Art Deco really had a moment with terrazzo — a glossy-finished stone amalgamation of granite, marble, quartz, glass or other materials poured together for a confetti-like appearance. While it was most often found poured as a floor (and enjoyed a ’70s-era revival), it has found a home more recently on countertops and backsplashes, some with wild and inspiring color combinations.
Unless you’ve chosen to put a snake in a clear, 20-gallon terrarium, feed it vermin, and let it out to slither around, you probably don’t want it in your house. A pet snake is one thing, but much like turning the lights on in the middle of the night to find a cockroach hunting for crumbs in your kitchen, there’s just something super unsettling about a snake entering your humble abode.
Speaking of cockroaches, here’s are the best ways to kill them.
The reality is, most creatures, including snakes, want nothing to do with humans. It’s nothing against you that they invade your space, it’s just that they’re wild and curious … and usually hungry. Most North American species of snakes are harmless, and so while your desire to keep them out of your sight is warranted, it’s best to remain calm and use non-harmful tactics.
If you have quite a few snakes slithering into your yard (and sometimes your house), your first instinct might be to buy chemical repellent; however, this is typically not the safest method for how to keep snakes away since these repellents can be harmful to pets, people and the environment.
It’s best to stick to repellents that are designed specifically for snakes. Even with snake repellents, be sure to read the follow the directions exactly! Try Ortho Snake B Gon, a snake repellent that’s to be sprinkled around your property every 30 days to keep snakes out of your yard and house. It’s made from essential oils and is marketed as an ecologically friendly option that will not harm humans, pets or plants.
Get Ortho Snake Be Gon on Amazon.
It’s also important to understand what you’re doing that could be attracting snakes to your home in the first place. Because they’re on the lookout for food and shelter, the best way to keep them at bay is to remove their food sources like rodents. You should also avoid keeping pet food out in the open.
Here’s what you need to know about eliminating other pests to keep snakes away.
As for ensuring they don’t cozy up in your basement or crawl space, seal those damp, cool entry points! Here’s what you need to know about using door sweeps and weather stripping to seal off gaps under your doors.
Another great idea for how to keep snakes out of your yard, is to keep it tidy. Snakes like to slither beneath scrap metal, wood piles, trash and within tall grass. Be sure any construction debris is tidied up each day, stay on top of your landscaping maintenance and all your DIY projects and outdoor games and toys are cleaned up. Here are some helpful hints for clearing the clutter from your yard.
Despite your efforts to keep snakes away, you may still find the random, sneaky snake staring at you while you watch TV on the couch. Don’t fret! You can call animal control to help you identify and remove it, or for more of a DIY effort, use a push broom to sweep it away at a safe distance. If you identify it as safe, you can also choose to wear gloves, pick it up and relocate it to its natural habitat.
You can also use glue-based traps, which are a humane way to get rid of snakes in your home.
Article source here: How to Keep Snakes Away from Your Yard and House
Glass bottles are one of the best items to use or landscaping border because it’s easy and inexpensive to accumulate a lot of them. You can vary the size and colors of the bottles and they will look pretty as the sun shines through them. Wet the ground a little before installation, then dig a trench about 6 inches deep. Place the bottles upside down and pack the dirt around them firmly. Leave about 2 to 3 inches of the bottles exposed. For the best garden edging tips check these out.
Hummingbirds fly forward, backward, sideways…and up, up, up! They go where the food is, and to the colors they love most: red, orange and even rich pink. If you think about it, flowering trees, such as redbud, eucalyptus and mimosa, are nectar favorites, and they’re way above the ground. Hummingbirds have even been spotted checking out rooftop gardens of towering buildings in large cities, so the sky really is the limit.
To make your high-level offerings truly stand out, focus on vivid flowers. For a sunny balcony, geraniums are a solid choice. Their bloom clusters are huge and draw the eye of humans and hummingbirds alike from a distance. But geraniums are generally scanty in nectar, so add a pot or rail box of nectar-rich nasturtiums (long-blooming and easy to start from seed), New Guinea impatiens or other hummingbird-friendly flowers to keep the nectar-seekers there once they arrive. If your balcony is on the shady side, annual shade impatiens (Impatiens walleriana) over a satisfying nectar source and a highly visible attraction.
Maybe your thumb isn’t the greenest. Have no fear—you can always fake it! Wrap a length of red-flowered garland around the rail, stick sprays of fake geraniums into a vase on a bistro table, or fill a railing window box with the brightest red and orange artificial flowers you can find.
Fake blooms work fine to attract their attention, but the birds won’t stick around once they discover your trick. So make sure there’s a sweet payoff . If you use artificial flowers to attract hungry birds, add mini nectar feeders on wire stems to your flowerpots, and make sure your full-size feeder is full of sugar water, close by and visible. Learn some other fascinating facts about hummingbirds here.
