How to Save Money on a Bathroom Renovation

It is a great time right now to renovate your home. The cost of building materials are down, and many contractors are lowering their labor charges in order to get work. You can save even more money when you do your projects yourself. Of course, getting your materials cheaply and making smart choices that save more money is even better. Imagine being able to completely renovate a bathroom for a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand? We are currently updating our downstairs half bathroom, doing all of the work ourself. It won’t be done as quickly as if … Continue reading

Where to Find Inexpensive Clothes for Slightly Older Kids

Inexpensive gently used clothing is easy to find for the littlest set, but once a kid gets past the age of four or five, the hunt becomes a real challenge. Here are some places you can use to cloth your children with inexpensive clothing for slightly older kids. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, finding good quality second hand clothing gets more difficult as kids get older. There is simply not a good inventory available. You can still do pretty well, though, if you check out the following sources. The outlets Outlets can sometimes yield great finds in new clothing. … Continue reading

High Value Strategies for Paperback Swap

Paperback Swap is a great way to exchange books for free. There are currently more than 200,000 books available to swap. Choose a book you want, and the member owning the book will mail it out to you for no charge. You then own the book. In turn, you list your unwanted books. For each book that you mail out to another member (at your expense), you receive a credit that can then be used to get another book. There is no fee for standard exchanges. While this is a great service to use as is, there are strategies that … Continue reading

Selling a House with Pets: Getting Them Out of the Picture

Photo by Georgios M. W. I wrote about the problem of selling a house with pets, not realizing the chaos that would ensue once our house was market ready. Our agent is doing exactly what we want: marketing our house, which includes placing it in the MLS and on the web with pictures of the inside along with a virtual tour. Well, let me tell you, both the pictures and the virtual tour turned out fantastic, but we had to jump through some major hurdles to get those results. I’m not talking about the decluttering and staging process. I thought … Continue reading

The End of Mr. Meow’s Maestro Days

Because of our impending move, our house is under siege from moving-related chaos. We are trying to get rid of as much stuff as possible. For one, and perhaps the most obvious, we don’t want to move more than we have to. For another, it helps decrease the clutter so our house will show better. One of the things that we decided it was time to part with was our baby grand piano. We got it eleven years ago, shortly after we bought our very first house in Phoenix. A friend of a friend was going through a divorce and … Continue reading