Apartment Therapy Archive: Feb 5, 2010

(Welcome to Smith from Chicago, one of the bloggers trying out for a place on the Apartment Therapy editorial team as a House Tour Contributor. Enjoy her work – comments welcome!

Name: Misty Adair, husband John, two young sons and dog, LucyLocation: Allandale, Austin, TXSize: 1375 square feetYears lived in: 6 yearsWhen we spotted some photos of Misty’s home in a few of her previous posts here on Apartment Therapy, we knew we needed to get in there for a house tour! A visit to Misty’s house in the Allandale neighborhood doesn’t disappoint.

For most people a tutorial on making grilled cheese is probably akin to explaining how to tie your shoe, but a friend was recently complaining that her 3-year-old rejects any grilled cheese sandwich with even the slightest hint of burning (scraping the burnt bits into the trash doesn’t fool her!) so I shared with her two small tips for making it perfect every time.

We all use a sponge to clean our dishes and clean up in the kitchen (hopefully not the same sponge), but unfortunately this tool can be one of the most unsanitary items in our house. Rather than throw it away, there are ways to disinfect them. Cook’s Illustrated is known a ‘America’s Test Kitchen,’ so we’ll take their word for it that this is the best way to clean a sponge.

Starting seeds inside is a great way to get a head start on your garden. While it’s still early in most places for many vegetables, growing season for cold weather vegetables like broccoli and lettuce is right around the corner (late February in some places).You can start the seeds in just about any kind of container, but egg cartons do double duty by not only recycling, but separating your seeds into little planting pods.

We don’t have a lot of pest problems. Never seen a bedbug. Not too many spiders. And the cats don’t often suffer from fleas. But ants? Ants are a different story.They haven’t hit us yet this year, but we know they’re coming. It’s just a matter of time until that creepy crawly black line of marching ants winds its way across the kitchen floor, up the cabinets, and onto some sweet puddle of juice we forgot to wipe up.

You aren’t using your home’s built-in phone lines, are you? Well, neither is most of America. But since it transports audio throughout the house in the form of your voice, could it do the same with music?Well it turns out, you can. But it’s not anywhere near as easy as it sounds.

One of our home indulgences–taking scalding hot showers (especially when the temps drop outside). So you can imagine our frustration when we jumped in the shower after a long day of moving only to discover lukewarm water. A quick email to our handyman delivered a quick and easy how to for this problem.1. Locate your hot water heater. At our old apartment, our hot water heater was underneath the house (that only the landlord had the key to unlock).

Anyone who’s ever made their own throw pillows or floor cushions knows that you’ll have to find something to stuff into your pillow or cushion. Pillow forms and loose stuffing are options, but we came across a neat pet product we find potentially inspiring.Molly Mutt’s Stuff Sacks are a neat way of creating dog beds for your pet in an affordable and eco-friendly way by reusing old or unwanted clothes as the stuffing, and then covering the sack with a durable fabric dog duvet.

(欧特一半时,祝贺自己ting Merriam Webster) that we’d invented a new food and coined a word, we learned that we are the 1,256,339th person to make pizzadillas from leftover tortillas and that “pizzadilla” entered the esteemed OED in 1444. Anyone who hasn’t tried this quick, kid-friendly snack, read on for the simple how-to.