Home and garden

Color – how and when to use it – is one of the more challenging dilemmas faced by many homeowners. For designers, education, training and some experimentation often yield the ideal result.

Melanie Priehs says her job as a part-time concrete artist kind of “fell into her lap” in 2019, when she purchased a neglected statuary in Michigan and began learning how to use the various molds and equipment to make animals and other figures. In the last couple of years, sales of one animal have gone through the roof: Everybody wants a goose.

Do you get frustrated when the expensive exterior paint you use peels, flakes or cracks in just a few years? You’re not alone. I’m about to survey my thousands of newsletter subscribers. I’m willing to bet you a two-step mocha-chip ice cream sundae that a majority of them suffer as you do.

Plant sales are blooming all over town. Here are a few coming up this next week for your gardening pleasure.

Have you ever struggled attaching some heavy object to a wall or a ceiling? You may use a stud finder, hunting and hoping wall studs are exactly where you need them to be. Some just throw in the towel and count on hollow wall anchors to do the job. You don’t ever have to use those when building a new home or doing remodeling.

Affordable fast fashion and social media make it seem as though clothing trends move more quickly than a runway model’s strut. But that churn is incompatible with building a wardrobe that has staying power. “As a society, we’ve been conditioned to think we’ll wear something for a little while and then donate it or sell it,” says Rosana Vollmerhausen, a stylist and project manager from Silver Spring, Maryland.

Hold your trowels, folks. It’s still too cold out there to plant many things and the long-range weather forecast seems to be trending colder this year.

Spring has sprung, which means out with the dust bunnies and in with the decluttering. And who better to guide you than Brittani Allen, founder of Pinch of Help – an Atlanta-based organizing service that has worked with everyone from neighborhood families to celebrities.

Is your home noisy? Do you wish you didn’t hear things going on in other parts of your house? How about exterior noise? Do you hear sirens, motorcycles, cars, trucks, etc., even when your doors and windows are closed? Believe it or not, there’s quite a bit you can do with an existing home to make it quiet. You can make a new home ultra quiet with attention to many details.

Now that our gardens are sprouting, it’s time to look ahead to the annual plant sales. First up is the Spokane County Master Gardener Foundation Garden Fair on April 25-26, followed by Garden Expo on May 10 and the Friends of Manito Plant Sale on June 7.

Spring is in the air, and there’s no better time to refresh your tabletop decor.

Think back to when you were taught to do laundry: You probably learned a set of hard-and-fast rules – separate your wash by color; hot water for whites and cold water for darks – that you’ve followed ever since. If formal laundering lessons were not part of your education, many of those rules probably made their way into your brain through osmosis.

I’ve shared in a few recent columns how I’m helping my son finish his basement. I’m having a great time building memories for the both of us. I made a sign from a scrap piece of drywall a few months ago: “Will Work for Food (Good Food).” I signed and dated it. I intend to have the sign framed and hope it hangs on the side wall of the speakeasy for decades. Fortunately, my son is a great cook, so I get paid very well.

Orchids have been surrounded by mystery and intrigue for centuries. In the 1800s, European collectors would fund expensive plant hunting expeditions around the world just to say they had a plant that their rivals didn’t. Even today, orchid collectors continue to search for new varieties on all the continents except Antarctica. With over 30,000 species already named, collectors still want to find plants no one else has.

On March 12, the overflow crowd at the South Hill library took up every available seat. It seems Spokanites thirst for water-wise education is unquenchable.

Jonny Carmack was perusing the aisles of a store in his hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, when he first saw it: a giant strawberry sitting on a shelf.

Have you ever used a stain to change the appearance of a piece of bare wood in your home? Did the job turn out like the finish you see on high-end stained cabinets or other furniture? My guess is that you didn’t even come close.

My heart sang a couple of weeks ago when my patch of white snowdrops appeared at the edge of a snow bank.