Check out our great home redecorating tips you can do to your home today. Comment on the blog and let us know which redecorating tip you are going to take advantage of:

• If you’d like your nightstands or end tables to be a little less crowded, replace table lamps with floor lamps when redecorating. They are portable. Table lamps are attractive but take up a good bit of the limited space a table has. There are many elegant choices that you can enjoy while adding the light you need to spruce up your home.
• Mount your TV on the wall. It can free up quite a bit of space. If you follow the directions, this redecorating tip will take a minimal amount of time.
• If you are redecorating your bedroom, consider purchasing furniture that is freestanding. Custom made furniture may look nice but you cannot resell them or take them along when you are moving. Free-standing furnishings also give you more options for redecorating, as they can be moved from room to room, refinished, or sold.
• Painting is an affordable way to give a room a fresh look quickly and easily. Visit a home improvement store to study a variety of paint chips. Choose the ones that appeal to you and have fun. If you wind up not liking the results, you always have the option of painting over it!
• Give your kitchen a personalized appearance. Create a uniform look in the kitchen with attractive containers for all those items on the kitchen counter like flour, sugar and pasta; add a matching tray for oils and vinegars. If your kitchen doesn’t have an island, redecorating with a movable trolley with a big slab of stone or butcher block on top of it.

No matter what your home redecorating project is, be sure to keep everything in perspective. Think hard about the reason for any given project, and consider how it might make your life better or easier. You need to be committed to making home improvements, and it’s important you are putting your time to good use.

Spring is here and that means it is time to start cleaning!

While spring cleaning may not seem like your idea of fun, the wonderful feeling of a clean and organized house is a reward in itself!

The Lawhead Team would like to share some spring cleaning ideas and tips to follow:

• To revive drab drapes, take them down, remove hooks and run them through an air-fluff cycle in the dryer with a damp towel (to attract the dust) for 15 minutes or so. Re-hang them immediately.
• When dusting for spring cleaning, take everything off shelves, tabletops and dressers to dust. Now is also the time to get to all the places you’ve been neglecting throughout the year, including ceiling fans, above kitchen cabinets and baseboards and doorways.
• Next, start cleaning out your garbage cans. Spray them with a hose and dump out the water. Next, spray the inside with a disinfectant spray, scrub with a handled brush and rinse. Leave them upside down to dry.
• Move furniture away from walls and clean underneath.
• Perform a deep cleaning for your floors. Have your carpets professionally cleaned and wax wooden floors.
• Upholstered furniture needs cleaning too. Vacuum pillows, as well as underneath the cushions. Look for stains and clean according to the care label.
• Start cleaning your refrigerator top to bottom. The best cleaner is a combination of abrasive salt and bubbly soda water.
• If there’s a lime buildup around the faucet, lay paper towels over the fixture and soak it with vinegar, letting it set for one hour. The deposits will soften and become easier to remove.
• Cleaning your stove top is easy if you use a toothbrush to remove softened food from around the burners, knobs and dials on the stove top.
• Organize pantry and throw out any expired foods.

You can open windows, let some fresh air in, and ORGANIZE when doing your spring cleaning!

We don’t know about you but as much as we love spring cleaning, we HATE buying cleaning products even more, YUCK! And that smell of bleach, no thank you. We would like to share with our readers how to make all your cleaning products for spring cleaning. Keep reading for some of our favorite recipes:

Wood Cleaner – Equal parts olive oil and white vinegar, shake, spray, and wipe off. The oil makes it shinny and is a dust repellent and the vinegar gets rid of the germs.

Counter Top, window, or any surface cleaner – White vinegar. I use it straight but you can add water if the smell is too strong. A perfect inexpensive solution for spring cleaning!

Shower/bath cleaner – This is our FAVORITE spring cleaning cleaner. Equal parts Dawn dish soap and white vinegar. Shake, spray, and take a break for about 20 minutes (the smell is STRONG). Come back and wipe off. Our shower doors look BRAND new every time we do this.

As you can tell, white vinegar is definitely our friend when it comes to spring cleaning.  We like to use it for everything. Now, if you have done this much work in a day, you deserve a drink!

Happy spring cleaning!

