If you’re an avid gardener, it’s likely a potting table is on your wish list. If you’re a beginning gardener, you may wonder, “What’s a potting table?”.  Your potting table is a simple work bench, allowing you the space to arrange your pots, mix your soil, store supplies and plant your seeds or plants.

A potting table is the gardener’s dream come true. When you’re planning next year’s garden, you need a space to make those dreams come true. During the rainy months, there’s not much you can do to till the ground or set up beds. This table gives you a space to plan for tomorrow, or at least for spring. A potting table serves you well in mid-season, starting seeds and potting up your next generation of plants. The potting table is a nourishing refuge for plants to come.  For indoor gardeners, a potting table in the garage or basement helps save a mess in the house and makes a handy place for storing potting soil, fertilizers, spray bottles and the like.

All that’s required for a potting table is a space about four feet long and two feet wide. You can purchase one or it can be a DIY project if you’re handy with tools. It’s not a difficult project. Your potting table can be as simple or elaborate as you please.  Plans for building these tables abound on the net, from simple workbench style tables to potting tables with all the bells and whistles.

Some have a shelf below for storing pots, bags of soil, fertilizers, rooting mediums and the like. The lower shelf is handy because it keeps these supplies off the ground and away from insects, who may otherwise take up residence in your supplies.  Table designs may also include a shelf above, handy for gardeners who do a lot of potting. This allows the upper shelf to be used for bottles, boxes and jars of fertilizers, rooting mediums and other such gardeners’ “condiments”, leaving the lower shelf for soil bags and pots.

Yet another available feature is a strip of wood across the upper shelf which is equipped with hooks from which tools, like hand held spades, pruners and bulb planters may be hung.  The surface of the table may also be used as an “incubating” table for spring seedlings. Just put a heating pad, especially designed for seedlings available at the nursery, on the table and set your seedling trays on top. You can set the temperature that’s right for the particular plants you’re growing.

Whether you buy or make your own potting table, this gardener’s tool will keep you organized with many a happy plant to boot! For those of you with gardening friends, this type of table makes a terrific gift at any time of year.

I love to people watch. I have a degree in social work and criminal justice and have worked in the human services filed for over twenty years. Even though there are times when I feel exhausted in dealing with human emotions, I still love to observe people in public.

People generally like to be kept comfortable. They have small range of temperature fluctuation that they can tolerate before they begin to complain. This is very interesting to me since I reside in the state of Minnesota. Temperature fluctuation is something that is a recurring theme to our extreme weather conditions. We can go from 30 degrees below zero to 30 degrees above zero within a week. This 60 degree difference still has people complaining about how cold it is. People want a constant 68 to 72 degrees within their homes. The same people that use multiple space heaters in the winter to deal with the cold will put air conditioner units in every room of their home in the summer to deal with the heat. Most people will choose their air conditioner units over their space heaters if they are told that they can only have one or the other.

In Minnesota the numbers of extremely hot days are limited, but the high humidity is a constant problem in the summer months. 82 degrees can feel stifling when there is a high level of humidity with it. It is amazing to see the puddles of water that accumulate under air conditioner units. We have had days when we cannot see out our bay windows because of the condensation on the windows. I do not mind the warm temperatures, but the humidity can cause a great deal of problems with creating mold and mildew as well as warping the wood in the home.

When we moved to our present home it was in the middle of July. We had several inches of rain the day before we moved and then the temperatures went over 90 degrees. Our china hutch and a curio cabinet warped due to the dampness. Once we had them in a room with air conditioner units we were able to get the doors closed. There was permanent damage to the wood.  After I experienced the warping of furniture I decided that it was not for comfort alone that we needed air conditioning units, but for the longevity of our belongings.

Eventually it comes time for all of us to decorate or redecorate.  You may be finally moving away from home or to a new city, or you’ve gotten sick of all of the furniture from your first move that’s been sitting around, getting stained and banged up for the last 20 years.  Once you start looking for furniture, you’re going to realize pretty quickly that there are a lot of choices out there.  Walking into one of those furniture warehouses is an intimidating task, with acres and acres of overstuffed sofas and dining room table sets laid out before you.  It’s hard to have an idea of what you want, and even harder to get some sort of a sense of what pieces of furniture are going to go together well and which ones would make it look like a furniture store exploded in your living room.

