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Photo: jolien_vallins, Flickr

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Photo: Valkri

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Photo: Cool Nails Art

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Photo: dmuth, Flickr

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Stick a fork in it. Photo: Nait.Ca

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Fido can relax on the couch as long as he'd like with this handy tip! Photo: Canine Supply Info

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The first step of wallpaper removal: NEVER put it up to begin with.

Please. If you are thinking of moving out of your house in the next century some time, don't hang wallpaper. You might think that there is no way people won't love your paper, but trust me it is a guarantee that someone will hate it. Remember how stylish the dark background wallpaper with teeny tiny flowers was a decade or so ago, or the large striped paper with a 12" border around the ceiling that made the room look like a big hatbox, or the cows and ducks in pastels phase, which screams outdated like your parents avocado green appliances. Yeah, how many of the people who hung those wallpapers now regret it. Or to be more accurate, how many current owners of those houses regret it.

You don't want to be that previous owner. You know that one that is talked about at dinner parties and neighborhood gatherings. The previous owner with no skills and even less taste.

One day you will sell your house. And the new owner will be faced with your wallpapering decisions. They will wonder how you could have ever thought it was worthy of hanging on the wall. Then when they are removing it and it has adhered to the wall and tears the plaster off in chunks, they will curse you.

If you can't follow this advice, if you just have your heart set on hanging wallpaper, please, for the love of all things holy, don't paper every single room. Confine yourself to one or two rooms.

Okay, so now you need to remove wallpaper. Where do you begin? Hopefully whatever wallpaper you are trying to remove has been hung properly.

There are many different ways to remove wallpaper. Some people use a steamer, a method I personally don't reccommend. Unless you like to be aggravated and to burn yourself periodically.

Step One: Acquire your tools

You will need:

A scraper, I prefer to use a five-in-one tool above all over scrapers. (That link will being you to a site that sells them 5 for under $30. You can buy them and invite your friends over to help!)

A product such as DIF wall paper remover

Paper tiger, or something similar to score the wallpaper. If you are doing a small area using the pointy side of your 5-in-1 tool to CAREFULLY score the paper will work fine. But for larger areas you are much better off using a tool designed for the purpose.

A large sponge

Step Two:
Using your paper tiger score your wallpaper. Score it as much as possible. It makes the next steps easier.

Step Three:
Apply the wall paper remover using a roller and apply like you would wall paint. Allow it to sit until it has soaked under the wallpaper. Work in smallish areas because you do not want the remover to dry on the walls.

Step Four:
Pray that the person who installed the wallpaper used sizing so that the wallpaper comes off quickly and easily.

Step Five:
If you are like 95% of the homeowners removing wallpaper you will discover that the person who installed the wallpaper decided to skip the step of applying the sizing to the walls. Now is when you begin swearing. Be creative with your cuss words.

Step Six:

Using your 5-in-1 tool gently scrape the wallpaper off the wall. Gently being the key word. You do not want to cause any more damage to the wall below than is absolutely necessary. You might need to reapply your wallpaper removing product.

Step Seven:

Continue around the room until all the paper has been removed. At this point you might notice that there are bits of wallpaper glue still stuck to the wall. Using your sponge and a bucket of hot water, sponge down the walls to remove the residue.

Step Eight:

Allow the walls to dry for a few days before you do anything else. Depending on how easily the wallpaper came off, you might need to get out some joint compound and patch some ares of your walls.

Now you can decide if you want to wallpaper again or paint.

I am guessing you choose paint.

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Everyone has had the experience of a light bulb breaking off in the socket. Getting the bulb out of the socket can be a real challenge.

Have you ever heard of the potato trick? You take half of a raw potato, push it into the bulb base, and then turn the potato to remove the bulb. I guess this would be effective if I had potatoes on hand, but I usually don't. Also, potatoes can be messy and I picture a lot of moisture, something which doesn't seem like a good idea around electricity.

There are other more effective ways to get the broken light bulb out of the socket. So get out your toolbox.

1) Make sure that you've turned the power off to your light fixture. If it's a lamp, unplug it. If it's an overhead light, turn off the circuit breaker.

2) If you have some sort of work gloves, put them on. If you don't, be very careful. If you're working above your head, put on glasses of some type. You don't want glass shards falling in your eyes.

3) Using your needle-nosed pliers, grab the edge of the metal base of the light bulb and bend it slightly inward.

4) Turn the base in the same direction you'd turn to remove an intact bulb. Psst, that's counter-clockwise.

5) Once you're done, vacuum up the area glass to completely get rid of any glass shards.