Everyone loves a clean house but sometimes it is close to impossible to keep up with the cleaning.

Check out our 10 tips to a cleaner home with minimal effort and time:

1. Clean dishes as you make dinner. Fill your sink with hot soapy water and add dishes and pans to the sink as you make dinner. While you eat, they will be soaking making it much easier when it comes to cleaning them up.
2. Make a circle in the kitchen to clean. Start to the right of your stove and move clockwise around the room. The stove is usually the dirtiest part of the kitchen so ending with that keeps you from spreading dirt and grease.
3. Clean up your glass shower doors. Rub a teaspoon of lemon oil on glass shower doors twice a month to help water to bead up and roll off.
4. Use a drain cleaner to unclog any slow draining sinks or showers. On a regular basis pour boiling water down the drains to keep your area problem free.
5. While your kids wash up at night, start cleaning up  the bathroom. Wipe the tub, toilet and mirrors and toss out any clutter. Once they are done with the sink, wipe that down too.
6. Use two separate brooms when cleaning – one for indoors and one for outdoors. For inside, choose a broom with finer bristles to pick up smaller dirt particles. A stronger and stiffer bristled broom is better outside for porous surfaces.
7. Eliminate dust bunnies from being swept up in a dust pan by finding a dust pan with a rubber edge.
8. When you wake up in the morning, make your bed first thing! A made up bed makes your bedroom look much cleaner and well-kept.
9. Kitchen sponges are a perfect breeding ground for bacteria. Disinfect yours every night by squeezing it out and microwaving it on high for a minute. If it is smelly, it is time to replace it – no point in cleaning it.
10. Clean top to bottom. If any crumbs or dust on the counter and table fall, they will be swept up when cleaning your floor.

An open house is a chance to showcase your home to potential home buyers who may have seen your home online and want to take the next step. An open house could potentially seal the deal.

The Lawhead Team would like to share some helpful tips to making sure your home is ready for its Open House.

Check out these tips for hosing an open house:

• Clear clutter. When you have too many appliances on the counters in your kitchen or piles of magazines on every flat surface of your living room or too much furniture in your rooms, it turns buyers off because they’re not able to visualize how they will use the space.
• Hire a cleaning service. Buyers won’t notice if your home is spotlessly clean, but they will notice if it isn’t. A cleaning service tackles all those dusty places you might forget: baseboards, tops of picture frames, ceiling fans. A neat and clean home is more attractive to potential homeowners especially during an open house.
• Remove family photos. Buyers need to see a neutral canvas where they can put down their roots instead of viewing your family tree.
• Neutralize odors. Often, you get used to the smells of your home. Ask your real estate professional or a friend for a nose check. Shampoo your carpets before the open house, and if you have pets, give them baths and make sure litter boxes are clean.
• Make repairs. Buyers are looking for the imperfections in your home, so now’s the time to fix that leaky faucet or slow-running drain, replace broken window panes and replace burned out light bulbs. These are noticeable maintenance projects that must be tackled before the open house.
• Buy new towels. Spruce up your kitchen and bathroom for your guests with fresh and decorative linens for the open house.
• Set the table. Stage your dining room table for a nice meal to encourage buyers to imagine what it would be like to entertain in the house. Your best china and a new neutral tablecloth with matching napkins will help with the visualization.
• Enhance curb appeal. Trim your lawn, weed your beds and prune your shrubs for your open house. These small landscaping tasks make a world of difference when trying to make your home sell.
• Organize cabinets and drawers. Storage space is a vital selling point of any property. More is more when it comes to the nooks and crannies of where to put belongings. Cluttered linen closets, kitchen cabinets and bedroom closets make it appear that your home doesn’t have enough storage. Solve this issue by streamlining and organizing all these spaces for your open house.
• Leave. Buyers will feel more comfortable asking questions of your agent at your open house if you’re not hovering in the background. Your Realtor can highlight the positive features of your home without bias. Occupy yourself away from home for a few hours. And if you have pets, take them with you. Some buyers might not feel comfortable around your four-legged friends or might have allergies.

