Home Help: A frog is a prince in your garden
Building a pond near your garden will encourage amphibians. Amphibians, especially frogs, are great friends of your garden as they eat many flies, moths and flying insects. A pond will also encourage dragonflies, which eat mosquitoes. -- helpfulgardener.com
How To: Fix a loose door
Age and continual use can cause even a well-fitted door to loosen, bind, or warp. Loose doors are relatively easy to fix.
If a door is too small for its frame, an easy though somewhat obtrusive solution is to install weather stripping on the latch side of the jamb. A more attractive fix is to shim out one or more of the door's hinges. To do this, you'll need to remove the hinge pins and remove the door. Unscrew the hinge leaf from the jamb. Cut a piece of thin sheet brass or dense, hard-surface cardboard to fit beneath it. Double up shims if you need more thickness. Then screw the leaf back in place.
Often, simply tightening loose hinges gets a sagging door back in alignment. You can try tightening loose hinge screws or replacing them with longer ones. - hometips.com
Coming Soon to Your Home?
If you're looking for eco-friendly furniture, there's a chair made from recycled cork and bamboo. Made by Trevor O-Neil Design, the chair costs $1,200. Oh, and there's a $5,800 sofa made from cork and birch, if you're interested in having a common theme through all your living room furniture. - luxuryhousingtrends.com
Tip of the Week
Painting the inside of your home may be easy enough to do yourself, but here are some tips from professionals: When choosing a roller for your paint job, take into consideration the type of paint that you're using -- oil base or water base. If you're rolling with a water-based paint, you want to use a synthetic roller. If you're rolling on an oil base, you'll want to use a natural roller, such as lamb's wool or natural fiber.
Be aware that rollers with loose fibers could ruin your paint finish. If you can pluck the bristles out, then you know many of those bristles will end up on the wall. -- diynetwork.com
Want to Go Green?
An Energy Star-qualified clothes washer can save up to $110 per year on your utility bills; plus, most full-sized Energy Star-qualified washers use 18-25 gallons of water per load, compared to the 40 gallons used by a standard machine. - houseandgarden.com
The Psychology of Color
Want to add a specific touch to your home just by changing colors? Here's a tip from HGTV.com:
A little pink can make us feel young and joyfully alive or gentle and calm, according to interior designer Mark McCauley. "It's innocent and playful but can also be garish and devil-may-care in its hotter intensities," he says.
-- GateHouse News Service