Archives for July 2014

Set up a comfy getaway where stress goes down the drain, without sending wads of cash along with it

So, you bought a vacation home — congratulations! But after saving and scrounging to pull off your dream, it may be that there isn’t much left over for actually furnishing said vacation home and making it, you know,livable. Once you have the nonnegotiables (working plumbing, wiring etc.) taken care of, it’s time to make your place your own. Here are 15 budget-friendly ways (including a few worthy splurges) to get your holiday cottage ready for summer, so you can get busy doing what’s really important: relaxing. 

How to efficiently — and regularly — rid your home of the things you don’t want

Many of us have a problem with clutter. It can be so hard to get rid of things. Often the difficulty comes down to deciding whether something really is clutter. The struggle can be internal (“I could use this some day”), or with various family members (“Are you kidding me? That was my Aunt Agatha’s!”)

If you are desperate to clear things out of your house, a good place to start is the stuff everyone can agree needs to go. In our family no one wants to hold on to outgrown clothing, dead batteries, returnable bottles and cans, and books we’ve read but don’t love enough to keep. So why can’t we get them out of the house? Why are they piled by the door or on the end of the table, stashed in the back of the pantry or moldering in bags in the garage? Why!

I was thinking about this as we cleaned the garage last week, and then again when I unloaded a table outside our laundry room and noted the various bags of things I had carefully gathered and sorted and then forgot about for weeks on end. I realized we need to come up with a few systems for getting this stuff out of the house. We need some exit strategies.