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Here at the Lennar Open Door blog, one of our favorite home websites (other than Lennar.com!) is BrightNest. They really, really want us to be happy in our homes! Here’s a great new article about how to keep the dust out of your bedrooms. Thank you, BrightNest!
No matter how hard we clean, dust always comes back. Hands down, the worst place to let it accumulate is your bedroom. Breathing in dust mites and allergens for eight straight hours a night? No thanks!
Luckily, there are ways to reduce dust in your bedroom and remove it more effectively. Fighting dust is a battle that you can win!
Here are some ways to keep dust out of your bedroom:
Wash pillowcases and sheets weekly. If you’re only going to do one thing to reduce dust in your bedroom, do this. Wash your pillows and bed linens once a week. Tip: To completely eradicate dust mites, wash your sheets at 130 degrees or higher.
Decrease surface area. The fewer surfaces you have in your bedroom, the fewer places dust has a chance to collect. Go minimalist with your bedroom décor by clearing away knickknacks, decorations and furniture that aren’t serving a clear purpose.
Clean with a damp cloth. Dusting with a dry microfiber cloth is a great start, but if you really want to remove dust from all surfaces, dampen the cloth. Surface-clean your bedroom once a week with the damp cloth, including all wood or metal furniture. Tip: Don’t forget about windowsills!
Rearrange your furniture. Take a quick survey of the furniture in your bedroom. Is any of it upholstered? If it is, consider removing it or swapping it out with another piece of furniture in your home. Dust mites love heavy fabric and upholstery.
An important part of keeping a healthy home is keeping it clean. This article from Mother Nature Network points out 9 common mistakes that could be complicating the process, and getting in the way of keeping your home as clean as it can be.
Our obsession with cleaning is a curious beast. Surely it’s born from an ancient urge to avoid the things that make us sick, but we’ve taken it to a whole new neurotic level. One so extreme, in fact, that it may actually be making us sick! But we love to clean, and within moderation, a clean place feels pretty nice.
You would think that keeping things spotless is a simple endeavor, but no. In our quest for hyper hygiene we’ve ended up making everything so complicated that removing dirt is no longer as straightforward as it could be. The following mistakes are just a few of the ways in which we may be making more of a mess than we started with:
Loading the dishwasher incorrectly. From where you position dishes with crusted carbohydrates to how you place utensils, many are the common mistakes made while loading the magic box that cleans the dishes. Three basics:
When done improperly the first time, dishwasher-seared glued-on gunk is even harder to clean the second time around.
Being indiscriminate with natural cleaners. So at first there were natural cleaners, and then the chemical revolution happened, and we started cleaning with all kinds of noxious concoctions. Now many people have returned to natural cleaners, but we skipped the passed-on know-how along the way. Compared to the chemical big guns, vinegar and baking soda and their all-natural friends seem like mild contenders – but while they may be less toxic, they still have plenty of punch. Rather than just using vinegar and baking soda to clean every surface, for example, make sure to research which ingredients are good for what; you will find that in fact, vinegar might ruin your stone countertops. (Acidic ingredients like lemon and vinegar can leave notable etch marks in stone.)
Cleaning windows on a nice sunny day. It seems that sparkling windows might best be achieved on a bright day, but in fact, streaky windows are likely what you will get. In heat and light, window cleaner evaporates too quickly and leaves the god-forbidden streaks that we all strive to steer clear of. Instead, clean windows in the early morning or on cloudy days.
Using general spray cleaners on electronics. Electronic screens are not windows, so don’t use window spray on them, and same goes with basic multi-purpose cleaners. Electronics like television, mobile phones and computers are delicate little flowers that can be damaged by general cleaning products, and fibers from paper towels can create tiny scratches. Instead use a microfiber cloth – either from your cleaning supplies or one intended for eyeglasses – and gently wipe, spray the cloth with a fine mist of water first for stubborn dust. Other tools that are safe to employ include cotton swabs and toothbrushes for nooks and crannies, canned air, and when all else fails, spray cleaners designed specifically for electronics.
The U.S presidential election of 2016 is still fourteen months away. But if you’re planning to sell your home anytime soon, this article from The Wall Street Journal explains why sooner may be better than later, based on recent data indicating that it might be harder to sell your home during an election year.
Can a looming election make it more difficult to sell your home? Yes – particularly if the contest is close.