But what do you do if the light bulb is screwed deeply into the socket and there is no metal edge to grab? You can try to shove the needle-nosed pliers in between the space of the light fixture and the metal light bulb base, but you risk damaging the light fixture itself. The easiest thing to do is to head back to your toolbox and grab your regular pliers.

1) Insert the pliers into the broken base as far as they can go.

2) Open the pliers so that they're pressing on the inner sides of the metal bulb base.

3) Holding the pliers in this manner, turn them counter clock-wise. The broken light bulb base should come loose.

4) Of course, vacuum up the area when you're done.

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Is your home looking a little tired? Are you dreaming of doing some renovating, but lack the funds to do so? Well, you aren't alone. According to the latest research form Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, so far there is a 12.3% drop in 2009 spending on home improvement projects. This is a slight improvement over the 13.6% drop in 2008. But things aren't expected to get much better any time soon.

Most of us think of home improvements and imagine huge projects that cost buckets of money and lots of time. The truth is that most homes can benefit from smaller projects, from a little attention to detail that often gets neglected. Most often renovations are undertaken because we want our homes to look better and function better.

With this in mind, I've rounded up my favorite tips and tricks to easily improve our homes on a very limited budget:

.

For less than $50:

1) Update bathroom and kitchen faucets. This might seem like a daunting project, but it is really quite simple. Just remember to turn your water supply off before you begin. A new shower head can make all the difference in how you feel about your morning shower, which in turn affects how you feel about your bathroom.

2) Add new hardware to your kitchen cabinets to change the look of your outdated cabinetry. Change brass hardware to brushed nickel for a more modern look.

3) Install new light fixtures to change the entire look of a room. Most can be purchased relatively inexpensively at the big box stores. There is no reason to live with horrible lighting.

For less than $10:

4) Stock up on cleaning erasers. I use them all the time to clean my walls, doors and trim work. I honestly never realized how filthy children are until I had my own. Spending half an hour cleaning off doors where dirty little hands grab them, the walls next to the staircase where they insist on running their hands while they walk up and down the stairs, and the balusters on your staircase, makes a huge difference in how a house looks.

5) Keep touch-up paint on hand. Sometimes the cleaning erasers are not enough. Don't be afraid to pull out your paint and touch up the areas that look less than beautiful. A tool like the Rubbermaid Paint Buddy Touch-Up Tool is perfect to keep on hand. Stock up on several for your home's primary colors. Remember your front door. I generally touch up the paint on my front door every spring. Of course maybe you don't have children who throw rocks and sticks at the door and then kick it every so often just for good measure.

6) Quick-repair those loose cabinet knobs. Cabinet knobs falling off when you pull on them? Most likely the threads inside have been stripped. Fill the hole in the cabinet where the knob screws in with some broken toothpicks and wood glue. Allow it to dry. Screw the knob back on.

For free ... who doesn't love this price?

7) Declutter, declutter, declutter. Did I say declutter? Nothing makes your home feel closed in more than piles of stuff stacked everywhere. View your belongings with a critical eye. If your things aren't useful or don't make you happy in some way, get rid of them.

8) Embrace the things that you can not change. Bright pink bathroom tile? Avocado green appliances? And, no budget to invest in changing them now? Work your decor around what you can't change, rather than try to mask it. Even though you may loathe the tile or appliances, make the room look as though you chose those items on purpose. You will be surprised how much a little shift in attitude can make all the difference.

What small fixes have you used to update the look and functionality of your home, when your budget doesn't allow for a big investment? I'd love to hear from you in our comments!

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Dealing with the mail that comes into my house has become the bane of my existence. I have heard the advice from all the organizational experts, telling me the first thing to do to gain control over the mail clutter is to stop the mail from coming into your house to begin with. Think of it as being eco-friendly too. Save the trees along with your sanity.

Here's a list of websites to help you get control of the junk mail:

1) Direct Market Association They provide their mail preference service to marketers for the sole purpose of removing consumers' names and addresses from the marketers' mailing lists.

2) End the credit card solicitations Register at this site to rid yourself of those endless credit card solicitations.

3) Catalog choice is a website that will let you opt out of unwanted catalogs.

4) Want someone else to handle it all for you? 41pounds will do just that for a fee. Interesting note, the company is named 41 pounds because that is the weight of the junk mail the average American receives every year.

Second, pay your bills online. Are you still paying your bills the old fashioned way, using checks and stamps and envelopes? How quaint. Now stop it. If every U.S. home viewed and paid its bills online, the switch would cut solid waste by 1.6 billion tons a year and curb greenhouse-gas emissions by 2.1 million tons a year.

