Guest Post - The Fun Way to Declutter Your Home and Reduce Stress

A clutter-free home is a stress-free home. There is something rejuvenating about cleaning out full closets and junk drawers. Fortunately, you don’t have to be an expert to get that clean and organized home you’ve been desiring, and you can even have a good time throughout the process. Below, you will find some easy and fun methods to declutter and destress.

The Plan

The goal of decluttering and cleaning the entire home is admirable, but when it comes to execution, you need a solid game plan. Before you jump right in, take the time to make a list of all the areas in your home that need attention, and then rank them by priority. Don’t forget to also include spaces like the garage, attic, basement, and shed. Then, plan for what you will need. Some cleaning supplies you might consider are:

• Bins

• Trash bags

• Labels

• Boxes

• Vacuum/broom

• Duster

• Various cleaning solutions

For each space you’re tidying, you will want to start small and then go big. The little accomplishments will give you the encouragement to tackle bigger tasks. As you go from space to space, try to keep the following six steps in mind:

1. Empty

2. Clean

3. Sort

4. Remove

5. Sort Again

6. Reload

Making It Fun

Don’t plan to clean and organize until you drop. It will take some time to accomplish all you are setting out to do, and you don’t want to rush through the sorting phases. Take some time to enjoy going through memory lane with each item. For items that are gently used but are no longer needed, donate them to organizations you are passionate about.

Plan for little rewards as you complete a task. For example:

• For the bigger spaces that will take some time, reward yourself with dinner out, a nice walk in the park, or a movie.

• Consider a sweet treat for the cleaning and tidying you’re not looking forward to.

• Get your loved ones involved.

• Clean while rocking out to your favorite songs.

• Listen to an audiobook while you tidy.

The Art of Tidying

Decluttering does not mean becoming a minimalist, having bare rooms, and throwing away all your memories. The idea of tidying is to either donate or throw away what you don’t love or use and to keep and organize what you do love and use. Most of us are guilty of buying clothes we don’t wear and for letting that junk drawer pile up. Essentially, tidying resets your home and stops the cycle of accumulating unused and unloved items.

Stopping the Mess Before It Starts

Clutter begets clutter. If you let your belongings accumulate and disorganization take hold, it will only get worse the longer it remains undealt with. Once you declutter, work to establish a routine to keep the mess at bay. Make it a habit to put your clothes away right after you take them off, sort through your mail when you have the time, and throw away unneeded paper immediately. Also, donate any books you finish to your local library, and give away any clothes that you haven’t worn in a year. Furthermore, plan to spend about 20 minutes a day cleaning up.

You don’t have to be an expert organizer to have a tidy home. Establish a plan of action to achieve it room by room. Reward yourself when you accomplish little victories, and encourage yourself to keep going. Master the art of tidying just by purging what you don’t use and love, and keep yourself on track by tidying a little here and there every day. In no time, your home will become that stress-free oasis you desire.

Author Bio: Alice Robertson recently created Tidyhome as a place to share the great cleaning and organizing advice she has developed over the years. Alice loves helping others, and she knows having a clean, organized home can do wonders for stress and mental health.

Guest Post - Backyard Oasis: How to Upgrade Your Outdoor Area to a Picturesque Paradise

No matter how large or how small your backyard is, this all-important area can be transformed into an oasis of peace or a paradise for play with some careful planning and a moderate investment of time and money.

The first step to upgrading your backyard will be to remove any items that you no longer use, repair anything that is broken, and prune back the bushes to be able to see the available space more clearly. Then, you’re ready to pull out a pen and paper, research some outdoor living space ideas, and start designing your very own private escape!

Picturesque by Design

If you’d like your backyard to be attractive and orderly, it helps to familiarize yourself with a few design basics:

• Texture: For a backyard with a special aesthetic appeal, try using a variety of textures and materials in your design. This could include a wooden deck, stone pavers, tile accents, lush planted garden areas, and a textured cement or brick outdoor barbecue.

• Color: Use color to your advantage to create the desired mood in your backyard paradise. Warm colors like reds, oranges, and yellows can provide an energizing feel whereas cool colors like blues, and purples provide an ambiance of calm and relaxation. A green, leafy garden with a few orange and purple accents brings interest and visual balance to the space.

• Layers: Levels and layers in the backyard can create the illusion of a larger space and can also contribute to a healthier ecosystem. Tall trees provide shade, nesting space for birds, and deliver moisture to shrubs and flowers below. Medium-sized bushes can provide herbs, flowers, and places for children to play, and low-lying groundcovers help to suppress weeds and provide a hiding place for small local wildlife.

