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At HomeTips, we pride ourselves in expert, trustworthy advice that is forged from decades of home improvement experience. HomeTips is operated by Don Vandervort, founder and CEO, and Christian Vandervort, Vice President. The company was started in a tree house office in 1996 by home-improvement author Don Vandervort. Tech guru Guy Kawasaki wrote this wonderful blog post about HomeTips back in 2007, just after HomeTips won Google's international AdSense Story Contest. Don Vandervort wrote his first home improvement book in the early 1970s.

A new air purifier or air cleaner can do an amazing job of cleaning up your home's air-you just have to know the type to buy for solving problems with your home's air. This article looks at the various types of home air purifiers and cleaners available. It begins with an overview of the serious problems caused by indoor air pollution, and then it moves on to a discussion of types of air cleaners and how to evaluate their technology and effectiveness. Finally, it offers air purifier buying tips. When sunlight streams in through a window, do you see a galaxy of dust particles in the air?

Bathroom cabinets are a key ingredient in setting the style of a bathroom and, more importantly, offer essential storage for bathroom supplies. When it comes to bathroom cabinet styles, sizes, configurations, and materials, options are almost endless. If you're in the market for new cabinets, you can choose from a world of possibilities. Base cabinets can be made like shorter versions of kitchen cabinets, or they can can be more like furniture consoles. They may have integral countertops or be capped with almost any material found on kitchen counters, from laminate to stone.

Basic tips for improving your home's driveway, including planning for installation of a new driveway, coloring and stamping concrete, and coating and sealing an asphalt driveway. Is it time to completely replace your driveway? While daunting, this is an excellent opportunity to boost your home's curb appeal and improve accessibility. Of course, installing even a small driveway is a big project. It involves planning the driveway's layout, choosing and buying the driveway materials, and doing the actual installation.

Beyond the functional side of a swimming pool, you'll find that pools also have aesthetic benefits. A pool can be like a water feature in the yard, especially when integrated beautifully into the landscape. Spas and hot tubs, like pools, can be a wonderful addition to your home and lifestyle. If you have never luxuriated in steaming water beneath the moon and stars, you have missed one of life's true pleasures. A hot tub or home spa offers a place for relaxation, contemplation, and quiet conversation.

Do you need help finding the best kitchen cabinets, garage door, or water softener? Is it time to buy a new dishwasher, front door, or kitchen sink? Your goal should be to buy home products that include the features you want, are priced within your budget, and are most likely to be reliable for a long time. These buying guides and reports will help you make informed buying decisions when shopping for nearly any home products or materials, from air conditioners to windows. Although a roller is easiest for applying paint to the broad surfaces of walls and ceilings, a roller will not apply paint all of the way into corners or to the edges of trim.

Plumbing is something that's easily taken for granted. However, if you've ever lived without plumbing, even for a weekend camping trip, you can quickly appreciate how important it has become to modern living. Drinking water, baths, showers, toilets, dishwashers, clothes washers, gardens-none of these are possible, or at least practical, without plumbing systems and fixtures. In this family of articles, we look at buying, improving, repairing, and maintaining your home's plumbing systems and fixtures.

This unbiased, expert thermostats buying guide will help you find the best type of home thermostat for your heating and cooling system. A home thermostat tells the furnace and/or cooling system when to turn on and off as temperatures in the house or individual rooms fluctuate. This is a very important job, because it affects both comfort and energy bills. Because the human body is highly sensitive to heat gain and heat loss, comfort can be elusive. In the quest to capture comfort, we fit houses with heating and cooling systems, insulation, efficient windows, weatherstripping, ventilation, and other features meant to control unwanted heat loss and heat gain.

Improvements to your home's exterior are critical to fending off the weather, presenting a proud face to the neighborhood, and ensuring the value of your home. Roofing, siding, windows and other parts of the exterior shell of your home are the barrier between Mother Nature and your family-it pays to keep them in good shape. In this family of articles, we look at buying, improving, repairing, and maintaining all of the components of your home's exterior, including the yard and landscape. Pick a section below to dig deeper.

Expert advice about how to sort through the various types of roofing to choose the best one for your home. If you're thinking about buying a new roof, be prepared to pick from possibilities that range from the familiar to materials you never knew existed. In this article, we'll help you become more acquainted with your options and the features you should consider when comparing one to another. Then we'll point you to more detailed information about each roofing material. Some roofing materials, such as slate, wood shakes, and copper, have remained virtually unchanged for centuries.

