Your Fall Planting Guide

Fall is a little bit like a reverse spring. Everything is starting to wind down as winter approaches, and for a lot of gardeners, that’s a sad time. It doesn’t have to be, though; fall can be a time for laying the groundwork for spring plants and creating dazzling garden displays.

What to Plant

Fall planting can be tricky, largely because the plants that prefer to be planted in the fall can vary widely depending on where you live. However, if you live where it gets cold enough to frost or freeze, you can bet on many of these being excellent candidates:

• Spring bulbs. Tulip, daffodil, Crocus, Allium, hyacinth, lilies, and even Iris are awesome choices for planting in the fall. They don’t generally need to be lifted, so they can be planted in those short days before the first frost hits. You’ll reap the fruits of your labor when the ground starts to warm up again.
• Perennials. A huge range of perennials do great when planted in the fall. Bleeding hearts, Rudbeckia, Sedum, Coreopsis, garden Chrysanthemums, Asters, Hostas, and many others are not only great for end of year color, but will reliably return year after year to put on a dazzling show.
• Shrubs. Looking for some show-stopping fall color? There’s no better time to choose and plant these kinds of shrubs than in the fall, when they’re at their best. Look for shrubs that produce berries and sport lovely fall foliage like Nandina, Viburnum, Pyracantha, and beautyberry. These will provide your local neighborhood wildlife with a little extra forage, and give you some extra fancy natural holiday decorations.
• Trees. Most trees thrive when planted in the fall; it’s their best season! Planting your young trees in the fall, well before your first frost, gives them time to establish their roots without risking drying out. Not only do you increase the odds that your trees will survive by choosing to plant them in the fall, you’ll skip all the major maintenance required to nurse a fresh, new baby tree through a hot summer. It’s really a win-win.

When to Plant

Timing is everything when you’re planting in the fall. It’s not enough to ensure that the ground is unfrozen and workable; you should also give your young plants time to grow and spread their roots before they go dormant for the year. You can look up your first frost date on a reliable gardening site like The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Count back six to eight weeks and plan to plant your garden at that time.

Planting too close to a frost can cause significant damage to your new plants, or even result in their deaths from too much stress. After all, moving into a new neighborhood can be tricky, even for a plant, and they need time to repair roots that have been injured during the process. A few extra weeks to start going into dormancy will help them come back strong in the spring.

Protecting Plants

For the most part, fall plantings won’t need a great deal of protection as long as they’re planted in a timely manner. What they will need is mulch, and lots of it. It doesn’t really matter what kind of mulch you use, so long as it’s biodegradable and can be piled on deep.

If your area sees snow and freezing temperatures, go for about four inches of mulch per planting, evenly distributed across the top. Wait to cover the crowns until you’re actually at risk for frost, but the root area of the plant can be covered the day you plant it. These kinds of mulches help the plant retain moisture and acts as insulation to keep the warmth from the sun in the ground longer.

As your plants die back for the year, mulch the entire area, making sure to carefully check tender plants for new growth as temperatures rise in the spring. When you see those little green sprouts popping up, uncover them (but leave the rest of the mulch) so they can continue on their upward journey.

Remodeling for High ROI

Remodeling can be serious business, especially if you’ve got several pet projects on your list and a limited budget with which to work. It can be tempting to go straight to the items that you find the most important, but if you’re considering reselling your home in the not too distant future, the return on your remodeling investment is really the thing to watch. Luckily, Remodeling Magazine has been tracking remodeling trends and returns for the US market since 2002 and has amassed a great deal of data on which projects you should focus your money on if you’re concerned about how well it will return.

A Note on Cost Return Versus Resellability

It’s important to note that there is a distinction between items that will be reflected in your home’s value and those which will help your home sell. These aren’t always the same thing. For example, you might find that adding a pool is a lot of fun and that people are drawn to homes with pools in your area, but a pool doesn’t necessarily increase the amount of money you’ll be offered for your home. On the flip side of that, new kitchen cabinets almost always both increase value and help make your home easier to resell.