One type of design that is becoming increasingly popular is contemporary furniture.  Though some contemporary furniture looks like it belongs with the Jetsons, full of weird, curving lines and pod shaped chairs, not all contemporary furniture is so space age.  In fact, though contemporary furniture designs were inspired by science fiction during the space race days, things have changed quite a bit since then.  Today’s contemporary furniture is identified by clean lines and simple, elegant designs.  Furniture giant Ikea founded much of it’s business and reputation on marketing simple, easy-to-assemble, clean-lined contemporary furniture.  One of the big advantages of this style is that it’s easy to mix and match different designs while still coordinating an entire room.  Since the pieces often don’t have a lot of color on their own, they can be easy accessorized with different splashes of color to bring together an entire room.  When you get tired of the color combination, you don’t have to get rid of your furniture, you just need to change up the accents.

Contemporary furniture also tends to add an attractive lightness to living spaces, which is especially apparent in small apartments and other cramped living spaces.  By focusing on lightness and crisp lines, contemporary furniture opens up small spaces and bring more light into living areas.  Contemporary designs also mesh well with older more traditional designs, allowing you to change the layout and feel of a room without replacing every last stick of furniture.  Even a couple clean, modern pieces will add a completely new look to a living or dining room, giving you that change you’ve been looking for.

We all have a dream house.  I mean, come on, think about it.  There’s that lingering fantasy that you harbor about a house with everything to your exact plan.  You know how big you want it, what color the rooms should be and how many bathrooms would suit your family.  You’re probably sick of living in homes that are just okay, but not designed with you in mind.  I know I am.  I do have dream house plans.  I can even hop online and figure out what they would cost me.

Dream house plans are certainly more viable than they were back in the day.  Things are just becoming more and more feasible these days.  Our technology is allowing us to dream up the craziest things and bring them to life.  If you don’t already have that house of your dreams, online is a great place to start your journey.  You can construct dream house plans on a number of websites.  Whether your ideas are simple and consist of a fairly basic two level home in an ideal location or you want the whole package, you can definitely have it your way.

My wife and I have recently became more focused on our dream house plans.  How many square feet we need, one story or two, what location is choice for our needs.  These are all things to consider when building that dream home.  One thing you want to remember is that you can have it your way when you build it yourself.  This doesn’t merely consist of the style and location of the home.  When you develop dream house plans, you virtually pick and choose every detail.  For example, we looked at log homes.  I have an idea of what type of log I want used, if I want some rooms to be drywall for painting, what type of floor we prefer in the kitchen, whether we want separate tubs and showers, what kind of light fixtures would suit each room and so on.  This is a scrutinizing process, but a fun one for sure.  When you design your own house plan, you know that it’s yours and yours alone down to the last brick.  It makes you feel proud.

If you check out the websites that offer dream house plans, you will get a better idea of what your price range is.  This way you can sort through what you need and what you may want to leave out.  The best part is that it’s totally up to you.  The ideal home in the ideal location is at your fingertips.  The beginning of your dream house is only a click away.

Leather is one of my favorite materials, and so I really can’t get enough of it. I have an American leather jacket which I practically live in. It is heavy, and fairly soft and one of the most comforting things I own. My shoes are also made of American leather. A tan rawhide that only seems to look more appealing as it soaks in the dust from the long roads that I walk. And of course, my wallet is American leather, not made in China, but a high quality product from right here in the USA. But nothing can beat the comfort and quality of my American leather sofa.

My sofa is a soft tan in color and really supremely comfortable to relax on. It is the highest quality of American leather and many are the nights I have succumbed to the temptation to sleep upon it instead of climbing out and going to my bed. It really is just that comfortable. I entertain on it all the time, serving friends delicious food and laughing about old times we’ve had, while enjoying the soft caress of the American leather sofa against my legs. I’m really embarrassed to tell you exactly how much I like it.

And then there is the leather recliner we found the other day, on the street of all places. I don’t really know if it is American leather, but I think it is because of the high quality and the classic design. Someone threw out this perfectly good American leather recliner because of one little problem, the foot rest is damaged. What kind of a reason is that to throw out a perfectly good, extremely comfortable sofa? I mean the leather is soft and padded against your back, it reclines for even greater comfort. Some people are so spoiled to get rid of good American leather when they could so much more easily just fix it themselves.

It just shows you that some people don’t appreciate a good thing. When something comes to easily to you, be it an American leather sofa, or anything at all, you become complacent and feel entitled to it, but this is of course always a great mistake. There is no better way to lose track of how to enjoy your life than by merely taking it for granted. Then it doesn’t matter what you have or don’t – it will all seem equally boring and unimportant to you.