Have your paychecks directly deposited into your account. Enroll in automatic bill pay with places that do this such as: gym memberships, daycares, and schools. My son's orthodontist had this set up and it was great not to have to think about it every month. Many banks allow you to pay your bills electronically for free. You will still, however, get a paper bill in the mail. Check out this extensive list of companies that will send you a bill electronically instead.

You can go completely paperless by joining a bill pay service. For a fee companies will collect all of your bills and send you email reminders to pay them, which you then do electronically. The US Postal Service has eBillPay for a fee of $5.95 per month. Or check out CheckFree.com

Third, start a trend of using electronic invitations rather than traditional invitations within your circle of friends. There are several different online sites for sending electronic invitations, evites being the most widely used. I find electronic invitations so much easier to keep organized. They come to my email, I reply instantly and add the date to my desktop and iPhone calenders.

I also have a huge wall calendar that I write on so the children and I can see the entire month at a single glance. Nope, can't jet off to Paris this weekend -- we have two baseball games, a birthday party, and swimming lessons. Not that anyone has asked me to jet off to Paris at a moment's notice, but if they did I would instantly know whether I could go. Or not.

Next time: How to organize the non-junk mail that still comes to your home.

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Love the lamp you have but the lampshade has gotten dusty and dirty over the years? My lampshades all took a beating during a recent cross-country move. Instead of running out and purchasing a new shade -- anything but plain white is expensive -- why not remake the lampshade by covering it with some fabric that co-ordinates with your room?

You will need:

Scissors
Spray glue
Paper, for tracing the pattern
Fabric

Step One:
Lay your lampshade down on your craft paper, or the back of wrapping paper. Starting at the seam roll and trace the bottom of your lampshade until you arrive back at the seam. Then roll the lampshade back in the opposite direction and trace the top edge. For the most common style of lampshade, it will be a crescent shape drawing.

Step Two:
Cut out your paper pattern and place it on the underside of your fabric. Add a 1/2" allowance on each side of the pattern for tucking around the edges of the shade. Also make sure to add at least 1/2" to the seamed edge of the pattern so that you can have a smooth finished edge.

Step Three:
Cut out your fabric pattern. Spray your lampshade with the adhesive. Tip: I carried my lampshade outside and sprayed it in the yard.

Step Four:
Carefully lay your shade down on the fabric, lining up the raw edge of the fabric with the seam on the existing shade. I failed to line mine up with the seam and just started the fabric all willynilly. It looks perfectly fine when the light is off, but when you turn the light on you can see the the original seam. Ooops. Live and learn. And also turn both seams to the wall.

Step Five:
Glue the raw edges around to the inside of the shade. I used regular white glue, watered down slightly for this.

Step Six:
Here you can add any sort of embellishments that you would like, ribbon edging, fabric trim, buttons, pom-poms, tassels. I preferred the sleek unadorned look of the fabric.

For very little money -- $3 on the fabric! -- I have a whole new lamp.

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My two bathrooms are the bane of my existence. Cheap, aging fixtures and a whole lotta leaks are just the tip of the iceberg. While, ideally, I'd like to personally steamroller both rooms to smithereens and start over, that's simply not an option budget-wise.

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Do you have a toilet that won't stop running? Do you constantly have to jiggle the handle, or remind other people to do so? That constant running water is adding up to big bucks on your water bill, not to mention the many gallons or water that are being wasted. You would never let your sink run all day and night, most of us even turn off the water while we are brushing our teeth, so why let the toilet continually waste water?

A running toilet can waste two gallons of water per minute, while a silent leak in a toilet can waste up to 7,000 gallons of water per month.

If you are not sure if your toilet is running, turn off the tap behind your toilet. Check the water level in the tank. Leave it for a few hours and then recheck the tank. If the water level has dropped, you have a problem.

There are only so many things that can go wrong inside of your toilet. Fixing your toilet is inexpensive and easy. So easy, in fact, that it doesn't even require tools!

First thing is to check the chain that is connected to the flapper. Is it the right length? Too short and it will prevent the flap from sealing properly. Too long and the chain will often get in the way of the seal.

If the chain checks out okay, most likely you just need to replace the flap assembly that is in the back of your toilet tank. All of the toilet guts that live there can be replaced for about $5. Why yes, 'toilet guts' is a technical term.

Before you begin working on your toilet, you need to turn off the water. There should be a valve on the wall behind your toilet.

Flush your toilet to empty the tank.

Remove the assembly from inside the toilet and bring it with you to your local hardware store. There they will be able to assist you with an identical replacement. I had no idea that there were different types until a few months ago when I went to the store to replace mine and was asked which type I wanted.

Bring the correct assembly home. Install it in your toilet tank, no tools required. Turn the water valve back on.

Your problem is fixed.

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