This Year’s Top Remodeling Items for Returning Your Dollars

Remodeling Magazine’s 2020 numbers are in, and much of what they have to say isn’t too surprising. Over the last several years, trends for return on your investment dollars have been mostly holding steady. Consider these items if you’re planning a remodel before you sell your home:

1. Manufactured Stone Veneer. This year it’s number one on the list, though it was ranked second in both 2019 and 2018 for percentage of cost recovered. At an estimated $9,357 for the average stone veneer project, you’ll see an average of 95.6 percent return.
2. Garage Door Replacement. Bumped from number one for 2018 and 2019 to a still respectable number two, garage doors will provide an average of 94.50 percent return for your average $3,695 project. Garage doors can change the entire face of your home, so they’re still a great choice for a quick facelift if you don’t have stone veneer money this year.
3. Kitchen Remodeling. It’s no surprise that a nice kitchen can pay for itself, but you have to be very careful in how you spend your money. A minor, mid range kitchen remodel might include small updates like replacing the drawer, door fronts, and hardware on cabinets, as well as new appliances, flooring, and sink and faucet, plus a fresh coat of paint. That’s estimated to cost about $23,452 this year, but the return on it will be about 77.6 percent. This is also one of those items that will absolutely push a buyer to choose your home over another, so there’s value beyond simple dollars and cents.
4. Siding Replacement. In the past, Remodeling Magazine has grouped all major siding types (excluding stone veneer) together, but this year it has separated them into two categories: fiber-cement and vinyl. Both are popular, durable choices for a home, and both return quite well. Fiber-cement should recoup about 77.6 percent of the $17,008 bill; vinyl returns about 74.7 percent of an estimated $14,359.
5. Vinyl Replacement Windows. Replacement windows can be a huge selling feature, especially if your home is in a neighborhood where a lot of houses still have their original windows. They can be ordered with a myriad of design elements to make them just as charming as the windows you’ll be replacing, down to the tiniest details. You’ll be looking at a cost of around $17,641 for the project, but you’ll recover about 72.3% of that when you sell your home. As a bonus, the new homebuyers will have plenty of incentive to choose your home, since energy efficiency is still a major decision point.

Kitchens, Baths, and Decks: Top Home Selling Points

 

When it comes time to sell your home, you obviously want it looking its best so that prospective buyers will fall in love with it. This may lead to you consider touching up or remodeling parts of your home to make the best possible impression. If you’re trying to figure out the best parts of the home to give special attention to, there are a few places that buyers are more likely to pay attention to than others. Chief among these are the kitchen, the bathrooms and decks.

Considering the Kitchen

A lot of work goes on in the kitchen, so it makes sense that homebuyers want to make sure that the kitchen meets their needs. If your kitchen is dirty, cramped or outdated, that could raise a few red flags. Most potential buyers are looking for a big, open kitchen with modern appliances and usually a few key features like a dishwasher or kitchen island.

Obviously, your home doesn’t need to have all of these things to sell, and it may not even be realistic for you to make those sort of upgrades. Still, it’s possible to find a balance between a small, cramped kitchen and a potential buyer’s dream kitchen. Taking a moment to see how well your kitchen meets that balance can help you to see if there are any tweaks that you could make to improve the likelihood that a buyer will want to purchase your home.

A Focus on Bathrooms

The bathroom is one of the most important rooms in a house, and buyers want to be confident that things will work well in the bathroom when they’re in there. There’s a lot that goes on in the bathroom, though; beyond the obvious, this is also where people get ready in the morning, take their showers or baths, brush their teeth and sound their absolute best when singing along to a favorite song.

Because of this, there’s always a wow factor involved when a potential buyer sees a nice bathroom. This can be a combination of new and nice-looking fixtures as well as cleanliness, lack of obvious mildew or water damage, layout and things like adequate lighting and sufficient mirrors. Most bathrooms only have a limited amount of space to work with, but you’d be surprised how much of a difference you can make with a few tweaks and upgrades.

Enjoying the Deck

Not every home has a deck, but those that do always get oohs and aahs from potential buyers. A lot of homeowners want to be able to enjoy their time outside of their home, and having a deck can make this a lot easier since you can set up tables, chairs, a grill or anything else in a secure and flat area outdoors.

This isn’t to say that you have to build a deck to sell your house, though some sellers actually do make significant changes to landscaping and outdoor areas to spruce things up. If you already have a deck, take the time to make sure it’s recently painted or stained and is otherwise in good condition. A deck can make a big impression, but an ugly or damaged deck can make the wrong sort of impression on your potential buyer.

Sprucing Up the Whole Home

Obviously, there are other parts of the home that you can make changes or updates to if you’re getting ready to sell your home. General repairs, remodels or upgrades can interest potential buyers regardless of where they occur. But take care of any obvious damage, and then focus on the kitchen, bathrooms and decks, before you work on any other big areas.

