Home Improvement | Green Home Improvements | Home Improvement Tips

If you want to help the environment by saving water and save yourself some money then you should consider checking all your bathroom fixtures for leaks. If they do leak then you’ll want to repair those leaks as quickly as possible. This is one home improvement project that just about anyone can get a start on. Fortunately, many minor repairs around the bathroom are relatively easy to tackle if you have a little patience and a few very basic tools.

The bathroom is the most likely room to find a majority of minor water leaks that are preventable. The bathroom almost always has the most water outlets and is one of the most heavily used rooms in any home. Here are some are few common leaks you may find and be able to fix in a bathroom:

Sink Faucet Drips: A sink faucet that drips can be annoying, but most people don’t think much of it until they realize how much water they’re wasting each day. Try this: place a glass under the dripping faucet and see how much water you collect in an hour and then multiply that amount by 24 hours. Chances are, you’ll be shocked by how much water you’re wasting. In most cases you can get to the old washers in a sink faucet by taking off the handles (a screwdriver may be required) or by twisting off the spout tip. Each bathroom faucet is a little different, so you may need to dig out the manual or take your best guess about how to replace the washers in your faucet.

Leaky Shower/Tub Diverter: If you have a shower and bathtub combination in your bathroom then you probably have a shower diverter which allows you to divert the water from the tub faucet to the shower head. They come in a variety of different shapes and sizes, but they all are prone to wear over time. Eventually these shower diverters leak and need to be fixed. Most work by pushing a little valve with a rubber seal back and forth. Over time that rubber can get dirty and crack and break as it dries out. This means that when you take a shower you’ll see water coming out from your tub faucet. That water is falling down the drain and being wasted.

Constantly Running Toilet: If you have a toilet that runs intermittently throughout the day then you might need to replace the toilet flapper to stop that excess water from leaking from the toilet tank into the toilet bowl. The flapper is a rubber or plastic trapdoor which lifts when you flush, and that rubber sometimes wears out and dry rots over time. It’s relatively easy to fix a toilet flapper and often doesn’t even require any special tools.

All you need to fix these leaks is a little time and a minimal amount of tools. That being said, you should probably only attempt repairs you feel comfortable trying. Fixing some of these minor leaks in your bathroom will not conserve water for the environment, but also save you money in your water bill.

One of the first tasks I had to undertake in my ongoing basement remodeling project was an organizational one: in essence I had to organize all the junk and boxes in my basement simply to reclaim enough space to be able to work on the remodeling. There are lots of basement organization guides and tips online, but I found that most of them were unrealistic or too simple in their approach to tacking a large basement or garage clean up.

Here’s a shot of the piles and piles of junk in my basement before I started cleaning it out.

It’s important to remember that basements, attics, garages and other storage areas that holding things that you once used, once thought to be important, once purchased or were given to you. The “things” in a basement, attic and garage had some sort of value to someone at one point. The cleaning and organizing of a basement is sometimes as much an emotional cleansing and organization as it is a physical cleaning out.

Basement Organization Step 1: Identify and Categorize

This is the most basic part of organizing any room of your house, including the basement. You’ll want to assess how much stuff you have, what kind of stuff it is and, generally, what you want to do with it. You’re not worried about where it’s going to ultimately end up or how you’re going to store it at this point. You’re simply going to identify it and place it into a loose category.

Most basement organizational articles suggest three categories (Throw away, Donate, Keep) but I think that’s being overly simplistic. When I cleaned out my basement I ended up with five piles:

Throw Away: Pretty self-explanatory, this is where you put things that have no real value and are bound for the trash. This includes things that can’t be used or repaired, things with little sentimental value, things you don’t recognize (it happens!) and things that are too difficult to deal with in any other way. For me it included some stained clothing, some broken particleboard furniture and plenty of “paper” things like old gift bags, old newspaper that had been used to wrap glasses when I moved and lots of empty boxes. Yes, I kept a lot of empty boxes in my basement for some reason.

Donate: My donation pile was actually broken into several smaller piles because I some of the charities in my area only accept certain things. So old bed sheets and pet items when to the local Humane Society while old textbooks and novels were bound for the local library (which ended up not taking half of them). Some other things were bound for the local Goodwill store (mostly kitchen items). Depending on where you live, you might be able to find an organization that picks up donations from your curb. Places like The Salvation Army, the Lupus Foundation and some Veteran’s organizations all offer donation pickups in some areas.

