Check out our Pinterest link for more great ideas at our library’s Home: Design & DIY board.

This year, nine homes are featured, showing off the skills of five local companies. The Capital Journal will have pictures and some details with the homes the week before the Parade of Homes begins. You can see the houses on a map with a few details here.

If you’re looking for more options and a wider variety of styles, the Kansas City Home Builders Association is sponsoring their own Parade of Homes for Kansas City. Starting April 20th and running through May 5th, you can view over 322 homes throughout the KC area.

These homes are free to tour and open to the public daily from 11 A.M. – 6 P.M. Prices range from $170,000 to $2 million. For more information on the KC Parade of homes or look at the participating companies, visit their website here.

Here is the list of homes in the Topeka area:

Drippe Construction

Dultmeier Homes

• 5304 SW Westport Drive (Timber Ridge)
• 6205 SW 48th Place (Lauren’s Bay)
• 3208 SW Blackjack Circle (Rock Fire)

Heritage Homes

• 4417 SW Forest Ct.

Prellwitz Construction

• 5301 NW Greenhills

Ramsey Custom Homes

• 6819 SW 44th
• 2127 SW Village Hall Road

If you’re like me, you never know where to start for such a colossal task. Luckily, the library has a large selection of books on organizing your life and your home! The Easy Organizer: 365 Tips for Conquering Clutter is a great starting point to plan your spring cleaning. It offers tips on how to stay motivated once you start cleaning and tips on keeping your home organized. Marilyn Bohn makes organizing your home seem like it’s a piece of cake. She gives tips on what to pitch and what to keep with simple explanations behind her reasoning. She takes you room by room, giving ideas on everyday household items that can be recycled to help reorganize and declutter your home.

Some easy tips to help in your quest for a cleaner and more organized home:

1) Never leave a room empty handed. See that glass that has been sitting in the living room all week? On your way to the kitchen? Take it with you. It seems simple, but it helps keep your home clean even after you’ve finished spring cleaning. Repeat every time you leave a room and you notice that you spend a lot less time cleaning.

2) Divide and conquer. Spend a few minutes each day cleaning a small section. Today could be the day you clean that bathroom, the messy living room will always be there tomorrow. By the end of the week, your whole home is nearly done.

Courtesy of Realsimple.com

3) Organize your bedding and sheet sets by folding the flat sheet around the fitted sheet and sticking it in a pillow case. Next time you head to your closet, you can quickly identify sets and not worry about where that fitted sheet is or where you put the rest of the shams.

4) Take your shirts hanging in your closet and flip all the hangars around. After a year or so it’s easy to see what shirts you truly wear and which ones should probably be donated or added to your lawn and paint shirt collection.

For some home organizing tips on-line, check out realsimple.com.

For more books on organizing your home, check out these and others in the home neighborhood here at the library.

All images from www.realsimple.com

Decorating inspiration can come from anything. A decorating scheme can come from something as simple as a pattern, a color, a piece of furniture, or a photograph. But for me, my favorite decorating inspirations come from souvenirs and travel photos that I’ve gatherd over the years. There is something very appealing about showcasing exotic locales or cultures in home decorating because using your own photos and souvenirs creates a very unique and personal style. Using worldly inspirations in your rooms also helps provide an escape from your busy life and will continually remind you of the interesting people and places you have encountered all over the world.

In all honesty, you don’t even have to leave the country to use other cultural influences in your decorating. You can focus on where you would like to travel and decorate accordingly to bring a little bit of the globe home to you. Just spend a little time researching what colors, textures, furniture, lighting, house plants and accessories may fit best into your worldly theme. So stop by the Topeka & Shawnee Co. Public Library’s Home Neighborhood. The collection can help you find a variety of global decorating inspiration. You can transform your house into a beautiful Tuscan villa or English cottage; decorate with bold colors using Indian saris or South American tapestries; or enhance your simple, modern style with Asian influences. You can check out these great resources and more:

All images from www.realsimple.com

For some people, the idea of decorating their home can be so overwhelming it brinks on the edge of nightmarish. What color scheme should be used? How should the furniture be arranged? What’s my decorating style? Should you mix patterns and textures or not? And what exactly does mixing textures mean anyway? Luckily, the Topeka & Shawnee Co. Public Library has all the right answers for you. Just go check out the wonderful resources in the Home Neighborhood to get some easy tips and ideas to find the perfect decorating style for you and your family.