Most Overrated Smart Home Devices

 

Smart homes are increasingly popular, and there are a wide range of smart home devices on the consumer market these days. These devices can give you greater control over your home, and can protect you from fires, water damage, and break-ins. They may even help you save money and live more comfortably over the long run. With that said, not every smart home device is a winner.

While a lot of smart devices earn points for the “neat” factor, some just won’t see that much use once you get over the novelty of them. In other cases, the items themselves will be used, but the added “smart” features will be completely ignored. While your mileage may vary, here are some of the smart home devices that you’re most likely going to consider overrated once the novelty wears off.

Smart Microwaves

There are many smart appliances making their way into modern homes, and each brings something of a unique take on how to implement smart home connectivity. Unfortunately, most smart microwaves just don’t seem to have a compelling argument for use. On paper the ability to customize cooking for different ingredients and tie in voice controls for the microwave seems interesting. But since most people rely almost exclusively on timed cooking in the microwave, the custom options probably fall outside of what most people use their microwaves for. Voice control is also unlikely to be a major selling point since a lot of microwave use involves single-touch preprogrammed times anyway.

Automatic Watering Solutions

Maintaining a garden using automated watering solutions sounds like a great idea. The problem is that there are already mechanical timers and other solutions that can handle this without adding another connected device. There are undoubtedly some people who will find some of the more advanced automated features in these watering solutions useful. But most won’t get much use out of these features, so these products don’t offer enough of an advantage over non-smart alternatives to justify the cost or hassle of installation.

Tacked-On Smart Appliances

There are a number of useful appliances that add Bluetooth connectivity and dedicated apps as something of a tacked-on function that adds a little bit to the cost. These washers, cookers, and other appliances work largely the same with or without the smart features, and in the end, there simply isn’t that much in the way of added functionality provided by the Bluetooth connection. Most of the time you’ll be better off saving the little bit of extra money and sticking with the non-smart version of these devices.

Smart Hubs

Before you complain, hear us out; this isn’t talking about smart speakers that act as hubs or similar devices that performs a unique function (like providing access to a digital assistant) while also controlling multiple devices around your home. This is specifically referring to devices in your home that only act as smart hubs, often requiring a dedicated app to program and interact with them. While some of these hubs may have nice interfaces in their apps, you can usually get more out of a multifunction device like Google Home or Amazon Echo than from a dedicated single-purpose smart hub.

Unique Home Remotes

Remote controls for smart home devices range from basic items such as IR remotes and key fobs to more unique pieces that could be considered works of art in their own right. Unfortunately, the more complex of these remotes are often a bit lacking when it comes to overall functionality. Typically designed with specific devices in mind, you’ll usually be better off with more general-purpose remotes, assuming that you don’t rely on voice control or smartphone apps instead.

 

Pantry Organization for Preppers

 

With more people staying at home and avoiding crowds, a lot of homeowners are turning to home prepping as a way to cut back on trips to the store and avoid shortages. Unfortunately, many people find themselves overwhelmed. Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what to stock up on. And once the pantry is fully stocked and prepped, maintaining it, and finding what you need among all the other things, can be difficult. Organization is a key part of successful prepping, so if you want to have an effective pantry, here are a few organizational tips to keep in mind.

What Should You Store?

First things first: What should you store in your pantry? Obviously, you want things that are shelf-stable and will last a while. Pick up or prepare staples like canned vegetables, canned fruits, crushed tomatoes and dry goods like pasta, rice and beans. Add cooking supplies like cooking oil, flour and cornmeal, plus sweeteners like sugar and honey. Beyond that, round things out according to your family’s tastes. This is where you add your taco shells, your pasta sauces, cereals, popcorn, condiments and dressings, canned meats and anything else that you know your family uses regularly. If you have pets, you can also set aside a section of your pantry for pet food as well.

Organizing for Easy Access

When you start organizing your pantry, don’t just stick things wherever you can find a space for it. Take everything out, clean the area so that you’re starting fresh, then put things back in a reasonable and organized way. Group similar items, like different types of canned vegetables, together so that everything is easy to find. Avoid just shoving a bunch of things together to make more room, since that will cause confusion and make some of your items a lot harder to find when you’re looking for them.

Label Everything

Place labels on your shelves once you have everything organized so you’ll know what goes in any particular space in the pantry. That doesn’t mean that you have to micromanage and label each individual type of item, of course; create categories like “Jelly” and “Vegetables” to simply mark the general area where those items go. If you want to be really efficient with your labeling, take the time (or recruit family members to help) and place an easy-to-read sticker or label on the top or front of each item, and write the expiration date on it for reference.

