Prepare Your Home For Cooler Weather
From the folks at Home Depot come these timely tips:
Be sure your outside lights come on earlier to make it easy for people trying to find your home in the dark or in the rain. It’s getting dark a lot earlier.
If you have sprinkler settings, adjust them to account for the changing weather.
When cooler weather comes, so does the real danger season for house fires. Review your family’s emergency procedures for getting out of the house.
Roll it up
Those of you with roll-up garage doors probably will experience sticking because of weather changes. To prevent this, use a lubricant on your screwdrive. You can find lubricants in the garage section of your local home center or hardware store.
Don’t use a spray lubricant. It will only attract dust and not last long.
Weather changes at this time of year also can mean using your furnace. How long has it been since you changed filters in your furnace or air intake points?
If you are typical, it’s been too long.
Deadly dust
Be careful about going into dusty attics. Dry dust can harbor hantaviruses, which have caused serious outbreaks of disease recently, University of Las Vegas researchers told a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Hantaviruses are a newly discovered family of viruses that cause hemorrhagic fever, or fever with internal bleeding, and kill between 5 percent and 15 percent of victims. “For the people living in exposed areas, we recommend wearing a filter mask when working in closed environments like attics,” the researchers said.
Up a tree
Treehouses aren’t just for your kids anymore. Traditionally they were places for children to escape from adults. Now, adults are escaping to them, too, building treehouses as weekend retreats, offices and guest cottages, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The scoop on litter
If nothing’s too good for your cat, there’s a new entrant in the premium segment of the $600 million cat litter market. Arm & Hammer Super Scoop, The Baking Soda Clumping Litter, will begin appearing on store shelves this month and is expected to reach broad national distribution by the end of November.
Bargain basement prices
You can equip a home office for $3,000, a 40 percent decrease in price since 1990, reports Working at Home magazine.