HomeKeepr Blog

Being a homeowner means more than just cleaning, decorating and maintaining your house. It’s also your responsibility to take care of whatever land is yours. For a lot of people, this means putting their own mark with landscaping like perennials, shrubs and trees. Unfortunately for those trees, many are planted in the wrong place and end up being cut down in their prime. It’s a great loss to the neighborhood and to your yard. Next time you plant a tree, you’ll need to be more careful about where you put it.

Buying a house is a little like taking up a new hobby. There are lots of things you don’t know yet that you’ll learn as you go along, you’re also gonna need some specialized equipment to get very far. Whether you hope to become a top level home remodeler or simply want to put some new slats on your privacy fence, it takes the right tools to do the job.

You’ve been watching HGTV again and you’ve been inspired to do something about that dated backsplash in your kitchen. It’s not exactly a small job, but certainly one an adventurous first time homeowner can do with just a few tools. Installing a backsplash is a pretty straightforward process, with a few caveats. Just make sure you’re really ready before you put mastic to wall.

Congrats! Your fixer-upper is well on its way to be a fixed-upper now that you have a remodeling plan in place and a way to pay for it. You’re almost certainly imagining how lovely a soak in that new bathroom will be after a long day at work or how many family members you’ll be able to pack into your newly opened-up kitchen and dining area. The one thing you’re not thinking about right now is what could possibly go wrong.

The sound of a sledgehammer smashing through sheetrock may get your pulse racing, but before you accidentally knock out a support wall full of wiring, take a long, deep breath and let’s ponder what can go terribly wrong with your remodel. The thing is that you can’t exactly x-ray the walls of your home to see what’s underneath -- remodels are just fraught with problems and they tend to multiply as the scope increases.

In 1986, Tom Hanks starred in a movie called “The Money Pit.” It was all about a couple’s adventures in remodeling what has to be the worst house ever. Even though it was a comedy, if you’ve ever been part of a big remodel, some of the situations the co-stars find themselves in (re: the remodel, not the rest of the story, which is clearly irrelevant) are way too familiar. Too little money, problems becoming bigger than initially assumed and chaos, chaos, chaos. But you aren’t going to jump into a money pit worthy remodeling project. Oh no. Not when there are so many awesome ways to avoid it.

From the moment you started thinking about buying a house, you knew you’d need to start saving. Even though you have a 401(k) that you can use for your down payment, you still have to cover your closing costs and have a little extra put back in case something goes sideways on you right away. Unexpected home repairs are terrifying when there’s nothing in the bank and no home equity to draw from yet.

Every morning, you ask your digital assistant for the news and weather while you’re getting ready for work. From there, you check the traffic with your smartphone, strap on your smartwatch, set some mood music for your pet for the day, have your digital assistant set your home’s thermostat to “away” mode and head out to the garage. You open your smart garage door before you realize you forgot to turn on your security system -- but that’s not a problem, you have an app for that.

When I bought my house a couple of years ago, the first thing my wife and I did was invest more money in it. So we fixed the things that were in the inspection report, and started some small projects that helped us settle in — and feel like our new house was our own.