Keeping your home and property looking great for the neighborhood and for your pride year round is something that most homeowners strive to do. However, no one really talks about how tough of a job it can be to do so. The warmer months makes it significantly easier to accomplish, but when winter hits, what are you supposed to do? Since winter is upon us, it can be difficult to maintain your home’s appeal during the snowy and wet months, especially with how hard it is to get outside and accomplish anything when you’re freezing. Luckily, we’ve pulled together a few tips for keeping your place clean, up to date, and looking great. No cutting corners on decor Whether that means buying cheap products or attempting to finish your decorations with little effort and time, you’ll only be making your place look worse by cutting corners. We suggest taking a weekend to get all of your cardboard boxes full of decor out and ready to go. From there, you’ll probably consider one full day as an honest attempt at getting your decorations up outside. Put some lights on your shrubbery and plenty of garland around your home’s entrance and you’ll be on the right track. It helps to have your stuff in cardboard boxes when it’s snowing, too, since they’ll ward off snow just fine so long as it’s not wet and slushy. Clear your walk paths and driveway This is especially true if you live in a northern region what with all the snow. Clearing your driveway and walkway not only keeps you and any visitors safe, but it also gives your home the look of being maintained well. A maintained exterior gives the impression that you’re probably maintaining the inside of the house as well. Using salt or a similar ice melt can help keep your walkways clear, even after you’ve finished shoveling the snow. Just make sure to clear the salt off your pathways after the ice is gone, or else you’ll find it everywhere in your house eventually. Have your gutters cleaned
It may be a bit late for this, though depending on where you live, it may have not snowed by this point. But the point remains that your gutters put in a lot of work standing up to the weather all year. But gutters full of leaves and debris make your house look messy from the curb, and they can also cause damage to your home. If a gutter is filled with wet leaves and then freezes, the weight can pull the gutter away from the house, causing damage that you’ll have to fix in the spring. You don’t want to have to pay more and put in more work then, do you?
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When it comes to giving gifts, I prefer to wrap mine in boxes. Perhaps it’s the old school way to do it. Maybe it’s just the practical thing to do. But any old cardboard boxes usually do for whatever I’m giving to others, and I just think that a gift in a box wrapped up shows a lot more effort went into the gift than just placing something in a bag. Sure, you can stuff some tissue paper in on top of the item and call it a day, but I find this to be a rushed and underwhelming way to prepare a gift for your recipient. I suppose that’s to each their own, though. While I like to have my recipient think there was a lot of thought that went into the gift, not everyone else does, and that’s their prerogative. Honestly, I can’t even fault others for being more efficient with their time and gift giving even if it does have the chance of making their recipient think of the gift as less special than if it were in a wrapped box. But for some, presentation isn’t nearly as important as the overall quality and thoughtfulness of the item itself.
It is worth noting that my gifting habits are the sole reason as to why I do have a lot of old cardboard boxes and other shipping materials laying around my home. Am I embarrassed when it’s still lying around deep into January? A little, yes. But the thing is, I’m always using boxes for something anyway considering how versatile they are. I’d say my favorite part of wrapping gifts in boxes is honestly the type of paper I wrap it with. Whether it’s a specific pattern tailored to the occasion or just plain, thick brown paper, it’s fun to change it all up and keeps me interested and excited in the whole process. I guess it’s the customization of it all that really piques my interest, is what I’m trying to say. When it comes down to it, my choice to wrap gifts in a box with paper and bows and a tag is all for the recipient. I get joy in the whole process because I know it’ll bring joy to whomever I’m gifting the item to. It sounds tacky and it sounds like a generic answer, but sometimes that’s all that needs to suffice to explain why you do things the way you do. This year has been the year of eCommerce. I am completely shocked by how much online shopping I have done this year and it really was not my plan at all. The 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic has changed the entire way my life works. I know work from home and pretty much been stuck in my home unless an emergency is taking place. Never in my life did I think that my own state for putting me on house arrest for committing no crime, but here we are and what it has caused no one could have foreseen. When I go to my front door each day and pick up my Amazon package it saddens me. Because I know that I am going to pick it up, cut it open and toss the box in my garage. It really is a fact of life that now my garage is a box pit and it has taken me a few months to learn how to get rid of all those boxes. I want to do it the most ethically responsible way and that took some time to figure out. See my trash company only allows us to have one recycle can each week. That means that all those corrugated boxes have to fit inside a small space. So the task to clean out my garage began and I will take you through my process on how I did it. It seems so simply, but in reality, the amount of work added on top of my normal trash routine was cumbersome. I first just started to throw full cardbaord boxes into my recylce trash can and I could fit anywhere from 2 to 6 inside. This would have been perfect on a normal week, but since the pandemic, I am getting 2-6 boxes a day. That means that I am constantly running a surpluss of packages that are stackign up in my garage. So after a week, I knew this was not going to work. I started to work on different ways to figure the problem out but time won and I stimply gave up. Alas, my family could no longer take not having a useable garage and then I had to find a way to get rid of it all and not just put them in a trash bag to go to a land fill. All of those cardboard boxes did not need to go to a land fill I wanted them to go and be recycled because everyone is going through the same thing and I didn't want to contribute to the harmful ways of huritng out earth. I want to promote sustainability. I think this was the best thing to do and it was worth the time. So I started to use my hands to break down the packages and fit them in teh trash can. I was only able to do this for a few boxes because it gave me paper cuts and blisters. It also left me with uneven tears in the packages and they didn't fit in the can very efficiently. So the next obvious step was to go out and get some scissors. This was a great plan and it worked really well for a long while. This is a good way to stay on top of the problem and I suggest starting here. |
Houghton Marquis
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