets. Many homeowners don’t realize they can and should, clean their upholstered furniture at the same time as they’re getting the carpets done. While you’re going to pay for this service, it will also help you extend the life of your carpets and furniture by several years which means the service can more than pay for itself.

If you’re like me, you tend to schedule the carpets to be cleaned after there’s an accident that leaves too big a stain to ignore. Maybe you’ve gotten some new living room furniture and you want to spruce up the entire room. If you create a schedule for more consistent cleaning, your carpeting will last longer. READ MORE

Floors are subject to incredible wear and tear. One way to protect your home’s floors is to provide a place for children and guests to sit down and remove their outdoor shoes and boots at the door. The Japanese do this by leaving slippers at the front door and there is usually one step up into the house to remind you to remove your shoes.

When people wear their street shoes into the house, they’re going to track all sorts of dirt through the house which requires more cleaning. Homeowners who establish rules for leaving shoes at the door will save cleaning time. They also save money because their flooring will last longer and require less professional cleaning. READ MORE

A handyman helps homeowners with almost any type of problem. While you might typically think it’s time to call a handyman when the job is too messy (drywall mud) or you don’t have the tools (tile wet saw) to get the job done quickly, the fact is they bring more knowledge to the job.

A house is made up of many interconnected systems that must all work together to keep you safe and comfy. Many homeowners call my handyman business asking for help with a problem when in fact, they may really only know the visible symptom of the problem. An important rule for any home repair is to back track until you find the source of the problem and fix that first. There is little point to repairing sheet rock if the water leak isn’t fixed. You also need to understand how the water traveled to the ceiling stain because often, and especially when water is involved, there is hidden damage that must also be corrected. READ MORE

Windows are a very important feature of your home. The problem is we don’t really look at the windows but rather we look through our windows to enjoy the view and windows bring natural sunlight into our homes. Because we seldom look at the actual window, it’s quite common for wood rot to continue for years until it gets noticed, and then it’s not surprising that a new window is needed.

Painting windows takes more time given the multiple pieces of wood, so people may defer this work without realizing that painting any exterior wood is how you protect the wood from damage. While most of the window structure can be painted on the same schedule as your house (frequency depends on paint quality, application and your local weather conditions), window sills need more frequent maintenance. That’s because soot in the air sticks to the sill, trapping water/moisture and so the wood rot starts. READ MORE

Your roof is pretty high up. You probably don’t look at your roof often but at least once a year you should be checking it visually to see if it’s in need of repairs. At the same time, you need to check the wood trim directly under the roof line. Why? Like your roof, this trim is so high up you’re not going to see the condition of the paint, and once water penetrates the wood, wood rot will start developing. Painting wood trim is much cheaper than replacing it.

Most homeowners don’t have 32 ft ladders like we have on my handyman vans, so the next best tool (don’t laugh) is a pair of binoculars. In just 30 minutes, you can walk round your home and visually inspect your roof, the wood trim below it and the windows/trim on the top floor(s) of your home. READ MORE

When you’re buying a home, you expect the kitchen to include a microwave oven and in the US, they are fairly common but that wasn’t always the case. The heating effect of microwaves was discovered accidentally in 1945 when an engineer, working on an active radar set, noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket started to melt (for details see Wikipedia). The first food intentionally cooked with a microwave was popcorn and the second, an egg which exploded.

I remember our first microwave (I won’t tell when that was). We thought it was a great tool for defrosting whatever we decided to have for dinner … as we weren’t good at planning ahead (then, or now). It took years to learn microwave cooking. So it’s Friday night and you guessed it, the pork chops went into the microwave to defrost. READ MORE