Your Guide to Home Maintenance: A Checklist for Every Season

 No one likes to deal with repairs, but they are a necessary part of life. Whether you're a new homeowner or have been living in your home for years, it's essential to develop a routine maintenance checklist and stick to it. In this blog post, we will provide an overview of the different types of maintenance that need to be carried out regularly, as well as tips on staying organized and keeping track of everything. Let's get started!

Photo by Ksenia Chernaya

Understanding Home Maintenance

There are two main types of home maintenance: routine and preventative. Routine maintenance, as the name implies, is a regular task that needs to be carried out regularly (usually annually or biannually) to keep your house in good condition. This can include checking the roof for any damage, cleaning gutters and drains, inspecting exterior walls for signs of wear and tear, testing smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors, etc.

Preventative maintenance is a bit more involved—it's about taking proactive measures to reduce the chances of significant repairs down the line. These tasks might include changing air filters regularly, replacing plumbing fixtures that have become worn out over time, replacing old windows with energy-efficient ones, and much more. Unfortunately, home plumbing typically gives more issues than anything else in and around a house. So, having a plumber in your back pocket is always a good idea, and Cathedral Plumbing is one plumbing company that will never disappoint you.

Helping Our Children Eat Healthier for Little Extra Money

 

Pexels - CC0 License

All parents want the best for their children. But of course, it’s not always feasible (or sometimes truly necessary) to give ‘the best’ in all things. For instance, it might be that goose eggs are some of the tastiest and largest eggs you can buy, but instead of finding the right purveyor to order them from, odds are you’re happy with free-range chicken eggs to fry and place on toast for them in the morning. This isn’t ‘the best,’ as a pedantic person might point out, but it’s certainly good enough.

This makes us wonder - especially as it relates to food - could we ensure our children eat better and more healthily at home without overextending ourselves in the kitchen, or spending that much more on our grocery bill? Times are tough for many people at the moment, so spending more on a higher quality supermarket may not be feasible, nor may purchasing or growing everything fresh be a realistic part of our lifestyle.

While that kind of best may not be available, you can certainly do the best you can. Let’s see how to go about that:

The Best Christmas Light Displays in Kansas City

*Originally posted December 9, 2014

Driving around looking at lights each December was a tradition when I was a kid, and my husband also remembers doing this with his family. So it only makes sense that we have continued this festive tradition with our kids. 

Some years we start out with to-go mugs of hot chocolate (mixed with coffee for me, please!), or sometimes we might go to Starbucks for hot chocolates for the kids and coffees for the adults. We have plenty of space in our 12-passenger van, and this year we even loaned out our van to a friend who had family in town so they could look at lights together and in comfort. 

Once we're all loaded up, we hit some of these places, in no particular order, and you can always make it a two-night affair if you need to: 

Candy Cane Lane is in a cul-de-sac in the 7900 block of Outlook Street in Prairie Village (3 streets west of Nall) and has been there since 1958.

Homeschooling with a Little More Travel Involved

 It’s a reality of homeschooling for the majority of parents that you do have to keep in mind the full breadth of experiences provided by traditional schools and decide when you want to be able to match them or when you can go a different direction. School trips are an unambiguous benefit to the children that go on them, however. So, what can you do to involve travel in your own homeschooling plans, too?

Credit - Pixabay License

Pick out some spots with great educational value

Naturally, the first aspect of organising a field trip with your child is to think about the educational value that a place offers them. As such, you can look up a range of educational destinations that can offer all manner of historical, cultural, or scientific learning opportunities. This might be due to a particularly rich local history, a melting pot of cultures, or because certain locations have great investments in tech and sciences, for instance.

How to Save Money on Groceries by Tiffany Doerr Guerzon

I love the Internet. It would be so easy to feel a little isolated as a work-at-home mom who also homeschools and is way too busy to have many meaningful in-person interactions. But with the Internet, I have met a lot of writing moms from other states and even call quite a few of them friends! Tiffany Doerr Guerzon is one such writing mom. We met in a group of regional parenting magazine writers and found we had a lot in common. Then she said she had written a book on Amazon and I was like MORE in common! So I checked out her book and left the following review:

As a mom of 5 and honorary "foster mom" to tons more kids in the summer, I found this book to be full of tips, smarts, and humor. I found some great new things to try, including apps to download to save money and put recipes together for me, as well as blogs to check out and much more. The recipes in the back were a nice surprise!

Here is the book description on Amazon and the purchase link is here!

How to save money on groceries is a popular topic. This is because, within most family budgets, there isn't a lot of wiggle room. You can't usually change the dollar amount of your mortgage, rent, or car payment. The weekly grocery bill is one of the few places a person can save a few dollars. But how? Food costs have increased in recent years and many families have food allergies or intolerances that require the purchase of more expensive food products. In this book, I share what I have learned about saving money on groceries through years of trial and error. I have found that a “back to basics” approach works best for me. Many of these cost-saving methods—such as buying in bulk, stocking up, cooking from scratch, buying on sale, and planning meals—are probably strategies our grandparents used. By going back to basics, I can save significantly, without clipping coupons or driving to several stores each week. I also include information on saving apps, batch cooking, alternative buying methods such as food co-ops, and how to read price labels at the store to decipher the best deal. I also include tasty, nutritious recipes. 

While I can't promise you will save a certain percentage on your grocery bill, I can say that by following even some of the saving methods in this book, you can gain control over your grocery spending.