Now is the time for Spring Cleaning! Set a day aside to get your house looking it’s best for the warmer months with the following tips:

• Organize your closet: This is the first step to organizing the rest of your home. Clear out unused clothing and accessories and organize by how you get dressed in the morning. It is also useful to organize your clothes by color and style.
• Shine up your stainless steel: Use a light mist of wax-based aerosol spray once or twice a week. Don’t use too much, you don’t want to soak the surface and make it greasy. Wipe the mist with a clean, lint-free cloth. Don’t use anything abrasive such as Soft Scrub or Scotch Brite pads. This will scratch and ruin the surface.
• Remove oils and marks from walls in your home: Start with a clean cloth or sponge and water. You can add a little dish-washing liquid into the water if you have stubborn wall marks. After cleaning, make sure to rinse the wall afterward with plain water. This is a great once a year spring cleaning thing to do.
• Give your interior a different look: Make a fast easy change with bedding, towels and table linens to create a different mood. You can also switch things out seasonally or whenever you want to play with a certain color or pattern, not just during spring cleaning.
• Clean your carpets: Always take your shoes off when you get home but leave your socks on because your bare feet leave natural oils which attract dirt. For high traffic areas, bring in a professional carpet cleaner 3-4 times a year. If only once a year, make it a point to do this during your spring cleaning activities.
• Reorganize your shelves: Sort your books on your bookshelf so they don’t look uniform. Remove any ripped dust jackets. Line your books horizontally and vertically in a pattern to relieve monotony or rows.
• Take on one task at a time: It’s exciting to get started spring cleaning and sometimes you may tend to get distracted with various projects throughout the house.  It is incredibly helpful and sanity-saving to work on one area at a time.  Inadvertently, piles of stuff will migrate to other rooms in your house, but those can be tackled when you get to them.
• Start at the top and work to the bottom: Let gravity make your job easier by working with it!  Start at the ceiling by dusting the ceiling fan or light fixture then get all the spider webs off the crown molding.  Work your way down the walls, over the furniture, all the way to the baseboards and flooring when spring cleaning.

Do you have some spring cleaning tips? We’d love to hear them! Comment on our blog to tell us your spring cleaning suggestions.

Spring is upon us and who doesn’t want their home looking its best as we come upon the warmer months of the year!  The Lawhead Team would like to share with you some helpful Spring Cleaning Tips:

Come up with a game plan – Jot down the areas of your home that you need to clean, come up with a plan and be sure to budget in time for distractions so you won’t get discouraged after just a few hours spring cleaning.  In essence, make a reasonable plan of attack that has at least a 98% chance of being accomplished!

Make sure you have your supplies first – There is nothing more frustrating than to start a project (or Spring Cleaning) only to find that you’re out of supplies.

Ask for help from your family – Having small tasks to accomplish while growing up gives children a feeling of accomplishment.  Delegate tasks for your children based on their age.  Or, if you wish, you can bring them over to their grandparents while you crank up the music and get cleaning!

Take on one task at a time – It’s exciting to get started cleaning and sometimes you may tend to get distracted with various projects throughout the house.  It is incredibly helpful and sanity-saving to work on one area at a time.  Inadvertently, piles of stuff will migrate to other rooms in your house, but those can be tackled when you get to them.

De-clutter Before Cleaning – It is frustrating to be ready to dust an area only to realize that you have to move 15 knick-knacks, 10 pieces of junk mail, broken crayons and wadded up tissues before you can get started. Save yourself a headache and get rid of the garbage and extraneous clutter before cleaning.

Use storage bins for organization – Instead of just dividing up things into separate piles that will likely get knocked over or mixed up, use plastic bins to keep them organized. Have a bin for garage sale items, items to donate, garbage and things that need to be returned to others.

Start at the top and work to the bottom – Let gravity make your job easier by working with it!  Start at the ceiling by dusting the ceiling fan or light fixture then get all the spider webs off the crown molding.  Work your way down the walls, over the furniture, all the way to the baseboards and flooring.

Get a new look – Since it’s Spring, try switching out heavy, darker items out with lighter and brighter accessories.  You can do this with all the decorations you already have.

Come up with a daily cleaning schedule – After all your hard work is done, make sure that you have a good cleaning schedule in place.  Whether you need to make one from scratch or update the one you have, set small daily tasks that will help keep your house in order until next Spring…or until you decide to deep clean your house again!