How do you define “home?” For some of us, “home” is where we grew up as children, no matter where we moved to as adults. For others, “home” is wherever our toothbrush happens to be! My wife and I, we like to travel from time to time on vacation, but we are essentially folks who like to put down roots and enjoy ourselves right in our own little house. My wife’s sister, however, she likes to travel around and “see the world,” not staying anywhere very long.
We found a website that talks about how different people are in their attitudes towards home; the website calls the different types of people growers and nomads. The website is called growersandnomads.com. It really is a very interesting site, with links to blogs and stories from a lot of different folks with different tastes and opinions. All of these different people make up the growers and nomads team, and I think they’ve done a fine job of creating a lively and informative site. I especially like the link to the Home Improvement Tools that they provide. That link goes to a wizard that helps you to figure out what the costs of repairs and remodeling might be. It also takes you to some informational links that helps you to learn about the basic systems of your home.
My wife likes to spend a lot of time thinking about ways she could be decorating and furnishing our home to make it look more like “us” and less like “flea market.” I have to admit we have a lot of hand-me-downs from family members that we have been using for a very long time, and we certainly have a strange eclectic mix of furnishings in our home. The biggest problem we have had in decorating is that she likes the country/traditional style but I like the modern style, and those two styles are hard to reconcile when buying new furniture! So for the most part we have been settling for “functional” because of the price tag involved - money is tight, so price has always been a big issue from the beginning. It would be great if the item looked good, but function and price are the number one considerations!
My wife has been looking for a great looking storage bench to put in the mud room, where people could sit down and put their shoes/boots on or off as they are coming or going. She is always reminding people to please remove their shoes before coming into the house, to reduce the amount of dirt that gets tracked in.
She also has been looking for coat racks to buy, as she seems to think we don’t have quite enough closet space. I have to agree that once we get all of our coats put into the closets there doesn’t seem to be any room for shirts, pants, sweaters, dresses, etc. So she is probably right about trying to find solutions to that situation too!
When she puts her mind to finding something specific that she wants to buy, she likes to use the shopwiki.com website. Unlike most shopping search engines, the shopwiki website searches throughout the entire Internet and brings up all of the results - not just the results of their paid advertisers. So she gets a lot more results to look at, and has a better chance of finding exactly what it is she really wants.
The local stores have a very limited supply of lighting fixtures, and my wife and I want to buy some new outdoor lighting fixtures for our house. We’d like to replace the lights on either side of the front door, and on either side of the garage door, and a nice lamppost at the end of the driveway.
Living far out in the country however, there really is not a large variety of stores to choose from, and we really don’t want to spend a lot of time going from store to store, looking for what we like. So we are doing our preliminary “window shopping” for our new lighting fixtures on the Internet.
We’ve found quite a few nice lighting fixtures that we like and I’ve bookmarked the webpages for us to be able to go back and look at them again for future comparison against other fixtures we might find. The pages I’ve bookmarked are from the farreys.com website are:
Forecast lighting, Maxim lighting, and Fine Art lamps,