Unbiased, expert advice on how to buy metal roofing, types of metal roofing including standing-seam metal roofing and metal shingles. Includes advice about brands, colors, metal roofing from Lowe's and Home Depot, hiring a metal roof contractor, and more. For your home's roof, you want the most durable, weathertight, fire-resistant, great looking roof you can buy, right? In this article, we'll take a close look at metal roofing and help you decide whether or not it is right for your home. If it is, we'll walk you step-by-step through everything you need to know when choosing the right metal roofing for your needs.

This expert, unbiased water softener buying guide will help you choose the best water softener for hard water problems. Includes salt-free water softeners, dual-tank softeners, and more. What is a water softener? Water softener systems (often misspelled "water softner systems") are products that solve hard water problems. Hard water is simply water that is rich in minerals such as calcium, magnesium carbonate, and manganese. If you find that soap and shampoo don't lather well, dishes have spots, the bathtub has a ring, laundry looks dingy, and the coffee maker has scale deposits, your home probably has a hard water problem.

Home appliances are the essence of convenient, contemporary living. They define how we take care of the many tasks we accomplish in our homes, from cooking to refrigerating foods and washing clothes. Because they're so important to our daily lives, they've become amazingly sophisticated both in the duties they handle and in their efficient use of energy. Our challenge is to buy the best appliances for our needs and to know basic techniques for using, repairing, and caring for them. Before you can make an informed decision about the right type of air cleaner to buy, you'll need to know the technologies they use to clean air.

Thanks to modern technology, today's houses have evolved beyond their basic role of providing shelter. They have become total environments that sustain, refresh, and provide us with a high level of healthful comfort. From air conditioners to zone heating systems, a wide variety of devices and systems equip today's homes for these responsibilities. In this family of articles, we look at buying, improving, repairing, and maintaining furnaces, air conditioners, fans, and other types of home comfort and energy-saving materials.

A home's garden and outdoor areas add beauty, enjoyment, and value to the property. In this section, you'll find a plethora of expert articles that guide your through gardening, landscaping, building patios, outdoor structures, water features, and much more.

A heat pump cools and heats a home very efficiently, thanks to the magic of refrigeration technology! Before buying a conventional furnace or AC system, be sure to check out heat pumps. For homes in climates where cooling and heating requirements are moderate, heat pumps can be a strong energy-saving alternative to conventional forced-air furnaces and air conditioners. Using refrigeration technology instead of fuel combustion to provide warmth and cooling, conventional heat pumps move heat from cold to warm spaces-and vice versa-to cool a warm house in the summer and heat a cool house in the winter.

Expert advice on buying the best manufactured gas fireplace, including direct-vent gas fireplaces, vent-free fireplaces, and more. Flickering flames and glowing embers: Nothing is quite as cozy as a fire on a cold winter's day. Of course, for a fire, a house needs a fireplace that will safely contain it, encourage the fuel to burn, exhaust any smoke, and deliver warmth to the room. Unfortunately, most traditional masonry fireplaces are notoriously inefficient at heating. In fact, they may actually increase drafts in a house.

Admitting in natural light, permitting views to the yard and beyond, providing natural ventilation-windows perform a number of critical roles in a home. And, because of the wide range of jobs they must do, sometimes simultaneously, house windows must be chosen thoughtfully and maintained with care. The work of windows is often complex; for example, windows are expected to allow in light and views but keep out wind, rain, glare, cold, and intruders. To accomplish all of these tasks, windows must be designed with a range of features that work together seamlessly.

Expert advice on decks and porches, including decking materials buying guides, installation instructions and DIY deck repair, cleaning and refinishing help. Barbecues, birthday parties, sunbathing, outdoor relaxation-outdoor activities like these are the essence of outdoor living when the seasons permit and, to do these activities, we rely upon decks and porches. These kinds of structures set the stage for outdoor entertaining, relaxing, play, and much more. They provide flat surfaces that, in some ways, are like an extension of a home's floors into the yard and garden.

The main building blocks of a home, house walls not only provide a barrier between indoors and out, but they also support the ceiling and roof and divide the indoor space into rooms. Walls are the surfaces in our homes that partition our spaces and provide a sense of enclosure. Of course, house walls are not strictly utilitarian. They are also the fundamental elements of the look and feel of a home's interior, providing the canvas for color, texture, and artwork. Dealing with walls is fundamental to many home improvement projects.

In an ideal world, our houses are designed to keep us high and dry-well away from the damaging effects of ground water. But life isn't always ideal. And even in regions where flooding doesn't occur, houses are often sited in a manner that does not protect their crawlspaces and basements from becoming flooded. When the ground becomes saturated, water flows across the surface toward any low spot. As ground water pressure builds, it is forced toward the paths of least resistance. If the water finds cracks and fissures in your home's foundation walls or basement floors, it easily seeps in to fill your basement.