Stress-free Living for a Peaceful Home

The environment of your home has a lot to do with the way you feel on a day-to-day basis. For example, if your home is cluttered, you will tend to feel lazy, tired, or frustrated. If your home’s interior paint is black, you will possibly feel slow or depressed. Much of our idea of a home is represented in who we are. The reverse is true as well. So, if you are looking to turn your life around, or simply feel more stress-free, then there are a few simple changes you can make to your home to help out.

Smells

Smells have one of the biggest influences on us. Don’t believe me? Walk into a house that smells like someone just removed chocolate chip cookies from the oven. I dare you not to feel happy. Other scents, such as, citrus (orange, lemon, and grapefruit), jasmine, lavender, vanilla, and if you need a more robust scent, fresh bread or coffee. Scent can help relieve depression, soothe our spirit, wake us up, or provide a variety of other sensations.

You can always purchase items like candles and plug-in air fresheners, but I prefer the al natural way with fresh ingredients. So, pull out that baking pan before guests arrive or fill a pot of boiling water with a sliced orange and a couple rich spices such as cinnamon and vanilla.

Feng Shui

Feng Shui is the belief that your home, or the area around you is a mirror-representation of who you are on the inside. By utilizing the energy of what you bring in (and everything has energy), you can better manage how that energy flows through your home.

For example, on furniture, your couch should be against a wall, leaving a few inches between the wall and couch to allow energy to flow. There should be open pathways through the room, and into other rooms. Round coffee tables are more inviting than rectangular ones. However, your living room should have a variety of shapes: Squares represent earth; rectangles, wood; triangles, fire; round and oval, metal.

Feng Shui also covers color, clutter, seating, and how arrangements mingle with each other, as well as represent the home.

Color

The color of your home can also influence how you feel. This doesn’t mean you need to paint your entire home, but adding a splash of color utilizing accent colors is a great way to brighten-up or soothe your home, or in some cases make your home appear larger such as with blues, greens, and purples. Whereas reds, oranges, and yellows will help your rooms feel vibrant.

Shades and tones can also liven, or tone down a room. Understanding a color-wheel and how it works is one way to balance out varying complimentary colors of your home and pick out accent wall colors. An accent wall is great because of the overall affect it has on a room, with a small amount of work to paint that wall, or section of wall.

Simplify

Simplifying a room is essentially de-cluttering a room of excess furniture, trinkets, and unnecessary items. For example, have you ever walked into a house where one or all of the tables had magazines strewn about? The home owner may have felt like they were representing who they are by what they read, but in fact they were distracting the mind to think the home was messy.

A few tricks to keep a home simple, is to use bins for items you would like in the room, and would otherwise leave them lingering about where you leave them. The idea of “everything has a place” is very effective when it comes to keeping a clean and simple home. Your remotes, car keys, and magazines should all have a location that is orderly, and near point of use.

Simplifying may also mean removing too much furniture. Do you have six chairs around a small dining table that has only ever held four people? Do you have one too many lounge chairs in your living room? Are your kitchen counter-tops filled with nifty small appliances? These are all signs that your home is too busy and distracting. The more items you have strewn about, the more cluttered, and small your home feels. 

Save Money as a “Green” Homeowner

Much like buying organically, many people feel that having a “green” home means they will need to throw away a lot of money to participate. However, as technology has grown, it is much easier, and often cheaper to own an environmentally-friendly home. Waste reduction for many green homes can reach 30% or higher savings on utility and water bills. In addition, many of the changes such as replacing a water heater with a tank-less water heater, will not only save you money in efficiency, but also has less maintenance over time, and can last up to 20 years, as opposed to 5-10 years of a standard water heater.

In addition to saving water during your showers, you can save money and water with smart irrigation systems that download current weather statistics for your area, such as humidity, wind speed, solar radiation, and precipitation, to determine when and how long your lawn and garden should be watered for optimum performance. These are systems that can save you up to 50% on your water bill.

