Prevent Kitchen Fire:

• Never step away when something is cooking on the stove. Most fires in the kitchen are caused by unattended cooking.
• Pot holders, towels, and other combustibles should be placed away from the cooking areas.
• Clean your oven and hob regularly. Built-up grease and food remnants catch fire easily.
• Avoid wearing loose clothing when you are cooking.

Contain Kitchen Fire:

• To extinguish a small pan fire, slide a lid over the pan and turn off the burner. Do not move the pan until the fire is completely extinguished and the pan is cool.
• For fire contained in a pan, you can also use baking soda. Sprinkle a generous amount on your palm and toss it on the fire. Never use water on a grease fire as water will cause the fire to spread and make it worse.
• If the fire is large or appears to be growing, do not attempt to extinguish it. Quickly leave your home and call the fire station.

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There two ways (but not limited to) how you can enliven your kitchen. Either as an after thought when your kitchen is fully furnished or plan from the start. Just remember, there is no wrong way. It is your kitchen so add your personality to it.

Colors For Your Kitchen Walls

• Traditional Colors: Some common kitchen colors are blue (cool and refreshing), yellow (sunny and bright) and white (clean and fresh).
• Dark and Vivid: If you get a lot of natural light in the kitchen, go for warm colors such yellow or orange.
• Light and Subdued: On the other end, if your kitchen is dark, go for cool and muted colors such as light gray or white.

Colors To Compliment Your Kitchen With…

• Kitchen Cabinet and Flooring: Much of the kitchen area is taken up by the cabinet and the floor, so use these as starting points for your color scheme in the kitchen. If you opt for warm colors, intersperse some areas with whites and neutrals to balance the intensity.
• Colorful Kitchen Appliances: Appliances are now more colorful. An orange microwave may seem outstanding at the store’s display shelf but do consider whether it will be practical in the long run. Colorful appliances may seem out of place if you decide to change your color scheme in the future.
• Dark-colored Kitchen Floor: The kitchen floor must be resistant to heavy traffic and spills. Go for a darker color if you can’t imagine yourself mopping the floor each time after you cook. Floor color can match or contrast with cabinet colors.

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Besides, an organized kitchen gives you ample space on the countertop to place ingredients when you cook, with basic condiments placed neatly within reach.

Tips on How to Organize your Kitchen

• To get started, get rid of clutter. If you haven’t used something for a year, thrash it or give it away. There’s no place for chipped dishes, recycled containers you hardly use, or the tea set you didn’t know you had.
• For appliance you seldom use, store them in the cabinet instead of having them take up counter space. Make sure there’s space around the stove for hot dishes as they come out of the oven.
• Spices and seasonings should be placed near your cooking space for ease of access. If you are storing them in drawers and cabinets, line them with shelf liners in case anything spills.
• Examine your shelves and store things like teabags and biscuits in containers and stack them up neatly.
• Canned food should be stored together. Baking ingredients and cake mixes should also go on the same shelf.
• Place detergents and cleaners under the sink, away from places where you store your crockery and utensils. You can also get a basket to hold these general cleaning items and pick them up in one go when you do housecleaning.

Whether you will succeed in getting your kitchen organized depend on these two important tips.

1. Your organize time should not be longer than 30 minutes.
2. Always work on one area or task at a time.

• For example, if you have 15 minutes to spare everyday; you could organize one top cabinet per day and then slowly work your way to lower drawers, shelves, and work station.
• Or you could go by task instead of working an area at a time. For example, discard unused or broken thing on Saturday. Clean and scrub on Sunday. Next, organize all the things the following weekend.

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1. Do you want a refrigerator with a smooth, shiny finish or one that is textured? Fingerprints tend to be more obvious on shiny surfaces, and are more of a hassle to clean off.
2. Consider whether you want the freezer to be on top, at the bottom or at the side. Side-by-side doors tend to have narrower shelves but if you really want to buy one, check the location of the fridge to ensure that there is space for both doors to be opened fully.
3. Check the shelves of the refrigerators at the showroom—see if they feel firm and slide easily and quietly. This is to ease the changing of height between two shelves when you have bigger items to store. And cleansing is more convenient too if the shelves can be removed easily.
4. Crispers—it is here where you will keep your fruits and vegetables. See if the size suits you, bearing in mind the kind of greens you buy. You may also want the bins to have transparent surfaces so that you can tell at a glance when supplies are running low.
5. Do you like lots of room in the door? This space is good for soda bottles, milk cartons, and drink pitchers.