In a paper published last year in the British Journal of Political Science, Princeton economist Brandice Canes-Wrone and her co-author Jee-Kwang Park used data from Zillow.com to look at housing sales during 73 U.S. gubernatorial elections in 35 states from 1999 to 2006. They found that in election years, home sales declined between two-tenths and three-tenths of a percent.
That might seem small, but the impact, they note, is comparable to “that of other, well-established influences on housing markets” such as a standard deviation decrease in per capita income growth.
The likely cause, says Dr. Canes-Wrone, is uncertainty, the notion being that house hunters are more reluctant to buy if they’re unsure how an upcoming election will affect their financial fortunes.
Bolstering this contention, she observes, is the fact that the study found the election effect was especially pronounced in the case of competitive races. In elections where the winner received less than 55% of the vote, home sales fell by between a third and a half of a percentage point.
In a separate analysis from 2012, real estate site Movoto uncovered a similar effect using data from the California Realtors Association to look at presidential elections.
During your life as a homeowner, it’s common to hear compliments from your friends about things like your entry foyer, your kitchen cabinets, your sofa or the setup of your TV. But when it comes to things in your home, the coffee table typically gets very little recognition. Maybe that’s because it’s usually covered with stuff. This article from BrightNest takes a look at four different types of coffee tables, and what they say about you.
Is your actual coffee table is hidden beneath boxes of takeout, empty fortune cookie wrappers and a half dozen to-go cups? Congrats, you have a takeout table! No judgment here, takeout is delish.
But, this is likely a sign of larger food organizational problem. Clear the table of all food, and then it might be time to take a look at your refrigerator. Chances are, you have old food in your fridge that needs clearing out.
If your coffee table is spotless like an untouched snowy field, you may be neat to the point of uninteresting.
A coffee table, like a kitchen, is often a heart of the home. It’s where all the living happens: conversations with guests, dinners with your boo, or a glass of wine after a long day. Warm up this space by neatly stacking a couple coffee table books and placing design piece on top, like a piece of driftwood from a beach vacation or a decorative candle. A little design goes a long way!
This past weekend, the city of Portland, Oregon officially opened its newest bridge across the Willamette River. In a town known for green living, walkability and bicycle-friendliness, it only makes sense that Tilikum Crossing is designed for walking and biking, or riding a bus, lightrail or streetcar train…but not for private vehicles. This article from CityLab reports on how this new bridge is changing the way other cities around the nation are planning for their own futures.
Leah Treat, director of the Portland Bureau of Transportation, says “the city is abuzz.”
“I think this is a very defining moment for us in terms of how we want the city to grow,” she tells CityLab. “We have really ambitious goals of reducing carbon emissions, getting people to take transit or walk or bike. It’s just a perfect symbol of our values in this community.”
Tilikum has become a symbol to those outside Portland, too. Cities across the country are turning to shared-use or even pedestrian-only bridges as a way to provide more balanced transportation options. When the U.S. Department of Transportation issued its proposed budget earlier this year, the cover image wasn’t an open highway or an interstate cloverleaf – it was Tilikum.
“For urban areas that are growing across the country, this is a great example of supplying convenient, easy, transportation options,” says Treat. “We’re increasingly seeing people adopting bicycling, walking, and transit as the way to get around.”
The city’s ambitions for Tilikum go beyond mobility. Treat says developers have wanted to connect the Southwest Waterfront knowledge district (home to Portland State and Oregon Health & Science University) with the emerging “crafter-maker-doer” economy on the Central East Side. New housing units, jobs, and businesses are expected to emerge on both sides of the bridge, with growth on one side supporting the other.
Lennar is proud to be named once again on Fortune Magazine’s list of Fastest-Growing Companies. The new list for 2015 is the 19th annual in the series, which looks at three-year profit, revenue, and stock growth of public companies. In this article, Chris Matthews of Fortune highlights the reasons why real estate-related companies were able to have a strong impact on this year’s list.
Real estate in America has turned around to such an extent that four of the fastest growing companies (Standard Pacific, M/I Homes, Toll Brothers, and Lennar) in America are home builders, while another five are building materials companies (Eagle Materials, Patrick Industries, PGT, Caesarstone Sdot-Yam, and Deltic Timber). So what led to this resurgence?
Home prices began to recover in 2012, and have continued to surge ever since, with the Case-Shiller index showing home prices rising 30% nationwide since the housing market bottomed early that year. As home prices recovered, so did Americans’ balance sheets.
