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What’s with all the furnace care companies offering their services this week

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I think the home service companies are having a little customer war in my area of Toronto.

This week along I’ve received letters from three different companies asking me to switch from my current furnace maintenance company to their company. Of course their offering deals for the first year, but then their prices revert back to normal in the second year and well … that’s higher than what I’m paying now, so uh … I think I’ll stick with my current company.

It’s just odd that I got three of these letters from different companies all in the same week.

A few weeks ago something like this happened with companies calling us on the telephone and offering cheap auto insurance quotes. I guess these things happen in cycles.

Do you ever get mail or phone calls from similar companies around the same time?

How do you keep your window blinds clean?

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Sometime in the next few days our house is going to get a major cleaning.

We’re going to be having guests for the weekend and I’d like to get this house in top shape.

The only thing that eludes me as far as keeping them clean is the window blinds in the master bedroom. No matter what I do they seem to gather dust.

I’ve tried buying one of those special dusters for mini blinds and that didn’t seem to do much. Now I’m thinking of trying a magic eraser on them – maybe that will work.

How do you keep your mini blinds clean?

All I want to do is garden today – but I can’t!

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I think today is going to be a big shopping day. Groan.

Oh yeah, my husband and I were out shopping yesterday – but it wasn’t really for the normal household things we need. Nope, I was looking for new eye glasses and not having much fun or luck finding a style that suits my face.

Today we have to go out to the pet store to get dog food for our Lab. We also have to go to the grocery store to pick up a few supplies for the week. Now that I think about it we also need to hit a place like Home Depot to get some manure and or compost for the garden as well as a new weed whacker – ours died last year and since we have built up garden beds we need a weed whacker to get rid of the grass that grows close to the raised stones.

I also want to get another smoke detector for the main floor of our house. By law you’re supposed to have one on each floor of your house (at least here in Toronto) and we only have smoke detectors on the second floor and in the basement. Oops!

I also want to look at a cell phone booster because our phone just doesn’t seem to be getting the reception that it used to. hmm maybe we should just get a new cell phone?

It’s going to be a busy day and I really don’t want to go shopping. Uh huh … What I really want to do is spend some time in my garden! It needs a good tidying up as everything has been growing like crazy!

What are your plans for today, Sunday … a supposed day of rest?






We’re going to have to do some exterior maintenance on the house this year

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I think this is the year that we’re going to do some work on the outside of the house. There’s some areas that have needed work for a few years and I don’t think we can ignore them much longer.

Our house is triple brick. Actually it’s an older home, built in 1927 which of course means that it’s all lathe and plaster and of course that triple brick. Outside of the house there’s about three feet of foundation? that’s parged and the parging or cement is starting to crumble in some areas. So I think we’re going to have to re-parge part of the exterior.

While we’re at it we might spruce up the look of the house too. I’ve always thought house with exterior shutters looked quite nice … even just cosmetic ones that doesn’t actually close. Perhaps we’ll price some exterior shutters and see if they fit our budget.

I’ve also toyed with the idea of moving some of the plants around in the garden. I created our raised garden beds back in 2002 so many of the plants are now quite mature and they are crowding out some of the smaller plants. I think if I move a few plants around the garden will look quite nice. That will be a big job that will have to be done mainly by me … so we’ll see if I’m feeling up to it in about a month or so.

Are you planning on doing some work on the exterior of your house this year too? Perhaps some maintenance work like the parging I discussed above or possibly putting in a garden or deck?

Window treatments and bedding freshen the look of a room

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We’ve been living in our house for 9 years now – 10 in June. Can you believe we still have some unfinished renovations? Ones that were started oh … maybe 6 years ago! Yeah, it’s true.

Anyway … in the areas that aren’t under an almost permanent state of renovation or stalled renovation I’m starting to get a little tired of the decor. I’ve been thinking of getting some new window treatments or perhaps even blinds for the windows in the upstairs bedrooms.

I think that will freshen the look of the room. Perhaps new bed spreads as well to give the rooms a new look. It’s really amazing what just changing the window treatments and bedding can do for a room.

I think I’ll start looking through catalogs and online stores to see if I can find anything I like.

Do you ever get tired of the look of a room? What small inexpensive changes have you tried?

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