For me, decorating a house can be as simple as painting a piece of furniture, adding a flower arrangement, or changing a few accessories and pillows. For others, decorating a room might be a more complicated process and require a complete remodel. Either way, the library has tons of books to inspire you and help you along the way. There are books that offer design ideas for kitchens, bathrooms, and fireplaces; others that offer tips on painting and choosing your color palette; and others that focus on traditional and modern decorating styles. Here’s just a small example of what you can find on the shelves:

Your next decorating project is hiding on the Library’s shelves. Go visit the Home Neighborhood now to find it. Don’t forget to follow the Topeka & Shawnee Co. Public Library on Pintrest as well for more decorating ideas.

The goal of The Energy-Smart House is to detail everything the homeowner needs to become “energy smart”.  This is accomplished with step-by-step instructions, accompanied by 250 photos and illustrations, on subjects covering Energy Efficiency, Insulation, Windows, Heating and Cooling, and Lighting and Appliances.  Each chapter is written by builders and energy professionals whose articles have appeared in Fine Homebuilding magazine.

That the advice and instructions in this book are authoritative, practical, and easy to follow is not surprising as Fine Homebuilding magazine from Taunton Press has provided quality information about home building and home improvement since 1981.   The Energy-Smart House and Fine Homebuilding magazine are available for check-out, along with other home improvement books and publications, in the Home Neighborhood and the magazine reading room @ your library®

featured image photo credit: Prairie Energy Solutions

October is Energy Awareness Month, and here are some fall and winter energy savings tips from energy.gov.

1. Take advantage of the heat from the sun and open curtains on your south-facing windows during the day to allow sunlight to naturally heat your home. Close them at night to reduce the chill you may feel from cold windows.

2. Cover drafty windows with a heavy-duty, clear plastic sheet on a frame or tape clear plastic film to the inside of your window frames during the cold winter months. Make sure the plastic is sealed tightly to the frame to help reduce infiltration. Install tight-fitting, insulating drapes or shades on windows that feel drafty after weatherizing.

3. When you are home and awake, set your thermostat as low as is comfortable. When you are asleep or out of the house, turn your thermostat back 10° to 15° for eight hours and save around 10% a year on your heating and cooling bills.

4. Seal the air leaks around utility cut-throughs for pipes (“plumbing penetrations”), gaps around chimneys and recessed lights in insulated ceilings, and unfinished spaces behind cupboards and closets. Add caulk or weatherstripping to seal air leaks around leaky doors and windows.

5. Find out what maintenance is required to keep your heating system operating efficiently. Replace your furnace filter once a month or as needed.

6. Keep your fireplace damper closed unless a fire is burning. Keeping the damper open is like keeping a window wide open during the winter. It allows warm air to go right up the chimney. If you never use your fireplace, plug and seal the chimney flue. Check the seal on the fireplace flue damper and make it as snug as possible. Add caulking around the fireplace hearth.

7. Turn down the temperature of your water heater to the warm setting (120°F). You’ll not only save energy, you’ll avoid scalding your hands.

8. Use light-emitting diode — or “LED” — holiday light strings to reduce the cost of decorating your home for the winter holidays.

For even more information on energy savings, living a more green life, and/or building a green house, visit the Home Neighborhood at the Library. Here are some titles you might want to check out:

Are you wanting to produce your own food, save on utility costs, conserve resources, or create less waste? Then check out the books on self-sufficiency in the Home Neighborhood.

DIY Projects for the Self-Sufficient Homeowner: 26 Ways to Build a Self-Reliant Lifestyle provides step-by-step projects that will help you grow your own food, build a greenhouse, set up a root cellar, raise chickens and keep a beehive, and work with solar energy. There are also tips on how to conserve resources and recycle what you already have. This book is geared to be of help to both the novice and the experienced self-reliant person.

Little House in the Suburbs: Backyard Farming and Home Skills for Self-sufficient Living gives easy-to-follow advice on how to become more independent by growing food in your own yard. Also included are recipes for natural deodorant, toothpaste, lip balm, and other beauty products. There are also step-by-step instructions for making soap and natural cleaning products.

Find these books and many more in the Library’s Home Neighborhood.