Abandon Nest

Part of living on your own is having to make big purchases every once in a while. As such, there will come a day where you have to buy a major home appliance for your house or apartment. Now, don’t panic. Appliances are generally designed and manufactured well. It’s likely that you’ll pick a durable unit no matter what. However, there are 3 things that you absolutely should pay attention to if you want to get the most bang for your buck.

• Brand - As a long term measure of quality, you can’t go wrong with looking at an appliances brand. Companies that have been making appliances well for years and years definitely have an advantage over those that are new to market. Think of it this way. If someone walked up to you and said that Ferrari and Hyundai are both making new cars completely from scratch, then asked you to pick one, what would you say? I’m betting you’d take the Ferrari. Picking an appliance is very much the same. LG is like the Scion, cheap and flashy, whereas GE units are like Mercedes, overengineered and more expensive than average.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have company coming this weekend. As such, I thought it would be a good time to point out the things you should do to prepare for people coming to your house/apartment/trailer. Here’s a simple checklist that anyone can go through to make sure the big things are covered.

• Vacuum the floors
• Clean the toilet
• Clean the mirrors in the bathroom
• Remove incriminating items from the bathroom counter top
• Scrub the stovetop
• Put away dishes and clean dirty ones
• Make the bed
• Hide dirty clothes
• Stash personal financial information
• Clear the table so that dinner can be served easily
• Replace the toilet paper with a fresh roll
• Mop if you have one
• Arrange your bookshelf
• Turn on the air conditioning (or heat) to bring the temperature to 72 degrees F

So that about sums it up I think. Pay attention to your surrounding and attempt to replace the things that seem like they’re somewhere they shouldn’t belong. Good luck on entertaining your guests!

So I’m not going to lie. I hate cleaning. I probably hate cleaning more than anything else (other than bugs, but that’ll be for another day). Let me start by saying this. I moved into my apartment at the end of February and I just bought a vacuum cleaner today. That shows a serious disdain for vacuuming, huh?

Anyways, I decided today that I had to buy a vacuum. It was a necessity that I was missing and my apartment carpeting was starting to look dingy. I decided to start (and hopefully end) my adventure at WalMart, home of everything you could ever want.

After wandering aimlessly for a few minutes (which people tend to do in Wal-Mart), I finally arrived upon the household products and cleaning aisle. Here I was, staring at a row full of vacuum cleaners. I automatically ruled out about half of them as too expensive ($200+). I’m not a fan of spending money on things I hate. So I was left with about 15 vacuums to choose from.

I knew that I wanted a bagless unit, because I didn’t want to have to buy bags for it. Again, why spend the money? So that narrowed my choices down to about 10. By now I was already looking at the cheapest units. Their claim to fame was that they were “under 12 pounds,” which is all well and good if you’re going to be hauling your vacuum up and down stairs, but I wasn’t going to be. However, I figured I’d give them a shot. Dismounting the cheapest vacuum from its rack, I immediately noticed how flimsy and unreliable I felt. It was definitely light, but it felt cheap. I decided I would have to move up.

Read the rest of this entry »