 

Insulating your home, or I should say a lack of efficient insulation costs many homeowners hundreds, or even thousands of dollars a year in energy bills. This is often a problem with older homes that haven’t had window updated, have poor insulation in walls, and don’t have all of the cracks in areas such as the attic filled in. While the initial cost of replacing all of your windows can be spendy, this is something that pays off in the first 1-2 years of installation. Using gas filled windows, will save you even more money. Gas filled windows are typically filled with an inert, odorless, gas such as argon. These windows prevent build-up of frost in winter, air-flow, and keep your home cool in summer and warm in winter by allowing your heating and AC to operate at higher efficiency levels since they are not fighting a constantly changing climate within your home.

Solar panels are another feature that is now much more affordable. There are actually many local and federal incentives that make solar usage cheaper to install, which in return pays back in less expensive energy costs. Manufacturing and technology can also produce solar panels faster, with less expensive materials, and easier installation that drives the cost down. New technologies are soon to introduce transparent solar panels in windows, as well as solar energy drawn from building and construction material.

Living green in the 21^st century is more than recycling and composting, although those are still great ways to leave your mark on protecting the environment. Living green in the 21^st century is about reusing renewable and sustainable energy, which not only protects the world around you, but also helps reduce your energy spending. 

Home Buyer's Checklist for Hidden House Problems

Buying a home is already one of the most stressful things you will do in your life. However, buying a home with hidden problems can cost you tens of thousands of dollars and more stress than imaginable. The good thing is that by spending a few extra minutes while looking at homes you can find many of the issues that will cause you trouble in the future.

Attic

The attic is one of the most commonly overlooked places by potential homeowners. There are several reasons for this from it being a difficult place to get to, as well as an out-of-the-way location house seekers don’t even think about. Yet, the attic can provide you with a wealth of knowledge about hidden house problems. So, if you are seriously considering making an offer on a home ask to see the attic and look for problems such as:

• Rodent or insect infestation or damage. This can be significant droppings, nests, or random food spread across the floor.
• Rotting, buckling, or damaged wood
• Mold
• Signs of water damage or roof leaks

 Basement

Most potential home buyers will go into the basement to, if anything, take a look around and see what they can do with it. However, as a huge part of the structure for a home many basements take on the full weight of the house, as well as manages the interior utilities linking the home to sewers. Basements are prone to sewer back-ups, foundation problems, and plumbing or water damage. Things to look for:

• Mold
• Water stains on carpet
• Bending, bubbling, or buckling wood
• Curling, or displaced flooring, especially adhesive backed flooring like linoleum.
• Cracks in walls
• Water damage around windows.
• Dry “streams” of water residue
• Look in corners and edges for signs of material left from sewer backup.

 Foundation

Cracks in the foundation of a home can be costly to fix, especially if you need to replace sections, or the entire foundation. All foundations deteriorate over time, so if you are looking for an older home you will have to have some understanding of what to expect. However, you should not settle for a house with major cracks and chipping on the inside, or outside of the home. That is unless you are getting a great deal and understand the problems that exist.

Use Your Senses

As you walk through the home use more than just your eyes. If something doesn’t smell right, you may want to explore further. This is especially true in areas such as storage, out of the way rooms, basements, and attics. If the area has an organic or moldy scent you will want to inquire as to the cause. This is a good indication a mold problem may exist, which can cause thousands in mold cleanup and management.

The Utility Room

Utility rooms are another, often passed by part of the home that can give you a good indication of potential hidden problems. Along with the common culprits, mold and cracks, the utility room can provide you with a more intimate look at features such as water heater, plumbing, and electrical work in the electrical cabinets. Look for:

• Unintelligible or half-hazard electrical cabinet
• Random dry water-residue streams
• Cracks near the water heater of furnace
• Damage around windows
• Signs of rodents

Under Sink Cabinets

The cabinets under kitchen and bathroom sinks are interesting. Most potential buyers will look inside the cabinets, but for reasons other than looking for damage. Often, people are simply looking to see how much space is available, or if there are storage alternatives. However, don’t be afraid to move over the current homeowners cleaning fluids to look for buckling or bending cabinet wood, water stains, or leaking plumbing. While these signs could be a quick fix, they could also be a sign of a much bigger plumbing problem.