Sell: If you’re going to clean out your basement, why not get paid for it? If you’re in a hurry, fine, skip this step and donate everything you aren’t keeping or throwing away. If you have some time then I strongly suggest you make a little extra cash by holding a yard sale or taking your items to the flea market or even trying to sell your items on eBay.

If you’re going to use a yard sale as part of your basement organization project then I suggest you set a deadline and actually schedule a yard sale for a month or two in advance. Buy an advertisement for your yard sale in your local paper so you can’t back down from the date. That will keep you on deadline and force you to keep on schedule and have plenty of items for sale. Ebay is best used for small collectibles and things that are easy to ship. It’s important to remember that not every single item that “looks” collectible really is and has any value.

I ended up selling some old comic books and a few little toys and other things on eBay and so far I’ve made about $100 from selling my basement junk! My wife has an entire box of old racing memorabilia that she’s hoping to sell as well.

Pending/Hold: Okay, I know the whole idea of cleaning out your basement is not to just “hang on” to stuff forever, but in some cases you simply can’t make an informed decision. Instead of completely freezing up and getting frustrated, move your items into a “pending” pile and then keep going. When I was cleaning out my basement I would sometimes come across a box of items that belonged to my wife long before she met me. I also came across some old leather bound books I’d picked up a yard sale years ago. I put them in the “Pending” pile until I had a chance to look up their value online. Their value? Just about nothing… I donated them.

Keep: Obviously, there are things in your basement that you want to keep or use in the future. To make sure everything doesn’t end up in this pile, here are some questions you can ask to determine what you should do with that stuff in your basement:

Do I absolutely need this?
Do I absolutely want this?
Am I going to use or display this in the next
Would this be one of my top items to rescue in a fire? (If it’s in the basement, it might not be)
Could this be useful to someone else in need?
Is this replaceable for a small amount of money? (like my empty boxes…)
Even if it looks collectible, are people actually paying money for it on eBay?

Your answers to some of those questions should help you determine which category to move your items into. Your ultimate success with this first basement organizational step is to be realistic. Don’t keep that old “Ship In A Bottle” model kit if you haven’t touched it in 10 years. Sure, you really like that old shirt twenty years ago, but it’s out-dated, probably doesn’t fit and it’s too worn for anyone else to really wear, isn’t it? A big part of almost any basement organization project is learning how to let go!

Avoiding Organizing Burn Out

Okay, so you’ve started going through your basement identifying and categorizing things, but you’re quickly getting tired of the process. That’s good. Take a break. In fact, stop for the day. I’ve found that a big task like organizing and cleaning out an entire room will sometimes take more than just a few days. I’m a big believer in breaking large projects into a series of smaller tasks. So each day or night plan to just go through a few box or move a few feet further into the piles of stuff. I know, I’ve been there.

It looks me about a month to actually get my basement mostly organized and cleaned out. Almost every night I would put on my iPod and go down to the basement for an hour or two, going through a few boxes or a pile or two of items each night. Sometimes my wife would help me and go through her own stuff, sometimes we’d go through things together. We even took one afternoon on the weekend to blaze through a particular large pile of items, load the car up with trash and take it all to the dump. It was physically and emotionally tiring. But then we were done for the day and we didn’t even go back down into the basement until the next day.

Basement Organization Step 2: Storage Tips and Tricks

As you go through your basement and put things into different categories you’re going to start having some pretty large piles or stacks of items. Items bound for the trash you obviously throw away as you can and it’s a good idea to move everything else into areas away from where you plan to put the items you want to keep.

Shelving Options

About half way through my basement organization I realized that I was running out of space, so I had to get a more efficient system for storing items. One basement storage option that a lot of people forget about is simply stacking things. If you’re going to stack boxes on top of one another, make sure you have the heaviest and largest boxes on the bottom and work your way up with smaller and lighter boxes almost as though you’re building pyramid towers.

I built some temporary shelves using some old doors (yes, they will go to the trash when I’m done with them) and simply stacked my boxes on them for now. I plan to move to a much better shelving solution: heavy plastic shelves. By using heavy plastic (not cheap plastic) shelves I’m able to have strong and adjustable shelves that I can adjust or even move around relatively easily.

This wheeled garment rack is easy to move in a basement and doesn’t take up much space!

The heavy duty plastic won’t rust even if there is some moisture and they will hold a heck of a lot of weight. Avoid anything tagged as a “decorator” plastic shelf and go for the “heavy duty” plastic shelves. It’s the easiest and most affordable way to quickly increase your storage space in a basement. If moisture isn’t a problem and you have a lot of heavy items then metal might be a slightly safer bet. Of course, you could always take some scrap wood and build your own, but then you may fall into the trap of spending so much time planning and building shelves that you don’t

There are lot of shelving options, and you can find a wide variety of shelving options online even if your local stores only have a few limited options.

