Home help: Paint can add depth to your rooms, how to fix a loose toilet handle

By GateHouse News
Decorating tip: Paint can add depth to your rooms
Want to make a small space look larger? Consider adding some splashes of color.
Apartment dwellers or homeowners can color the inside of a bookshelf or windowsill to add depth to a small space. Owners who have foyers or halls can paint those areas a darker color before easing into lighter shades of paint in their living rooms. This can make the living room seem more spacious when compared with the darker-painted foyers or hallways.
Some designers also recommend people paint one wall in a room a different or deeper color than the others. This makes that wall appear to recede, which, again, creates an illusion of a larger space.
Other designers recommend owners paint their ceilings a lighter color than their walls. This makes rooms appear airier, another way to create the illusion that a space is larger than it really is.
— HGTV.com

Home-selling tip
Before an open house, turn on every light you can, including appliance and closet lights. If you have particularly dark rooms with few windows, place spotlights on the floor behind furniture.
—  Century 21 Home Selling Tips

How to: Fix a loose toilet handle
Remove your toilet’s tank cover and clean the mounting nut — on the inside behind the handle — so the handle operates smoothly.
If there is a buildup of lime around the mounting nut, clean it with a brush dipped in vinegar.
Check the chain that connects the lift arm to the flapper valve. There should be about half an inch of slack in the chain. You can adjust the slack by hooking the chain in a different hole in the handle or by removing links with needle-nose pliers. If the chain is broken, you must replace it.
— Lowe’s

Did you know?
The national median price of an existing single-family home stood at $176,900 in the second quarter of 2010, up 1.5 percent from a median price of $174,200 in the same period of 2009, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Home Improvements: Window projects most popular green upgrade
Tax credits aren’t enough to spur homeowners to make their homes more energy-efficient.
In a survey released Aug. 10, 59 percent of U.S. homeowners said that they considered green alternatives for their home-improvement projects in the second quarter of 2010. Homeowners cited window energy-efficiency as being their leading green home-improvement project.
But only 19 percent of homeowners said that they were motivated to conduct home-improvement projects because of tax credits.
The survey was part of ServiceMagic’s Q2 2010 Home Remodeling and Repair Index, compiled of data from 1.6 million service requests received through ServiceMagic’s online marketplace from May to July of this year. It also includes the results of a survey of more than 1,200 homeowners and 500 service professionals conducted in July.
When homeowners did go green, according to the index, they focused largely on window upgrades, with an increase in window service requests of 81 percent from the second quarter in 2009. A total of 83 percent of survey respondents invested in windows for energy reasons, with cost savings from increased energy efficiency being the top motivation.
— ServiceMagic

Garden Guide: Beware gutter ripoffs

    A 30-year-old man from Chatham-Kent, Ontario, Canada, swindled $1,800 from a 90-year-old woman by posing as a gutter-guard installer, according to The Chatham Daily News. Police say the perpetrator used the ruse to enter the victim’s residence, steal her debit card and trick her into giving up her PIN.  
    
    Gutter-related issues are far from rare. In 2009, the U.S. Better Business Bureau received 776 complaints against companies or individuals in the gutters/downspouts business. That was down from 928 complaints in 2008. Plus "the number of complaints which were unpursuable (meaning the BBB couldn’t track the company down or the company went out of business) was 9.5 percent, considerably higher than the 3.4-percent average across all industries," says BBB spokeswoman Alison Southwick.

    -- Consumer Reports Home & Garden Blog

    Backyard Buddies: Make sure birds get fresh seed

    Tube-type feeders are favorites of backyard bird watchers. Unfortunately, the seed that gets eaten out of a tube feeder comes from the top and the middle of the column of seed.

    Fresh seed gets added at the top of the tube. It’s LIFO -- Last In, First Out. The seed that was added most recently gets eaten first; the seed at the bottom of the feeder gets eaten very slowly, if at all, and quickly turns stale.

    The solution to eliminating stale seed comes from a technique your local grocer practices to manage the store’s inventory: First In, First Out, or FIFO. The principle is simple: Make sure the oldest inventory gets used first so that none of the inventory gets so old that it can’t be sold. Or, in the case of birdseed, make sure the old seed gets eaten before it gets old, stale and unfit to eat.

    The FIFO technique is easy: Just add new seed to the bottom of the feeder. Since tube feeders open at the top, the easiest way to do this is to empty any seed remaining in the feeder into a bucket before adding new seed, then pour fresh seed into the bottom of the feeder and top it off with the older seed from the bucket.

    -- BirdWatcher’s Digest

    GateHouse News Service