Home Remedies

So we recently bought a house, and as new homeowners had to figure a few things out the hard way.  I thought that we'd pass along a few tips that may enlighten and hopefully help a few other people.

#1: RoundUp kills weeds and grass.  Yes, it says so on the bottle, but apparently not quite as common of knowledge as one would think, and if you've already got a pre-made mix running, an off-the cuff question for confirmation can have a negative impact on your new lawn.  I recommend Patch Master to correct that error.

#2: Raccoons are some serious SOB's.  We had some that decided to camp under our deck and roll up the new sod in the yard to poach on worms and grub.  As fun as it is to roll your lawn back over the bare ground a couple of times a week, we decided to take action...swiftly.  First, we used Ammonia-soaked tennis balls and tossed them under the deck.  This sent them packing for a few days, but they were back within a week.  Follow up attacks included moth balls and Critter Ridder, which again worked for a limited time.  In the end, what stopped the damn raccoons was depriving them of their food, and using their nocturnal nature against them.  The worms and grub always came out when the sprinklers came on to water the grass, which prompted the raccoons.  By changing our watering time from 4:30am to 6:15am we may have reduced the optimum utilization that the water companies talk about, but keeping the sprinklers on early (before it gets hot) but after dawn has turned our pests into ghosts.  Not a raccoon trace anywhere since.  Note to the people!

#3: CFLs are great energy saving tools.  However, if you have your light on a dimmer switch (and literally every light switch in our house, save the kitchen and master bath, was on a dimmer), a CFL will not work properly.  The reason is that they are already producing less wattage than a standard light bulb, so dialing the current back gives the light a flickering effect-- even leaving the light on high will eventually produce a flicker due to the variable current in the switch.  So we changed out a couple of our switches to the standard [on/off] to handle the CFLs, and kept others with standard bulbs on dimmers.  We won't save as much energy and risk our commitment to the environment, but it's nice to be able to adjust the intensity of some lights.