Here are the latest month's daily tips from Right at Home Daily.
Buy one piece of exercise equipment and create a space where you'll use it regularly. Be sure you have access to a TV or music to keep you motivated.
Scrub and repaint your outdoor furniture and buy new cushions. Check for sales. It will look like a new set for your new abode.
Organize your CDs, videos, cassettes, and DVDs as a part of your early spring-cleaning. To display them, purchase wood or metal stacking shelves and organize them by size, type, or alphabetically.
Don't let anything obstruct your view: Have your windows washed, inside and out. If you can't do it yourself, hire a company.
Have you ever wanted a pet? The best time to train a dog is during the summer. Set aside an area of your house where you can set up a dog crate, water and food bowls, and keep the leash.
Add mulch to your garden. Many communities offer it for free and will even deliver it. Once it's spread, you can consider what flowers and shrubbery you'll want to add to your yard. Make a list and set a budget.
Paint hallways in bold colors to liven up the rest of your house. Stick to one or two colors.
Line window curtains with yellow material to enhance the sunshine effect.
If you have a large bay window or a window with a big ledge, display funky feather and star lamps instead of odd knick-knacks.
Add a few accessories in the trendy colors for spring, orange and periwinkle blue.
To add cache to your window treatments, consider a short valance that hugs the window's frame without hiding it. There are various styles and shapes of valances from pleated ones to tailored or boxy valances or a playful swag trimmed in colorful pompons.
Plan an Oscar party in advance (in April). Create scorecards and give the winner tickets to your local movie theater. Whip up a menu based on the movies' themes.
Think spring by planning your gardening needs. Consider using faux pots that are made from fiberglass or plastic. Not only do they resemble terra cotta, lead, stone and even bronze pots, they also cost and weigh less.
Create an aquarium. You can now purchase a low-maintenance aquarium modeled on a salt-water reef that takes care of its own eco-system.
If you're planning to redo your kitchen consider a pot faucet over your stove, so you don't have to carry heavy pots of water back and forth.
To combine contemporary with traditional design in a room, cover windows on one side of the room with shades for a clean modern feeling and cover windows at the other with heavy pleated curtains in a silk fabric for a more conservative feel.
Repaint your child's bedroom. Allow your children to help select the colors. If they're under age 4, consider painting a chalkboard on the wall with Crayola chalk paint.
Organize a progressive dinner for your new friends who like to cook or your new neighbors who've never seen each other's homes and welcome them with a pretty welcome mat at the front door.
For an inexpensive way to experience luxury, buy some expensive 300 thread count pure cotton or silk sheets for your master bedroom. Give your Valentine cozy pajamas or a sexy nightgown to complement the new bedding.
Spend the winter creating a master plan for planting a brand-new garden. Tackle it slowly over the years so you see how the garden develops with color, texture and height.
Spring cleaning comes early: Clean your cars, inside and outside, and then spray the interior with an aromatic freshener such as lemon, lime or ginger.
Buy a flowering plant, like a hot pink or salmon-colored azalea, to brighten up your kitchen and living room.
Inspect your home furnishings piece by piece. Make a list of what needs to be recovered, re-lacquered and refinished. Prioritize the list and choose one piece per month to work on. Within a year, your home will sparkle.
Create a centerpiece with a Valentine's Day theme for your dining room table of multicolored silk flowers in an antique or crystal vase.
Go room-by-room at night to make sure you have enough illumination, because it gets dark in the winter earlier. You should have a variety of lights for mood as well as reading and working.
Set aside a place in your home to write letters - not e-mails but the old-fashioned hand-written, send via postal mail type.
Place a phone pad and pen or pencil by each phone in the house so all messages are recorded. Consider putting a phone in your living room in a discreet place.
Enjoy your new home: Invite friends for dinner during the week or weekend and start a big jigsaw puzzle on a table that everyone can work on. When you complete the puzzle, glue it to a board to keep it intact and frame it.
Create a bake center in your kitchen on one wall near the sink with a built-in oven, microwave, large pull-out bread board, glide-out storage for oversized pans and plenty of counter space as a convenient landing pad for hot trays. Stash your baking utens
Buy an old armoire and create a grid effect of shelving inside, which will give order to a large collection of plates, porcelain, china or glass. You might paint the shelving a dark shade to show off light colored china or other collections.
Buy one piece of exercise equipment and create a space where you'll use it regularly. Be sure you have access to a TV or music to keep you motivated.