• Sustainability: If you’d like to keep your energy costs down and save on your water bill, planning in some eco-friendly strategies and features in your backyard from the beginning will be more cost-effective than making modifications in the future. This could include solar-powered accent lighting for the pathways and a water tank to collect the runoff from the shed, or on larger properties, you could consider building a charming waterwheel to generate some of your very own hydroelectric power.

Personalize Your Backyard Paradise

While different improvements to your backyard can raise your property value, it’s best to choose the features that interest you and that you’re actually going to use. For example, there’s not much point installing a high-maintenance landscaped garden for a 5.5-12.5% increase on your home value if you’re not likely to take good care of it. For the brown thumbs out there, a low-maintenance, drought-tolerant garden could be a much better choice!

Depending on your tastes and interests, you might like to include a lawn area, a swimming pool, an outdoor setting for having afternoon tea, fruit trees, or a productive vegetable garden. Do some research about the space needed for each feature on your wish list and choose just enough features to make your yard appear abundant without feeling cluttered.

Bring Your Living Spaces Outdoors

To make your backyard more inviting, it can help to install some basic amenities outdoors. A mobile or fixed fire pit is an excellent way to create a focal point and inspire social gatherings in both summer and winter. It can also be the beginning of a simple outdoor kitchen!

For those who prefer to cook inside and enjoy their meals outside, a patio area with weatherproof furniture and some bright pillows provides an effortless transition between the home and the yard. To warm the patio in winter, gas column heaters or an outdoor fireplace can provide the needed heat as well as creating a rustic atmosphere. With any recreational fires outdoors, be sure to follow these guidelines from the EPA to keep you, your family, and your neighborhood safe.

Add Some Natural Ambience

There’s nothing like the gentle tweeting of birds, insects chirping, and the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves on the trees to provide instant ambiance and help you to feel relaxed. Encourage native wildlife in your yard by planting native species and plants for pollinators in your garden and consider installing a bird bath and a wooden insect hotel. A well-designed pond can attract frogs to assist with natural pest control in your garden.

Complete the Oasis Feel with Water

Whether a small frog pond or an Olympic-sized swimming pool, water adds the magic that your backyard needs to feel like an oasis. Water also offers additional benefits by reflecting the available light around the yard in winter and helping to lower the ambient temperature in summer.

For the calming sound of flowing water without the need for heavy maintenance, a solar-powered water feature like a fountain or waterfall could be just the touch your yard needs to feel complete. However, if you do decide to have something much bigger by your home, please refer to these safety barrier guidelines and drowning prevention strategies to keep young children safe around your pool.

Protect Your Family and Belongings

Finally, the last thing you would want is for your beautiful backyard oasis to become the subject of attention with nosy neighbors and opportunistic thieves. Keep your yard private with fences, trellises, and climbing plants, and lock away your tools and valuables in a secure shed when not in use. Follow these additional tips to make your home safer and you will be able to enjoy your paradise and relax in peace.

Even a Small Change Can Make A Difference

Are you feeling overwhelmed and not sure where to start? Don’t worry. Even the smallest of additions can make your backyard feel that little bit more magical. A few container plants along the fence, a portable sand box for the kids, or a string of fairy lights on the patio could be the missing detail that takes your backyard to the next level. You never know, it might also be the catalyst that inspires you to go back for more!

About the Author: Katie Tejada is a writer, editor, and former HR professional. She enjoys writing about events, travel, decorating trends, and innovations for the home, but also covers developments in HR, business communication, recruiting, and CRM solutions.

Guest Post - 5 Home Hacks to Save You Time and Aggravation

While cleaning up can be satisfying, some chores that are super irritating. They take too long, they make you crazy, or they are too much hard work for not enough return. Here are five ways that you can beat those annoying tasks and get on with your day.

Folding a fitted sheet

The process of folding a fitted sheet has caused even the most hardcore cleaners to throw up their hands in frustration. But, you don’t need to end up with a messy linen closet anymore. Luckily someone tried all the methods they could muster and came up with the best way to get those annoying elastics all put perfectly together to make a neat flat fold.

The breakdown is:  

• Grab the sheet by the short length and pull out the corners.

• Fold the corners together to create a pocket.

• Get the next corner and tuck it into the pocket you’ve made and then fold.

• Place on a bed with the elastic up and then fold that over into quarters.