Another idea I’m still considering for organizing my basement actually came from when I set up my garage. In my garage I used a few old kitchen cabinets to build a workbench and put in some simple storage space. I’ve been thinking about picking up some very cheap (and probably ugly) cabinets from someone’s kitchen renovation project and using them in my basement. You can often find people selling old kitchen cabinets in your local newspaper’s classified section or even Craigslist.com.

If you don’t have any cabinet, but you do have some extra furniture in your basement consider using your furniture as a storage solution! I have a few end tables that we don’t want to part with yet, so we stacked the end tables and now we’re putting boxes between them, effectively using the tables as shelves!

Using Bins and Plastic Boxes

An even better solution is to invest in a number of plastic bins with tops. Plastic bins are great for keeping things dry in case your basement has some moisture problems and most plastic bins are stackable. I purposely choose plastic bins that can be stacked inside of one another when they’re empty just so I don’t take up a bunch of room with empty containers.

I personally like the clear bins so I can see what’s in them without opening them, but I also have a few solid colored bins for keeping paper that is sensitive to light.

And when you’re putting things into bins and boxes be sure to keep like things together. So use a few bins and boxes for all your holiday items but obviously keep everything from the same holiday together so you only need to pull out one or two boxes per holiday instead of rooting through three or four different containers each time. I actually keep my plastic containers that I know I’m going to use frequently (holiday bins) in a different part of my basement than the things I’m not going to use frequently (old books).

I’ve also made a pretty good efford to label what’s in each bin, even if it’s clear. I don’t list every item in the bin, but I do try to put things together by category. For example, I’ve labelled one bin “High School - Year Books and Documents” and another bin “Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” Yes, I’m a bit of a nerd.

Making Your Basement Organization Easier

Basements and garages and attics and rooms dedicated to storage in most homes are not always the most pleasant to spend a lot of time in. And since you’ll be spending lots of time organizing and cleaning them out, you can try to make the job more approachable in a couple different ways.

Here’s a clever basement lighting idea: LED lights that you can also plug in.

First, try to make sure you have plenty of light in your basement. One solution I’ve used in my home is installing a bunch of battery powered light fixtures in dark places. If you want to put up some permanent lighting in your basement, you might want to consider the battery powered lights that can later be plugged in as one money-saving option.

If you have to, bring in a lamp with a cord from another room. If your storage area doesn’t have a permanent light and have a little extra money you may want to consider having an electrician put one in just for safety’s sake. A more affordable option is using a battery powered light fixture like the one pictured above. Going into dark rooms filled with all sorts of junk is not the safest thing you can do.

Along those same lines, you might want to also make sure you have some fresh air with a fan or open door, just to keep yourself safe with musty smells and other surprising odors you might find in a disorganized basement.

Basement Organization Step 3: Maintaining Order

Congratulations if you’ve gotten to the point of having a fairly organized basement with some of these tips and tricks. Now the real trick is maintaining an organized basement while still making sure you always have some extra storage space available.

I’m almost done organizing my basement. This is the “pending” pile that’s left. I freed up enough room to put down a stack of sheetrock and have a temporary workspace for the rest of my basement remodeling project!

I still have about 10 empty plastic bins stacked on a shelf and out of the way for the days when I need to go through and store more things. In the few months since I first cleaned out my basement I’ve actually gone back into the stuff that kept and taken out a few things here. I initially saved a lot of jackets and coats, but I then cleaned out my coat closet and found even more coats and sweatshirts that I’d forgotten about. I ended up consolidating all my winter and fall coats into one section of my coat closet, I donated to two jackets that were still in good condition and threw away two that were torn and stained.

That’s the key to keeping your basement (or any room) organized: revisiting your stuff every so often and reevaluating its worth and value to you. You can plan to do it every year or so or you can take a more relaxed approach to keeping your basement organized by simply going into a box or two whenever you put something new in storage.

Now that basement is relatively organized I have much more room to move around and work on my basement remodeling project. Based on my month long basement organizing project I’ve also decided to change my plans slightly and purposely keep an entire area of my basement dedicated just to storage. I also have to admit that I had no idea how big my basement really was until I got rid of all the junk that was down there. It’s like I’ve added a whole new room onto my home!

One of my home improvement projects this summer is to paint my house and while I’m doing that I figured I would also replace the old aluminum gutters that I currently have installed on my home. Gutters are an essential part of most roofing systems because they collect all the rain that hits the wide area of a home’s roof and directs the water away from the foundation of a home.

