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Archive for August, 2011
Fire In Your Kitchen
1Statistics show that the number one cause of fire in homes is kitchen related. Inattention or forgetting that something is on the stove causes most of these fires. Grease, water boiling out of pots, and leaving the kitchen when cooking are the three main causes. All of them are preventable. Everyone says that almost all kitchen fires could be prevented by just staying in the kitchen and attentive to meal preparation. Too often when you leave the room, you get distracted and forget that there’s something on the stove.
There are ways to prevent fires. First, as mentioned, don’t leave your kitchen while preparing a meal. Sometimes this is unrealistic. If you need to leave the kitchen, set a timer to remind you to come back and check on things. I use this many times when I’m waiting for water to boil. I set a timer for five minutes, because that is approximately how long it takes for water to boil on my stove. If I’m cooking something that needs to simmer for a long time, then I set a timer to check on it regularly while it is cooking.
There are also safety precautions should you have a fire. Always, always, always have a fire extinguisher that is rated for both electrical and grease fires in the kitchen area. Somewhere that you’ll be able to reach it fast should a fire break out. Baking powder is a great way to put out a grease fire. DO NOT use water to put out a grease fire it will just spread it wherever the water goes.
Should the tragedy of a fire happen for you, you’ll need to services of a cleaning after fire damage austin company. A great place to look for services is on the Internet. There are damage and restoration companies available in almost all areas of the country. If you live in Austin, TX, the Steam Team has a lot of great information on their web site, http://www.thesteamteam.com/. If you ever need their services, which I hope you never do, give them a call to see if they can help you with your clean up and restoration.
Preparing For Fall Fun
0649 days
by Sadaajit
in Celebrations
Before you know it, it will be time to put out the pumpkins, chrysanthemums, corn stalks, and scarecrow decorations. In the Knoxville, TN area their biggest displays are in the fall, much bigger than Christmas. Fall and Halloween are the big themes, and you can hardly pass a corner that doesn’t have some huge display with all the trimmings.
Maybe your part of the country doesn’t go quite so crazy for fall and Halloween, but being prepared for the season can be a lot of fun. I remember as a kid, the next door neighbors would have a huge Halloween party for all of us, complete with haunted house. They had a partially finished basement and the unfinished part would be set up with different rooms all depicting gruesome things. They would blindfold you and make you put your hands in all kinds of disgusting things; blood, ketchup; eyeballs, peeled grapes; veins and arteries, cooked cold spaghetti.
One time one of the rooms was set up as an operating room. The doctor was all decked out in medical scrubs covered in what looked like massive amounts of blood and the assistant was wearing an equally gruesome looking old fashioned nurses uniform. They were performing “surgery” on someone without anesthesia and they were pulling the guts out of them. It was pretty scary for me as a kid. So much so that I rarely got to enjoy all the nice treats their mother had made for us, because my stomach was too upset. No one in the family was a doctor or nurse so they must have purchased the costumes somewhere. We didn’t have the convenience of the Internet back then. Today, should you need some scrubs for your Halloween affair you can pick them up at http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/categories/Scrubs/.
So remember the age and impressionability of the kids coming to these parties and set a proper scare level. You don’t want all those specially home made treats to be uneaten!
After The Remodel
0We remodeled our kitchen several years ago. I have to say it was quite an experience, because we did all the work, except replacing the sub-floor, ourselves. From coming up with the design, to finding the right materials, to putting down the backer board for the tile, to touch up paint, we did it all.
It was a magnificent change and I would do it again in heartbeat, should we ever move again, because it made the kitchen much more beautiful and functional. Having a space where you enjoy being when you prepare meals is important, because then you are more willing to spend the time fixing delicious, nutritious, and healthy meals.
Our newly remodeled, warm and inviting kitchen
Although the inside of the house looked great, the mounds of stuff we’d pulled out of the house looked like a disaster had struck our property. It took us many trips to the dump to rid ourselves of all the useless, damaged demolition remains. If we’d realized how much work it was going to be, we probably would have called a junk removal service and had it done all at once, but we didn’t plan ahead very well in that respect.
I can tell you that if we do this again we’ll definitely use a junk removal service. Not only would it have saved us a lot of time and effort, but these companies are set up to make sure each material goes where it should. For instance appliance removal Chicago will make sure that your appliances are disposed of safely and if anything can be recycled they see that it is.
Actually in retrospect there were a few things we decided we would do differently. First and foremost, we would do all the work before we moved in, if possible. Second, if we had to move in we’d only do one room at a time (we did four at once, the entire living area). Third, we’d have used a hauling service to pick up all the junk. Fourth, we’d allot more time in our scheduling of the work. We thought it would take us 3 months; it took us 2 years to complete all four rooms.
However, I have to emphasize, the kitchen is a fantastic place to be now. They say that a kitchen is the heart of the home and ours really is now.