Remember FIFO

Where a lot of people run into problems is rotating stocked items as new items are bought or made. Keep the FIFO principle in mind as you restock your pantry: First In, First Out. New items should always go to the back, allowing the older items in the front to be used first. As you take items out of the pantry, move up the items behind them so that they’re closer to the front and you have room to place things behind them later.

Shelving and Storage Additions

If you need to add shelving or other storage types to your pantry area, try to do so in a way that makes stocking and access easier. Standalone shelves that you can walk behind or rollout shelves that you can pull toward you make it a lot easier to place new items at the back, while sliding shelves or rotating units make it easy to reach stored items that otherwise might be hard to get to.

Emergency Storage

In general, your pantry should be filled with items that you’re actually going to use and that will be rotated out over time. If you really want to make sure that you’re good in case of a disaster, though, you can set aside a space for some additional emergency storage as well. Consider this sort of a “backup pantry” and focus on items with very long shelf lives such as freeze-dried rations, vacuum-sealed grains and bottled water. You should check expiration dates at least once or twice a year and move items about to expire to your main pantry, or use them for activities such as camping trips, hiking excursions or other adventures.

Attic Ventilation Basics

 

When you think of your home, the last thing you probably imagine is that it can breathe. Well, maybe not literally breathe, but it does have a way of moving air in and out, whether you like it or not. One of the most important, and intentional, places for this to happen is in your attic. Attic ventilation is key to exceptional climate control in your home. This may seem a bit counter-intuitive; wouldn’t you want to keep all the warm air trapped up there when it’s cold?

Attics and Heat Retention

In an unfinished attic, the insulation that lays on top of your living areas is generally what keeps your home warm. The space above that is kind of a heat sink, just a place for the warm air in the summer (and, on a bright day, in the winter) to collect and move out of your living space. Since you can’t really have a safe indoor space without a roof on it, it makes sense to have a holding space that keeps all the warm and moist air tucked out of the way.

But the more of that hot air that accumulates in your attic, the warmer your home can become. In the summer, that excess heat can cause your shingles to age prematurely. In the winter, extra heat may not seem like a bad thing, but hot attics with poor rafter insulation can cause rapid roof snow melts, which turn into ice dams when the water refreezes at night. On top of that, warm air can hold a lot more moisture than cooler air; that moisture is the absolute enemy of wood, especially in an unfinished space. In short, overheated attic spaces aren’t great for your house, inside or out.

Attic Vents to the Rescue

Attic vents were developed to help deal with this problem of too much heat accumulating in unfinished attics, where it doesn’t belong. There are many different kinds on the market today, but they all have the same end goal of moving cooler outside air into your attic and pushing that hotter air out (known as the stack effect).

When you’re looking for an attic vent, remember that it’s more than just the exit vent; you’ll need vents to bring cool air in, too. In many homes, these intake vents come in the form of soffit vents. These simple, easy to install vents let cool air come in to replace the hot air in your attic, which escapes through either a roof-mounted vent or a gable-mounted vent. That’s how a house breathes: soffit vents bring in cool air and roof vents let out warm air. In and out, in and out, helping to keep the climate in your home much more stable and drier than an exit vent alone would allow.

In older homes, enlarging your gable vents may be enough to create the airflow you need, especially if your home is short on overhangs to install soffit vents. How much to enlarge them is pretty subjective, but a good rule of thumb is that you should have one square foot of attic ventilation per 300 square feet of ceiling space. A lot of factors can influence this number, but it’ll never be lower than 1:300.

Is It Safe to Hire In-Home Workers?

As a part of maintaining good social distance, many people are limiting who they bring into their homes. But this can lead to a bit of anxiety when you need to bring in some extra help to do jobs around the house. Plumbers, electricians and other contractors can’t do their jobs without access to your home’s internal space, but is it safe to bring workers inside when they also have to visit other homes and businesses as a part of their job?

Contractors want to keep themselves and their crew safe on the job, so almost any contractor you hire can be expected to follow appropriate safety protocols while in your home. With that said, there are things that you can do to help ensure that everyone remains safe when you have to bring in workers for necessary tasks around the house.