You can get all sorts of gutter and downspout accessories and parts online.

The gutters I have now are seamless aluminum gutters which are probably 10 years old or more. They are still holding up, but they are dented and bent in a number of places, the downspouts are prone to falling apart and they are held up with those lousy aluminum nails that regularly “slip” out of the wood fascia. About twice a season I now have to go up to bang in the existing gutter nails and to try to knock out any sagging or bends which may have occurred from the rain. Most of my gutters also don’t have any gutter toppers at the moment because they are bent so much that none of the gutters adequately fit.

So now I’m faced with the prospect of installing my own gutters. It isn’t an awful job, but it will take a fair amount of time and planning because even though my home is a ranch some of my gutters are still a good 15 feet off the ground and will require a lot of ladder work. Copper gutters sound wonderful, but they’re too “fancy” for my home in it’s current state and steel gutters seem to have some rust issues and aren’t as readily available to me at the moment. This means I’m faced with two options: putting up my own aluminum gutters or putting up my own vinyl gutters.

Here are the differences between vinyl and aluminum gutters:

Of course, the third option is to simply have a professional put install seamless aluminum gutters, which might end up being only marginally more expensive than buying all the gutter parts and accessories at a retail home improvement store and having a professional do the work would eliminate the need for me to spend a weekend on a ladder. I’m not afraid of heights, but I know that working on ladders and roofs is one of the more common places to have a home improvement accident.

The extra money might be worth the convenience and peace of mind of having all my old gutters torn down and having all new gutters put up by a professional.

I’ve been spending the last couple weekends creating some new landscaping around my house and one of the projects I’m dedicated to doing this year is properly mulching my flower beds and trees. In the past I’ve tried other forms of weed control like putting down plastic and even some fancy chemicals, but I’m quickly learning that old-fashioned mulch seems to work the best and is almost always the cheapest, best-looking option. Here’s a little bit of everything about mulch and using mulch around your home.

What is Mulch?

The term “mulch” can refer to a lot of different categories, but mulch is generally some sort of ground covering you spread down in flower beds and around trees to prevent weeds, regulate soil temperature and keep moisture in the ground from evaporating too quickly. Using mulch ultimately means you’ll use a little less water (because it often keeps the soil beneath it moist for plants) and you won’t have as big of an issue with weeds. In my experience some weeds almost always find a way to grow where you don’t want them, but mulch definitely makes the weeding job much easier by severely limiting the weeds.

Mulch basically serves as a type of blanket in flower beds, covering the soil but still preventing water to reach the roots while keeping out the drying heat, sunlight and seeds and spores which could land in the soil and start growing weeds. Mulch can also be effective in controlling soil erosion on slight slopes and it can help keep your plant roots warmer during cold spells.

Types of Mulch

There are lots of different types of mulch, but they generally fall into three categories: natural organic mulch, natural inorganic mulch and synthetic or rubber mulch. Each type of mulch have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Natural organic mulch can be made from a variety of materials, but it’s most often made out of shredded or ground up trees, tree bark, newspapers or processed wood fibers. A lot of cities and townships around the country actually offer to pick up Christmas trees from the curb each year and the trees are then shredded and used for mulch around community buildings and gardens. Natural mulch does often need to be reapplied from one season to the next because it does eventually break down and blow away. It breaks down slowly so some people just rake off the top layer of old mulch at the start of a season and then add a “topping off” layer their mulched beds from one year to the next.

To make natural mulch trees to have to be cut down and shredded in some cases, but it’s still a natural and it is biodegradable. Many stores now sell natural mulch that’s been dyed a rustic red or dark black color which doesn’t fade in the sun nearly as quickly as the non-dyed natural mulch. Insects also tend to like mulch, so some people recommend putting down an insecticide around areas with a lot of mulch.

Natural inorganic mulch usually covers things like stones, gravel and other natural materials which don’t normally break down in a season or two. We’ll discuss natural inorganic mulches at a later time.

Synthetic or rubber mulch does not come from a rubber tree (at least not directly!). Rubber mulch or synthetic mulch can also come from various types of materials, including old ground up tires, man made materials, and lots of other chemicals. Synthetic mulch is often heavier than natural mulch so it doesn’t blow away, often doesn’t fade very quickly and will generally last a few seasons. You’ll initially pay more for synthetic mulch but it’s available in a wide selection of colors, both natural and unnatural looking, and will often last through several seasons or more.