One last trick to get the most out of your high-rise hummingbird haven: Add perches. The tiny birds spend as much as 80 percent of their waking hours at rest. They prefer a relatively high perch with a clear view, so straighten out a wire coat hanger (the perfect diameter for those tiny feet), twist one end onto the railing and bend the top horizontally to provide a lookout. When the busy little birds have an inviting place to sit and rest between rounds of feeding, even high-rise hummingbirds linger a little longer.
Here are hummingbirds top flower picks for your balcony:
Plus, give your backyard an upgrade AND attract these beautiful birds with their favorite blooms!
Lure more hummingbirds with moving water. Add a solar fountain to a bath or a small dish with this kit from thebirdhousechick.com. Or get one on Amazon here. Additionally, attract more hummingbirds to your backyard space with moving water.
Next, read: Beyond Feeders: 5 More Ways to Attract Hummingbirds.
Do you need to make a fence for a new dog? We love a good DIY project, but they can get expensive sometimes. You could get by with spending a few hundred bucks on an electric fence, or you could build a fence yourself. We decided a picket fence was a good cost-effective way to go.
If you have saved wood scraps over the years from various DIY projects, you might be in luck! Depending on quantity and quality of your scrap wood, you may not even need to get more project supplies.
Some of your scrap boards may need a little cleaning up before they can be used. Be sure to check every board for nails and screws and then run them through a surface planer for a good cleanup. You can also sand your boards down to give them a fresh face.
If you don’t have enough scrap lumber to make your desired size fence, look for pickets at your local hardware store. The desired look of the fence is completely up to you, so get creative with what you can imagine up and find.
We suggest staggering the pickets every other one and hold the fence a few inches off the ground to make grass trimming easier.
Check out these stories for more tips on saving money:
10 Tips on Saving Electricity and Lowering Your Electricity
Save Money on Gas: Tips for Better Gas Mileage and Fuel Economy
Save Energy by Closing Heat Registers
Think of a hacker trying to access the smart devices in your home like a burglar scoping your neighborhood for a home to break into. What’s the easiest target? The one with the most obvious vulnerability and lax security.
No different here. Hackers, like burglars, seek the fastest, easiest systems to hack into. Weak or default passwords are as enticing to hackers as an open front door to a burglar.
“They are attempting to gain access to any home that has a gap in security measures by exploiting the easiest, most common vulnerabilities, including devices with default passwords (or no passwords at all),” said Nick Turner, CPO of Echosec Systems.
Turner recommends creating passwords for your home devices with a random password generator. These impossible-to-guess passwords make things harder on hackers right off the bat. Most will move on.
Art Deco really had a moment with terrazzo — a glossy-finished stone amalgamation of granite, marble, quartz, glass or other materials poured together for a confetti-like appearance. While it was most often found poured as a floor (and enjoyed a ’70s-era revival), it has found a home more recently on countertops and backsplashes, some with wild and inspiring color combinations.
Glass bottles are one of the best items to use or landscaping border because it’s easy and inexpensive to accumulate a lot of them. You can vary the size and colors of the bottles and they will look pretty as the sun shines through them. Wet the ground a little before installation, then dig a trench about 6 inches deep. Place the bottles upside down and pack the dirt around them firmly. Leave about 2 to 3 inches of the bottles exposed. For the best garden edging tips check these out.
Unless you’ve chosen to put a snake in a clear, 20-gallon terrarium, feed it vermin, and let it out to slither around, you probably don’t want it in your house. A pet snake is one thing, but much like turning the lights on in the middle of the night to find a cockroach hunting for crumbs in your kitchen, there’s just something super unsettling about a snake entering your humble abode.
Speaking of cockroaches, here’s are the best ways to kill them.
The reality is, most creatures, including snakes, want nothing to do with humans. It’s nothing against you that they invade your space, it’s just that they’re wild and curious … and usually hungry. Most North American species of snakes are harmless, and so while your desire to keep them out of your sight is warranted, it’s best to remain calm and use non-harmful tactics.
If you have quite a few snakes slithering into your yard (and sometimes your house), your first instinct might be to buy chemical repellent; however, this is typically not the safest method for how to keep snakes away since these repellents can be harmful to pets, people and the environment.
It’s best to stick to repellents that are designed specifically for snakes. Even with snake repellents, be sure to read the follow the directions exactly! Try Ortho Snake B Gon, a snake repellent that’s to be sprinkled around your property every 30 days to keep snakes out of your yard and house. It’s made from essential oils and is marketed as an ecologically friendly option that will not harm humans, pets or plants.
Get Ortho Snake Be Gon on Amazon.
It’s also important to understand what you’re doing that could be attracting snakes to your home in the first place. Because they’re on the lookout for food and shelter, the best way to keep them at bay is to remove their food sources like rodents. You should also avoid keeping pet food out in the open.
