HomeKeepr Blog

It’s been a busy year. It almost feels like we completely skipped over spring, summer and fall and found ourselves barreling head first into winter like a kid on an out of control snow sled. With those cold days just around the corner, now is the time to make sure all your heating equipment is safe to operate and ready to go when you need it. After all, you don’t want to learn that your furnace needs to be repaired by spending a freezing night regretting not having found out sooner.

It’s the most important meal of the day, so why are you spending your mornings eating over the sink on your rush to get ready for work? For many homeowners there’s a perfectly cozy and wonderful alternative in their home that they might not even be using: the breakfast nook.

Land can be a good investment, whether you intend to build a house or business on a particular lot or simply want a place where you can stretch your legs and breathe a bit more deeply. After all, they’re not making any more of it (ok, technically this isn’t true, but you’d need to be volcano adjacent to get dibs on brand new land).

While you’re dreaming about your Starter Home, don’t forget that you’re going to need a Starter Mortgage to pay for it. The mortgage programs offered through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Federal Housing Authority can be easy ways for borrowers with limited or lightly bruised credit to enter the housing market with confidence.

Every morning, it’s the same thing. You get out of bed, take a shower, burn the toast and then curse the smoke detector. Although its singing the song of its people can be incredibly loud and awful to hear, the truth is that smoke detectors save lives. So, while your smoke detector may sing way off tune, it’s trying very hard to protect you and your family from smoke- and fire-related hazards, like your morning toast.

Just imagine it! Waking up to the sound of sea and surf pounding the sand right outside your very own home. You don’t have to call ahead for reservations, you don’t need to ask anyone for a key or have a check-out time. It’s all yours to do with as you will, and you’re going take advantage of it constantly because now you own your very own vacation home.

In the Internet Age, it seems like almost anything is possible. There are cars that can drive themselves, microwaves that you can talk to and, of course, smart thermostats. For the average homeowner, that last one might not sound all that special, but there’s really a lot of "neat" coming out of that weird little thing that hangs on your wall and controls the complicated HVAC system in your home.

For the third time this week, you’ve found yourself cursing the unusability of your kitchen. The drawers come out in all the wrong directions, the cabinets are so shallow that you can barely use them and the entire layout just puts you off. You’re ready to talk about a kitchen remodel.

You didn’t do anything different, but all of a sudden the garbage disposal is smoking and water is backing up in the sink. Is your plumbing possessed? Should you just set the whole house on fire and run? The answer is almost certainly no. What you may have, though, is a plumbing emergency on your hands. After all, that sink is pretty important and the reasons it’s backing up could be many.