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Easy Tips To Help You Save $300 a year on Water Bills

Before your next…

Laundry: Try to do full loads of laundry. A typical full load usually uses about 21 gallons of water. A small load uses 14 gallons. Several small loads use considerable more water than one or two large loads. Over the course of a year, this can add up to a savings of about $25-$125 a year.

Add fabric softener to your laundry at the appropriate point in the cycle instead of adding at the end and rinsing clothes again, which can use up to 10 extra gallons of water. Figure out how much time it takes for the washer to reach the rinse cycle, and set a timer so you can add softener at the right time.

Rather than always using hot water in your laundry, use warm or cold water for washing clothes, and always rinse in cold water, which can save you around $50/year.

Dish Washing: Similarly, run your dishwasher only when you have a full load. Allow the dishes to air dry instead of using the heat cycle. Try to place dishes appropriately in the washer so that they get cleaned appropriately. This will prevent having to re-wash some dishes because they are still dirty. An average dishwasher costs about $60 to $100 per year to run. By waiting to clean until it is full, you can save from $35-$55/year.

If you eat alone most of the time, better yet, wash your dishes by hand. But don’t wash them under running water throughout. You not only cutting down your water expenses in addition you also save on your electrical bills.

Bath: Install flow restricting shower heads. A family of four can save 8,000 to 12,000 gallons of water a year from this simple change. You will not only save on the cost of water, but also the cost of heating it.

Toileting: Always try to fix running toilets or leaky faucets promptly. A continuously running toilet can use more than 8,000 gallons of water a year. This can generate from $25-$125/year.

Making these simple changes adds up to a big difference overall. You’ll be pleased to see your water bills decreasing instead of going up each month!

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Lighting: Firstly, install the new type of fluorescent bulbs in lights you leave on for extended time periods. They provide about four times as much light and last times longer than incandescent bulbs. This can add up to a savings of about $10-$50/year.

Heating System: Try lowering the temperature on your hot water heater to between 110 and 120 degrees. It’s not necessary to have it any hotter and wastes energy. Cut back on the long, hot showers, this can really add up.

Temperature Setting: Set the thermostat no higher than 68 degrees in winter and no lower than 78 degrees in summer. Turn your heat down even further at night and when you’re not home (unless you have a heat pump, which operates more efficiently at one consistent setting). Each extra degree in winter can increase heating costs by 3%. In summer, each degree can raise cooling costs by about 6%. This can add up to about $325 to $500/year.

Laundry Dryer: Try to cut back on the use of your clothes dryer. Not only is it a big energy drain, it can also suck heated air out of your house very quickly in winter. Hang clothes outside or on a clothes rack to dry and use the dryer for towels and other heavier items. This will amount to a savings of around $25-50/year.

Cooking: When cooking up a meal, use your microwave when possible instead of your oven, which can save up to 50% in energy costs for cooking. There is a potential savings of about $50/year.

Finally, find out if your utility company offers free energy audits, where they inspect your home for energy effectiveness and recommend inexpensive ways to cut energy costs, such as insulating hot water heaters, weather-stripping, etc. Just insulating your hot water heater could save you $25 a year.

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Unlike bathrooms, where the main danger of a slippery surface is injury from a fall, kitchens run the additional risk of a failing person spilling a pot full of boiling soup over himself or herself, so in some ways, the importance of nonslip flooring is doubled.

Pros and Cons Of Various Kitchen Flooring

There are many types of kitchen flooring for every imaginable kitchen but some aren’t not practical even for people who rarely cook. Let’s have a look which kitchen flooring is best for your needs.

Mosaic: Many old kitchens used to have mosaic flooring. Such surfaces were certainly quite hard-wearing and gave feet enough grip, but the many grooves were difficult to scrub, and the individual little tiles chipped relatively easily if something heavy was dropped on the floor—something that happens quite often in a kitchen!

