As winter firmly grasps us in her cold embrace, it’s important to practice some small, but very important routines to ensure your home stays safe and secure during extremely frigid temperatures. Not only does the risk of fires skyrocket during colder months, but there’s always a threat of water pipes freezing over and busting. If you’re anything like me, you don’t mind the cooler temperatures and actually enjoy bundling up in hoodies and warm, soft clothing, but if you’re absolutely against the chill, you’re counting down the days until warmer weather returns.

Home ownership used to be one of the most vital parts of achieving the “American Dream.” However, with rising home costs and wages that are struggling to keep up with inflation, many families are forced to hold off on purchasing their very first home until much later in life or go without home ownership altogether. What used to be an accessible milestone has quickly become a Herculean feat only few can actually accomplish.

Personally, there are few things that I despise more than the HOA in my neighborhood. For those of you lucky to not know, most homes built in subdivisions today have a Homeowners Association that you can’t opt out of. My biggest gripe is that the HOA isn’t run by the actual homeowners, but instead run by an outsourced community management company that’s usually far removed from the neighborhood itself.

The list feature in Amazon is undefeated. The fact that I can create a list for each section of my house and window shop for things that I might never buy speaks to the Type A in my personality.

I enjoy putting together furniture. In fact, I’ve put together every piece of furniture that’s arrived from Amazon. It might take me a while (and I might have to unscrew, flip a piece around, and re-screw) but I stick with the task until the very end. For some reason, I enjoy the challenge of figuring out the super obtuse and poorly written instruction manual to produce a complete piece of furniture.