Anyone who's caught the first season of The Walking Dead on AMC knows that the CDC played a vital role in handling the zombie pandemic of which the heroes of the story are trying to survive. The show is also based on a series of graphic novels, and the actual real-life CDC seems to be taking a cue from the sucess of the show to make sure that you and your family are prepared for anything ... including a zombie apocalypse.
What started as a tounge-in-cheek blog post last May has become a full-on campaign from the government entity to help spread the word about emergency preparedness through social media outlets.
Now that it's officially autumn and fall projects are finishing up as the cooler weather sits in, it's time for a reality check. Before you know it, winter and the holiday season will be upon us once again, and with that comes a new round of concerns when it comes to your home's security.
Thanks to Consumer Reports for reminding us of the top ten things NOT to do with your home if you'd like to deter would-be burglars from making you their next target. We've picked out the most important tips for you below:
1) Leaving Garage Doors Open or Unlocked
Of course most of us remember to lock our front and back doors at night or when we leave, but how many of us secure our garage doors? We're not just talking the outer door either, but the internal one that grants entry to your home. If you don't lock your outer garage door or accidentally leave it open and don't secure your inner garage door, all a theif would have to do is walk right in and right back out with all your valuables. Instead, the article suggests getting a garage door code-lock with random code resets.
Neighbors are a hard thing to predict sometimes. Despite your type of dwelling, your neighborhood, or your city, the neighbor lottery always ends up being more of a Russian roulette. We learned this recently after making some exterior improvements to our home.
The photo above is of our house, which has on-street parking only. That truck, however, belongs to our neighbor a couple of houses down, who parked it directly in front of our house in protest of our new landscape lighting because he "doesn't want [his] house lit up" although our lighting is no brighter than the streetlight also in front of our house.
So what do you do when your neighbors turn on you? How do you quell a brewing feud before it explodes into something of Hatfield vs. McCoy proportions? Here's some steps we've taken to try and remedy our brewing domestic despute.
Ask Politely
Before we assumed the worst of our neighbors, who have been more than friendly up until recently, we asked our other neighbors if they knew what was going on. We were more than willing to be understanding if there was more to the situation that met the eye. And when we next saw the owner of the truck, we asked him nicely if he could possibly move his vehicle back in front of his house, or to the off-street parking he has behind his house.
Living in an urban environment sometimes means sacrificing some personal space. Houses are closer together, square footage is minimal, and neighbors don't have to work very hard to be nosy with their windows practically lining up with yours. Privacy fences can be hard to squeeze into the breezeways between homes, can be very costly, and may not even be permissible by local codes. So what's an urban home-dweller to do? Why, build a "wall" of lattice, of course!
My husband and I embarked on this weekend long project over the Fourth to help create some privacy for one side of our house. Our master bedroom and bathroom (to be) windows face out to what was once a vacant property, but now is in the process of being renovated as a rental property.