Necessary Questions

Before hiring a contractor or anyone to work inside your house, take a few moments to ask about their safety policies. You can ask about things such as whether they or their crew wear masks or ventilators when on the job or while dealing with customers. You can expect most contractors to have a safety and masking protocol in place, though it’s possible that you may encounter one or two who don’t want to take these precautions on the job. Asking them a few simple questions can help you identify those contractors and workers who will respect your desire to stay safe, and who will be careful the entire time that they’re in your home.

Cleaning and Sanitizing

Before contractors and in-home workers are scheduled to show up, take the time to clean up the area where they’ll be working and sanitize any surfaces that they’re likely to come into contact with. This makes it easier for them to do their jobs safely. It also demonstrates that you are willing to show others the same considerations that you wish to be shown as well. Some contractors will sanitize the areas they work in at the end of the day as a courtesy, but if they don’t, then you should carefully sanitize the area after any workers have left each day.

Masking and Distancing

Ideally, any workers who are in your house will wear a mask or other protection while they are inside. At the same time, you and your family should put a mask on whenever you’re in the same part of the house where work is going on. Additionally, while you should stay away from work areas whenever possible, it’s important to maintain proper social distance from workers when you do have to go into that part of the house. If you need to talk to the contractor or other workers, be sure to do it from at least a 6-foot distance or take the conversation outside if the work is happening in an area where proper distance is difficult to maintain.

Post-Work Cleanup

Once work is wrapped up and the work crew is gone, be sure to check the work area to see if there is any additional cleanup needed. Most if not all of the cleaning should have been done by the workers while wrapping up, but it’s possible that some materials will remain that need to be disposed of. Wear gloves and a mask when handling any packing material or other items that were left behind by the work crew. You should also sanitize the entire work area unless you know for sure that the workers sanitized everything just before they left. While it may seem like extra work, it helps to ensure that there aren’t any contaminated surfaces left behind.

Painter’s Masks: A Primer

One of the best things about owning your own home is how much you can do to make it your own. Although big jobs like laying tile and building decks might be more than you’re ready for, a simple and easy way to make a big change to the atmosphere of a place is to give it a paint job.

Of course, before you even pick up that big brush, it’s important to have all the safety equipment you’ll need on hand. Many paints contain a variety of particles that can become airborne and get inhaled, which is not very good for your lungs. That’s why painter’s masks are absolutely not optional.

Surgical Masks Versus Painter’s Masks

By now, most people are pretty familiar with paper face masks. While paper masks may all look the same, there are actually some pretty major differences between surgical masks and painter’s masks.

Surgical masks, which are generally sold for medical purposes, offer little to no protection from inhaling airborne particles. They’re only good at preventing you from exhaling germs onto someone else. This is why you don’t see surgical masks for sale in the same department as painting and sanding masks; they simply don’t do the same job.

Painter’s masks, which can also be made from a paper-like material, are specifically designed to prevent particles from penetrating their surface and getting into your lungs. Also commonly known as dust masks, these masks are actually filtering devices and offer various degrees of filtration, much like the air filters you use in your furnace.

Mask Ratings: What Do They Mean?

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has very specific ratings to help painters and other professionals determine exactly what type of mask to use in a given situation. It’s not uncommon for a professional painter to have a variety of filtering masks on hand for different working conditions. For most homeowners, there are two main factors to consider:

• Oil Resistance. The “N” in an “N95” means the mask isn’t oil proof at all. You might not think that’s a problem with painting, but if you’re working with any kind of coating that’s oil-based, using a mask with no oil proofing is the same as not using a mask at all. The letter rating is vital to your safety. N, as already stated, means no oil-proofing, R provides up to eight hours of oil-resistance, and P can remain oil-proof for more than eight hours at a stretch.
• Filtration. The number part of the mask’s rating is all about the percentage of one micrometer particles that are being removed from the air coming into your face, based on clinical trials. A 95 rating filters 95 percent of these tiny particles, a 97 filters 97 percent of particles, and 100 is akin to a HEPA filter, removing 99.9 percent of those airborne particles.

For most homeowner projects, a 95 percent filtration mask is adequate protection, but if you’re working in a home that is known to have lead, asbestos or other fine and dangerous particles, you may need a more powerful filtering device.

Enter the Cartridge Respirator

Cartridge respirators are tight fitting masks with removable filtration cartridges that offer more protection than a basic dust mask. Although the rating system is essentially the same, cartridge respirators can also filter out harmful vapors and particles smaller than one micrometer. When choosing a cartridge respirator, you can grab one that will allow you to stack filter cartridges, and thus filter a range of environmental hazards all at once.