Here’s what you need to know about eliminating other pests to keep snakes away.
As for ensuring they don’t cozy up in your basement or crawl space, seal those damp, cool entry points! Here’s what you need to know about using door sweeps and weather stripping to seal off gaps under your doors.
Another great idea for how to keep snakes out of your yard, is to keep it tidy. Snakes like to slither beneath scrap metal, wood piles, trash and within tall grass. Be sure any construction debris is tidied up each day, stay on top of your landscaping maintenance and all your DIY projects and outdoor games and toys are cleaned up. Here are some helpful hints for clearing the clutter from your yard.
Despite your efforts to keep snakes away, you may still find the random, sneaky snake staring at you while you watch TV on the couch. Don’t fret! You can call animal control to help you identify and remove it, or for more of a DIY effort, use a push broom to sweep it away at a safe distance. If you identify it as safe, you can also choose to wear gloves, pick it up and relocate it to its natural habitat.
You can also use glue-based traps, which are a humane way to get rid of snakes in your home.
Article source here: How to Keep Snakes Away from Your Yard and House
Hummingbirds fly forward, backward, sideways…and up, up, up! They go where the food is, and to the colors they love most: red, orange and even rich pink. If you think about it, flowering trees, such as redbud, eucalyptus and mimosa, are nectar favorites, and they’re way above the ground. Hummingbirds have even been spotted checking out rooftop gardens of towering buildings in large cities, so the sky really is the limit.
To make your high-level offerings truly stand out, focus on vivid flowers. For a sunny balcony, geraniums are a solid choice. Their bloom clusters are huge and draw the eye of humans and hummingbirds alike from a distance. But geraniums are generally scanty in nectar, so add a pot or rail box of nectar-rich nasturtiums (long-blooming and easy to start from seed), New Guinea impatiens or other hummingbird-friendly flowers to keep the nectar-seekers there once they arrive. If your balcony is on the shady side, annual shade impatiens (Impatiens walleriana) over a satisfying nectar source and a highly visible attraction.
Maybe your thumb isn’t the greenest. Have no fear—you can always fake it! Wrap a length of red-flowered garland around the rail, stick sprays of fake geraniums into a vase on a bistro table, or fill a railing window box with the brightest red and orange artificial flowers you can find.
Fake blooms work fine to attract their attention, but the birds won’t stick around once they discover your trick. So make sure there’s a sweet payoff . If you use artificial flowers to attract hungry birds, add mini nectar feeders on wire stems to your flowerpots, and make sure your full-size feeder is full of sugar water, close by and visible. Learn some other fascinating facts about hummingbirds here.
One last trick to get the most out of your high-rise hummingbird haven: Add perches. The tiny birds spend as much as 80 percent of their waking hours at rest. They prefer a relatively high perch with a clear view, so straighten out a wire coat hanger (the perfect diameter for those tiny feet), twist one end onto the railing and bend the top horizontally to provide a lookout. When the busy little birds have an inviting place to sit and rest between rounds of feeding, even high-rise hummingbirds linger a little longer.
Here are hummingbirds top flower picks for your balcony:
Plus, give your backyard an upgrade AND attract these beautiful birds with their favorite blooms!
Lure more hummingbirds with moving water. Add a solar fountain to a bath or a small dish with this kit from thebirdhousechick.com. Or get one on Amazon here. Additionally, attract more hummingbirds to your backyard space with moving water.
Next, read: Beyond Feeders: 5 More Ways to Attract Hummingbirds.
Do you need to make a fence for a new dog? We love a good DIY project, but they can get expensive sometimes. You could get by with spending a few hundred bucks on an electric fence, or you could build a fence yourself. We decided a picket fence was a good cost-effective way to go.
If you have saved wood scraps over the years from various DIY projects, you might be in luck! Depending on quantity and quality of your scrap wood, you may not even need to get more project supplies.
Some of your scrap boards may need a little cleaning up before they can be used. Be sure to check every board for nails and screws and then run them through a surface planer for a good cleanup. You can also sand your boards down to give them a fresh face.
If you don’t have enough scrap lumber to make your desired size fence, look for pickets at your local hardware store. The desired look of the fence is completely up to you, so get creative with what you can imagine up and find.
We suggest staggering the pickets every other one and hold the fence a few inches off the ground to make grass trimming easier.
Check out these stories for more tips on saving money:
10 Tips on Saving Electricity and Lowering Your Electricity
Save Money on Gas: Tips for Better Gas Mileage and Fuel Economy
Save Energy by Closing Heat Registers
Cut all pieces of wood Cut the wood for the base (A), sides (B), top cap (C), front and back top faces (D) and pot supports (E). All the co...
