During our home and yard renovations last summer, we hired a very reliable Chandler home painter to paint the exterior of our house. He did a really good job and our house has never looked better. He was very helpful in offering suggestions on what would look good with the type of landscaping that we were doing.

We actually found him on a website. We had gone to a search engine and came up with BestHousePainter.com, which gave us a list of different painters that were available in our area.

We looked under exterior painting and that is where we found our man. The great thing about him is that we also found out that he does interior painting as well. We will be doing the interior of our house very shortly and we know who to call when we are ready to have it painted. If he does half as good inside as he did outside, it will be great.

Our home is older, but I love it.  It seems like it has been a very long time since we moved in and I am feeling like it is time for a change.  Instead of ripping up the whole house, I have decided that we should do a room at a time.

Perhaps the biggest eyesore in our home is the bathroom.  It looks like it came out from the fifties and needs a big facelift.  So today, I think I will go look at some bathroom suites and see what ideas I can come up with.

I do have some ideas of what I want to get in mind from the number of home improvement shows and magazines that I have seen.  My only concern is making the choice between whirlpool baths or shower baths.  I do very much love a quick shower, but a soak in a whirlpool… that would be something else.

Lets not get too hasty though.  I am going to see what is out there in the store and make my decision from there.  Irrespective of which way I choose, it will just be so nice to have a new bathroom.

It is getting to that time of year again, when I must start thinking about what I am going to plant in my garden. I have always had a most spectacular garden and it is not just a small plot, but my whole yard.

I love flower beds and I have numerous ones scattered throughout my yard. Each year, I like to try planting some different flowers than I had the year before. I do, of course, have quite a few annuals that come up every year, but I like to have a variety of perennials.

I also have a very large vegetable garden, which provides us with frozen vegetables and fresh potatoes throughout the winter months. My vegetable garden is not nearly as pretty as my flower gardens, but I am just as proud of it.

As I said, it is getting to be that time, and I have started to receive seed catalogues in the mail. I just need to decide now what I am going to plant and where to plant them. I hope to order my seeds in the next couple of weeks, so I had better get busy.

I was browsing through a furniture store the other day, when I saw the nicest set of contemporary bedroom furniture. It was sleek and stylish and yet very functional. I was really surprised at how quickly I fell in love with the set.

The reason that I am so surprised is that I have never really been a fan of contemporary furniture. I have always been a little bit more traditional and would even say that I would sway more towards Victorian than contemporary. I don’t know if this is because of how I was raised or just my own style choices.

I never actually thought of putting modern furniture in my house. As I had never fallen in love with a set before, it was just never something that had crossed my mind. I would still be skeptical of modernizing my whole house, but I need that bedroom furniture.

Well, I have to be honest, I am not much of a plumber.  Until today, my biggest repair I ever did was changing the toilet seat - yeah, I know, I am not much of a home plumbing repair expert.

So, I ran into a plumbing problem today - my toilet was running continuously.  It all started when I tried to go to bed - all I could hear is the water running into the toilet tank - you know that sound - and it didn’t help that my bedroom is right beside the bathroom.

So, I just laid there, hoping that it would stop…. and I waited and waited.  Finally, after fifteen minutes or so, I couldn’t take it any longer: I had to stop it.  The thing is, I really didn’t know what was going on. 

I leaped on the Internet in attempts to find how to stop a toilet running continuously.  Thankfully, I did find an article on a plumbing website on how to fix it - I guess the common cause of my problem is the flapper valve being worn out.  I got in the car and took a quick trip to my local hardware store (Canadian Tire in my case).  Ten bucks, and about ten minutes was all it took me to fix my toilet.

Good.  Now I can go back to sleep…