One year I finally said, "To heck with it" and called the electrician to come and put an outlet at the end of the mantle. What little damage he did to the drywall, I patched and painted over. Not an expense one wants to have in the month of December, but since then, every Christmas I smile as I plug things in. Now, more to your question: Sometimes I want tiny lights down the center of my table. I had a new leaf cut out of MDF and had a big hole drilled in the center. I attached a surge protector to the underside. From the surge protector, I run an extension cord under the table and down the table leg. I tried and tried to think of something that could camouflage the extension cord from the bottom of the leg to the wall outlet. I came up with NOTHING. So, instead of trying to hide it, I took the cardboard roll that holds Christmas wrapping paper (sort of a very long toilet paper roll) and threaded the extension cord through. Then I wrapped Christmas paper around the roll and tied off the ends with ribbon, letting the extra paper at each end flair out. Now, instead of trying to hide it, I purposely bring attention to the cord - which I think is a good thing, as I know people won't be tripping on the way to the buffet table. P.S. Of course, I have to put a large button hole in the center of my table cloth, but if I don't use lights, I always have some sort of centerpiece that sits on top of the buttonhole.

I've paid everything online since Quicken introduced Bill Pay in the early 90s. However, I am grateful I'm compulsive enough to keep my statements. After 2 pretty serious thefts and a house fire, they made my life a LOT easier. When you have to prove cost to an insurance company, they're invaluable. Online statements are fine, but they usually only make them available for a year to 18 months. Sometimes that's not enough. I have a basket by the door into which I put important mail. It organizes itself as newest to oldest, because I put the newer in front. At tax time I go through and sort them into companies or accounts. Stapled, they go into a credenza that has file drawers in it. I might refer to them once in a couple years, but I have them. Legal papers go into another file in the same place. Junk mail goes into a paper grocery bag, really neatly, which I turn around and usually bury in the garden. Paper recycles well and prevents weeks when the thickness of a section of news paper. Now magazines? If I like an article or ad, I've started tearing off the cover of that mag and putting them into a binder with a pressure clip holding them in. This has come in extremely handy when talking about ideas, and I can throw away the TONS of magazines I seem to accumulate. I'm considering that neat desk scanner thing I see advertized on TV. It has an auto document feed, where my scanner is manual. Last year I scanned statements before and like it. I did them individually and am storing them by account/month on a CD for that year along with a .pdf of last year's tax return, the TurboTax version I've used, and any receipts I might need to reproduce for a deduction. I'm storing that in a binder with 1 printed copy of my tax return. I'm anal enough I am thinking of going thru previous years I'm saving and consolidating like this. Imagine the space I'll free up! But that's after a gudzillion house projects that need finishing. That's a task I'll do when I'm procrastinating about something else.

Hi rhizo_1, I've seen a number of tiny spiders, which make a mess of webs and some long-legged ones as well but I'm more concerned about the black widows and brown recluses. My next door neighbour was bitten by a spider, she thinks it may have been a black widow, while watering her plants in late June. Her reaction to the venom was very bad -she was wearing flip-flops and the bite was on the side of her foot, near the heel- she wound up in the ER and the healing was painful and rather slow, at least 6 weeks. She has an exterminator that sprays in and around her house periodically and still... I do as you do: broom, blower, vacuum daily. I'm very tired of it. And a week after my neighbour was bitten, I found (and killed) a black widow while inspecting one of my plants.

I am just finishing a four month reno that affected nearly my whole first floor (and half the second) and left me with no kitchen or eating area the whole time. I have a fridge in the garage but the fridge portion was no good to me bc it’s winter and everything froze in there. I set up one end of my living room with a long folding table. I had some very lightweight thin sheets of wood cut to fit it at Home Depot and laid that down for heat protection, then put a table cloth over it that hung down to the floor. I put a dorm fridge at one end of the table, and on the table I put a toaster, microwave, and toaster oven. At the other end was the trash and recycling bins. I kept one plate, one cup, one bowl, two knives, two spoons, and two forks in the house, along with salt and pepper, a spatula, some tongs, and several disposable food storage containers that could either store leftovers or act as additional bowls if needed. All of it went in a basket under the folding table, behind the tablecloth, which gave me some sense of neatness and order. Another basket under the table held food basics - bread, pb&j, cereal. Almost every single other thing in my kitchen was packed up and put into storage. I cooked tons of stuff ahead of time and froze them in individual serving sizes and put them in the garage freezer. My best advice is to get the stuff you will not need out of your house. ALL of it - put it in storage. I put a lot in storage, but there were some misc hard to pack things (like bottles of liquor, and a large wall mirror, and a clock) that I decided I could just stick in my living room or office. I also didn’t want to put any sort of pantry food in a storage facility so anything I hadn’t used up before the reno I put in boxes and set it in other rooms. I regretted these decisions big time. I’ve spent four months tripping over that stuff or shuffling it from place to place - I should have just found a way to pack it and store the possessions and given the food to a food bank. It seems like every available surface had stuff piled on it that I should have stored. I hated that way more than not having a kitchen. And remove any excess stuff from the room you’ll be living in - pare it down to only what you need. Otherwise it will just feel cramped and overwhelming. I just found it’s super important to create some order and visual calmness in the spaces you are living in. Other advice - take everything off the walls, even in rooms adjoining the work area, otherwise it may fall during work that vibrates. Buy extra filters for your HVAC and change them frequently during the work. And absolutely do not use your garage as storage for what is normally in your house. The very best advice I saw on Houzz before my remodel was to ruthlessly purge and organize my garage ahead of time. I did it, and thank goodness I did - both the house and garage would have been sheer chaos if I hadn’t, because the garage was used to stage materials and set up saws and other tools. Even though I had completely cleared both bays, this stuff completely filled the garage at times, leaving only a narrow aisle up the middle, so thank god I didn’t try to also use it to store stuff from the house. One of the big surprises to me was the amount of money it costs to deal with the reno but is not being paid to the contractor or designer. Examples include: movers to move things in and out of storage, storage fees, post-reno deep cleaning, post-reno duct cleaning, area rug and carpet cleaning, service charges from my home security company to come and put sensors on my new windows, appliance delivery and installation fees, packing supplies, etc. It adds up. BUT it will all be worth it!! Good luck!