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The Garbage Disposal Secret Your Plumber Won’t Tell You

Garbage disposals are scary machines, especially from the vantage point of the average user. You’re looking from above at a hole, inside which contains a spinning machine capable of lopping off your fingers. Naturally, most of us like to play it safe around garbage disposals. But what do you do when it jams up? It
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How to Paint an Old Piece of Stained Furniture

So you found a cool old table at a yard sale, and you love its shape, size and style, but you hate the color of its stain. It won’t fit into your home, and from past experience, you know that re-staining it is more work than you’re willing to put in. Well, we have a
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Lawnmowers: Electric vs. Gasoline

It’s mid-February, which in south Texas means spring has nearly sprung. If you’re a new homehowner, or your old lawn equipment has simply given up the ghost, it’s probably about time to buy a new one. If it’s been a few years since you shopped for a lawnmower, you’ll notice an entirely new option available
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Do Houses Really ‘Settle’ And Is That a Problem?
Since you were a kid, you’ve noticed creaking, popping, moaning noises coming from the bones of various houses. Nothing to worry about, some adult told you, the house is just “settling.” And so you accept that explanation and move on. But what, exactly, does it mean for a house to settle? What causes it to
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7 House Plants to Make Your House Smell Great the Natural Way

The world has no shortage of products designed to make your house smell good. You can spray stuff, you can light stuff, you can plug in stuff, you can just leave bowls of stuff sitting around. The disadvantage of all that is that the smells don’t last long, and you have to buy new products.
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How to Transplant a Tree

You have a tree in your yard that you really like, you just don’t like its location. Maybe it obscures a view or hangs over a walkway. We don’t know. We just know that people often wish their trees could be in a different place. Well, we have good news. You can totally move a
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How to Make Biscuits Like Grandma Used To

We don’t know about your grandma. Maybe your grandma was the kind to just mail it in and stir up some Bisquick. When we say “Grandma,” we’re talking about the archetype, the type who made pies from scratch on week days and had blue hair. Anyway, Grandma made biscuits, because biscuits are easy and buttery and flaky
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Why You Should Buy a New House Instead of an Old One

All right, so obviously we’re a home-building company. We have plenty of skin in the game, here. We want you to buy a new home, and we want you to buy it from us. That said, we think if you asked your friends who have bought older homes, you’d find out that many of them
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Grill the Perfect Steak (Even in Winter)

The advantage of grilling is that you get great flavor without getting a bunch of smells in your house, or using up any extra cooking dishes. The advantage of living in South Texas is that even when it’s cold, it’s not that cold, which means there is no time of year you can’t cook a
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How to Quickly Get a Bad Smell Out of Your House

Smells don’t come in all shapes and sizes, because they don’t have shapes at all, but because of that people tend to treat all smells the same way. This is a mistake. Some smells are in the air, some are trapped in materials, and they all have unique causes. The good news is, you’re not