It’s a little difficult to see abstractly without these videos, but take a look and you’ll get it pretty quickly. Now if only they could help you get a fitted sheet on by yourself without one of the other corners popping up!

Quick dry your laundry

Most people hate doing laundry because it takes so long. Especially the drying part. And when the washer is done and the dryer isn’t, well the process just gets more lengthy. Get your clothes to dry more quickly with this simple hack: put a dry towel in the dryer with your damp laundry Check on your laundry about 10 minutes before you usually would and you’ll see it dries more quickly.

Clean the gunk out of your blender

Love smoothies, but hate the chore of cleaning the sticky bits out of the blender when it’s done? Berry seeds and fruit particles are tough to get out and you find yourself rinsing and rinsing over and over to try to get it clean. Instead try this hack. When you are done with the delicious smoothie part, fill the blender container with hot water and dish soap, wait for a few minutes and then run the blender on high for about 15 seconds. Then just rinse and dry.

Polish your pots with a condiment

If the bottom of your stainless steel pots and pans get black and brown, it’s generally from a natural reaction with copper oxide. Scrubbing and scrubbing can be annoying, so avoid it. Spread a layer of ketchup on the bottom and the acetic acid in the condiment will corrode the copper oxide after about 30 minutes. Then, you can just wipe and rinse.

Stop rage cleaning your microwave

Avoiding cleaning the microwave has long been a favorite pastime. That’s because it gets so sticky and greasy in there that cleaning it seems like a futile gesture and even the best attempts are not very satisfactory in the end. Until now. Put a bowl of water and lemon juice in and run it for five full minutes. The evaporated liquid will get into the stains and make everything simple to wipe up.

These five chores have long been the bane of clean up time. With these simple hacks you will save time for what you really want to do: Netflix and chill. Haha, right, now there’s all that other cleaning to do.

Author Bio: Sarah Archer, Content and PR Manager for Your Best Digs. Sarah’s a writer who’s passionate about evaluating everyday home products to help consumers save time and money. When she’s not putting a product’s promise to the test, you’ll find her hiking a local trail or collecting new stamps in her passport.

Interview - TecKnow

Lately, we see a lot of modern technology in our client’s homes. From lights that turn on when you enter a room to sound systems that come with Google Assistant & Amazon Alexa built-in. We spoke with Westport, CT’s TecKnow and Kim Burke to help us make sense of it all.

For the busy person, what is TecKnow?

Tecknow Is a company that custom designs, installs, programs and maintains smart home and office automation systems incorporating solar and/or solar storage. A light, a lock, a solar roof, a battery, a thermostat, irrigation - these are all examples of connected devices that can be optimized and set into “scenes” to create energy efficiencies, security and convenience. Unlike some other smart home systems that collect your data and listen to conversations, the Apple HomeKit platform is all about data privacy, security and does not monetize your data or record your conversations.

What does Smart Living Ecosystem mean?

It refers to the holistic approach of the automation platform we utilize to create homes and offices powered by the sun and controlled by your voice.

For the techno-phobe, how easy are things to use?

Super easy to use. You can use your voice to turn on the lights or say “goodnight” and the lights can turn off, doors lock, garage doors go down, tv goes off, thermostats set lower and alarm gets armed. If you prefer to use your phone or ipad, you can use the touch screen to activate individual devices or entire scenes. In addition, we provide ongoing service to our customers and help them evolve with the technology. We don't just install and leave it to them to figure out. We help to program, service and maintain our installs.

Most people think computers and TV's but what other areas do you cover?

Security (alarms, cameras, motion sensors, door and window sensors), thermostats, lighting, air quality, fans, irrigation, door locks, garage doors, doorbells, outlets, switches, shades, speakers, solar and solar storage utilizing Tesla Powerwall.

What are the most popular services you install?

Every job is different and custom tailored for the client. It depends on what the client focus is...Security? Entertainment? Energy efficiency? Convenience?

What are one or two of the coolest projects you have created?

Every project we complete! There are new devices being added all the time and we are continually amazed at what this platform is capable of. Our latest project incorporating solar and solar storage resulting in a beach home powered by the sun and controlled by your voice is truly groundbreaking. When you come in the door and say "I'm Home!" the shades roll up, the temperature gets set to 70, the lights come on, the fireplace turns on, the TV turns on and favorite music starts playing. Conversely, when you say "Good night" the house shuts down into power saving mode to minimize the draw on the battery that has stored access energy from the sun during the day and runs the house at night.