Stone: Smooth, polished stone like marble is far too slippery for kitchen flooring. Besides, it is highly absorbent, and thus a bad idea where all kinds of cooking oils, salad dressings and meat graves could drip onto the floor and permanently discolor it. Marble is also too pricey to risk chipping every time a plate slips out of your hands and goes crashing to the floor.

More textured stones like granite remove the problem of slipperiness and unsightly chips, but they are hard to clean, and can absorb stains too. One way to overcome this is to top the tiles with a couple of heavy layers of industrial varnish.

Rubber: Rubber floors are very hard-wearing and slightly softer on the feet and dropped crockery. Rubber floor tiles that are textured (usually studded or ribbed) also give your toes grip and prevent you from losing your footing. Heavily textured tiles, however, are harder to keep clean than smooth ones.

Vinyl: This is easy to clean whenever you have to wipe up spills, and for general maintenance. It is also water- and oil-resistant. Vinyl tiles, though, tend to lift at the seams after a while, or if the tiles are warped by hot liquids, for example.

Wood: Most Asian homes (apply to those who cook mainly Asian dishes regularly) do not have kitchens with wood flooring. Although wood is attractive and very hard-wearing, it needs polishing and may chip if something heavy is dropped. It may also be slippery when wet. Layers of varnish can help prolong the life of wood flooring, but even well varnished wood can get warped and misshapen under heavy spillage of liquids.

Laminates: These combine the beauty of wood with ease of maintenance, and are very hard-wearing since they are normally scratch- and water-resistant. Usually, acrylic forms the uppermost layers. But like wood tiles, laminates may chip if you drop heavy pots on them!

Ceramic: Can be slippery when wet, unless heavily textured, which then presents the usual cleaning challenge. It also chips pretty easily, and unlike textured stones, chips are far more obvious here.

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Know Thy Living Pattern Well

When trying to save space in small apartment, homeowners tend to build more storage room, try to control clutter, then increase storage space again later. It is an endless, often ineffective battle.

To make truly smart use of limited space, objectively regard your apartment as a whole without boxing yourself in with conventional concepts like “sitting room,” “kitchen,” and “bedroom.” Be truthful about what your family’s or your living patterns really are, then adjust your apartment to suit the reality.

Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize!

Ask yourself these questions and consider the answers:

Q. Do we cook often enough to justify a kitchen this size?

If you say “no,” cut your actual kitchen area back to one stove or microwave, sink, refrigerator, and one small cabinet.

Reallocate the remaining kitchen/dinning space. It could be a music area your kids yearn for, an indoor garden for precious plants, a computer corner, or even a corner screened off with sliding doors to give individual members of a large, nosey family some privacy when needed.

Q. Do I need more than one bedroom?

If you’re a newly-wed couple without child, ask yourself if you really intend to raise a family in this apartment. Or if overnight guests are a big part of your life. If it’s “no” to both, perhaps you only need one bedroom.

Are you allowed to knock two rooms into one for one big bedroom? Is it structurally permissible to create an opening in the wall between your living room and one bedroom to form the bigger living room you have always wanted? Would you prefer to keep the other bedroom space intact for a favorite hobby of yours or your spouse’s?

Q. Should the store room be a store room?

Do not keep stuff in your store room merely because it is there. If you don’t really need a store room, you can remove the door, install good lighting, and turn that poky place into a tiny computer niche, or transform it with wood and glass into a proper, built-in display for your much loved crystal collection.

Q. What is my living room used for?

What does your family, partner, or yourself enjoy doing most in the living room? If it is primarily a dining-cum-television area, then make it so, and drop the extras.

If family members spend all their time in their rooms or out, you may not require a conventional living room. Free yourself of the idea that a living room must have sofa, armchairs, coffee table, and television set, and free the space for other thing. You can even section off a small part and erect partitions to make a private retreat for a child who has always shared a bedroom with a sibling, and longs for space of his or her own.

Your small apartment should no longer seem quite so small because when you enjoy and need most will have its necessary space to accommodate whatever it needs.

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