This paying down of debt (or discharging it in bankruptcy) combined with the recovery of home prices meant that Americans could finally start to think about buying new homes. For builders who survived the financial crisis, the stage was set for a renaissance.
Demographics are on these companies’ side too. The single largest demographic group in the country are echo-boomers who are now in their early twenties and just entering prime home-buying age. And this is good news for the economy too, as investment in residential real estate usually accounts for a large share of total economic output each year. As homebuilders continue to recover, it should lead to faster growth and good jobs for blue collar Americans who have been shut out of the economic recovery.
[See the full list of Fortune‘s 100 Fastest Growing Companies]
According to Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen, interest rates will most likely rise this year. “If the economy evolves as we expect, economic conditions likely would make it appropriate at some point this year to raise the federal funds rate target,” Yellen said, adding that Fed officials expect growth “to strengthen over the remainder of this year and the unemployment rate to decline gradually.” This article from CNBC takes a look at the effect rising interest rates could have on the housing market, and those looking to purchase homes.
When it comes to interest rates, what goes down eventually must go up.
And as interest rates begin moving back up to more “normal” levels, that could spell trouble for home prices.
When the bottom fell out of the housing market in 2007, the Federal Reserve responded by pushing borrowing rates to record low levels. Those very low interest rates helped the housing market get back on its feet by making it cheaper for buyers to own a home. As of this summer, the average selling price of a single-family home has made up all the ground lost to the housing bust.
Now, if interest rates go back up to more normal levels, the cost of buying a house will also rise. That could put pressure on home prices, which have bounced back more than 50 percent since bottoming out in early 2012.
For homebuyers who lock in relatively low rates now, the cost of homeownership is still pretty affordable – but a lot depends on where you live.
When most of us think of bookshelves, we usually think in terms of rectangles. The wall is basically a rectangle, so the bookshelf should be a smaller version of that rectangle, right? But there are some amazingly talented designers in the world today who are taking a much more creative approach to the appearance, shape and functionality of bookshelves, and this collection of photos from Bored Panda highlights some of the most unique. Read on!
Despite the advent of e-books, many of us still value the tactile experience of flipping through a paper book. These creative bookshelves, then, are the perfect places to store our collections of little literary treasures.
There’s nothing wrong with a heavy, old-school bookcase, but most of these bookshelves cater to modern sensibilities, using creative and diverse designs to become interior décor statements in their own right.
A Lennar “Everything’s Included” home already includes many of the features homebuyers need and want most in their new home. But many new homeowners can be tempted to fill their homes with other items like brand new furniture, new dinnerware, new lamps and other fun new things that can cost a lot of money. This article from U.S. News offers some tips on how to save money on some of those items by purchasing them from secondhand stores.
There is great joy to be found when moving into your first apartment or your first home. You finally have space all to yourself. You can decorate how you want! You can spend your time how you want!
Sadly, that initial burst of joy is often deflated by the realization that you need a lot of little things when you first move into a place of your own. For many people, that means an online shopping spree on Amazon or a trip to the local department store.
Instead, consider making your first stop the local secondhand store. Many of the items you need to set up an apartment or a home for the first time or in a new area can be found at a secondhand shop, which means you’ll cut back on that big burst of spending that can really hurt your wallet.
Fortunately, most secondhand stores have a selection of silverware on hand. You might not have perfect matching silverware, but you’ll have more than enough for your needs at an inexpensive price.
Dishes are also a dining necessity. Again, it’s easy to find plenty of plates and bowls at a secondhand store for a pittance, though you may not find a matching set. Still, you’re far better off buying two or three partial sets for pennies than shelling out the money for a single matching set from a store.
Glasses and cups for consuming beverages are another household essential that’s perfect for a secondhand purchase. As with silverware and dishes, you’ll likely not find a matching set, but what you will find are many cups and glasses to fill your cupboards at an inexpensive price.
A toaster or toaster oven can easily be found at secondhand stores in working order, and can make for a valuable addition to your kitchen to help you with food preparation.
Lamps are simple items that are often found in abundance at secondhand stores. All varieties of lamps, from desk lamps and floor lamps to clip lamps and table lamps, can usually be found secondhand at a very reasonable price.
You can often find simple dining tables at most secondhand stores, and they often come with simple, solid chairs. The key thing to remember is you can buy an inexpensive starter set, and then upgrade later when you have money to easily do so.