The choice between natural and synthetic mulch is personal one and, like almost all gardening questions, there are people who feel strongly about both sides. Some argue that rubber mulch doesn’t break down naturally, but some companies claim their products do break down over time. Rubber mulch can burn and often smolders and is a little more difficult to extinguish than natural mulch. Even mulch colors can be debated because lighter colors in theory reflect more

How To Use Mulch Around Trees

If you have trees around your yard you may want to consider offsetting them against the grass by mulching around them or putting a bed of flowers around them and then mulching that. Two years ago I put in a small Japanese Red Maple and I’ve since nicked the small trunk about a dozen times with my lawnmower because the grass grew right up to it. I’ve used a weed trimmer around it, but that also damages the bark and isn’t really very good for the tree.

For smaller trees like my little Japanese Red Maple I just took a shovelful or two of mulch and spread it around the base in a circle. I wore gloves and evened out the 2 inch thick circle of mulch around my sapling. Avoid making a “mulch volcano” around the base of your tree with a pile of mulch that’s more than a few inches thick. If your mulch is too thick you’ll actually be cutting off the possible supply of water and air that can reach the roots.

I also used my gloved finger to just run a little ring around the trunk, pushing the mulch a few inches away so it wasn’t completely touching the tree trunk. It will eventually all settle so you may have to pull the mulch away from the trunk from time to time throughout the season. You really don’t want to completely cover the roots of a small tree with mulch. You need to make sure that some air and water can get right to base of the tree trunk and roots when it rains.

The same is true when you’re mulching around larger trees: Feel free to use a few inches of mulch around your tree in a circle, but don’t pile the mulch right up against the bark of your trees. That mulch can hold in moisture and can basically make the bark around the base of your tree soggy and soft which can invite disease and pests. Instead, keep a few inches of space between the base of your tree and the mulch circle surrounding it. You may also want to use some sort of landscaping barrier like stones or blocks or a plastic landscaping fence to keep your mulch in a neat circle.

How To Mulch Flower Beds

Put mulch down in flower beds is a pretty straight forward procedure, but you might want to prep the bed before you go shoveling or dumping mulch in your beds. Most people first apply mulch in the late spring to early summer when the growing season is just starting up.

1. Weed the beds as well as you can ahead of time. Rake out any debris or anything other than the soil and flowers itself. Your soil should be flat and even because any bumps or hills will also show up when you spread your mulch if you spread it evenly.

2. Water your flower beds really well. This will help keep them moist because when you put down mulch it will help lock in some of that moisture.

3. Some people recommend putting down nitrogen to help your plants grow or even insecticides to keep away the bugs if you’re using natural shredded mulch. I didn’t do either this year, but I might in the future.

4. Now is the time to start spreading your mulch. You can do this a number of different ways, based on how big your flower beds are. I use a regular shovel and just drop a few large shovels full of mulch around my plants. I don’t bother using a pitchfork unless the shredded mulch I’m using is has been shredded into particular large pieces. For home use I typically use bags of mulch with smaller chips, so a shovel is fine.

5. I then put on some gardening gloves and begin to spread the mulch out evenly, making sure it’s between 2-4 inches thick. The mulch will settle a little bit so you can plan to add a little more later in the season. I literally use my hands to make sure everything is spread out where I want it. When it comes to my plants I again use my hands and leave about a 2 inch gap all the way around the stem of the flower or plant for the same reason I leave a circle around my trees when I mulch them: I want water to be able to reach the center roots of my plants quickly and I don’t want to smother my plants and lock moisture against the stem.

6. If you’re using dyed mulch you may want to now hold off watering few days because a lot of the dyed bagged mulch suggests that it needs a few days of air drying to really cure the dye well.

7. You’re done! Throughout the season you can rake off a little bit of the top layer if leaves and other debris start to fall on your mulch. I generally do this after the early summer pollen season is done. I then hand sprinkle a thin “refresher” layer of mulch over my beds just to make them look a little more maintained. This method of putting a light new layer of mulch over an old layer is called “top dressing” and it basically makes your beds look freshly mulched and replaces some of the mulch which made of been blown or eroded away throughout the season.

In the fall you can leave the mulch in place or, if it’s natural mulch some people actually choose to turn it over and into the soil, which basically increases your soil’s nutrients and fertility to some extent for next year. You can also put down mulch in late fall around perennials to help protect them from the cold of the winter months.

To determine how much mulch you’ll need, you can use our handy mulch calculator which will tell you how much mulch you’ll need based on the depth of your mulch, the size of your area and how you plan to buy it (bags or a truckload).

Good luck and happy mulching!