Shopping – Page 65

Remodel, blog and win contest!

April 16, 2007 by Tricia

Show of hands … How many of you enjoy doing Do It Yourself projects? It could be anything from painting a room, perhaps using an interesting painting technique like sponging or venetian plaster like I did. Or perhaps you’ve refinished your basement? Maybe your project involved tearing out a wall in a room and re-dry walling? Putting in a sky light? Re-finishing your kitchen, installing ceramic tile backsplash, Re-finishing antiques? Being creative and taking something old and worn and painting it or adding trim and making it into something new and functional?

Well, for those of you who have planned projects and hired someone to complete the job, or have a past, present or future do it yourself remodeling project you might be very interested in visiting RemodelingMySpace.com. Not only does this site aim to be your one stop place for just about everything to do with remodeling from How To video’s and articles, to scores of resources, but they are currently holding a contest.

This is an ideal contest for anyone who is planning or currently involved in a remodeling job.

The contest is called “Remodel, Blog and Win” and the grand prize winner will win $5,000 dollars! I’m going to tell you all about the contest, but I just wanted to let those of you who are not doing any remodeling projects that you too can win $250 by registering to vote in the contest.

Are you having a baby or have you already had one? Did you spend time fixing up the babies room? Yes? Well guess what – that’s a remodeling project.

As many of you know I’m a true do it yourselfer. I love renovating and doing projects to improve my home and garden. I know that many of you have mentioned your own past, present and future remodeling projects on this site whenever I’ve discussed my own. I hope that many of you will consider entering this fantastic contest.

Contest Benefits for Bloggers

This is a contest that delivers. Even if you don’t end up being the grand prize winner you can still reap many rewards just by entering:

1. YOU COULD WIN $5000! If you’re the grand prize winner

2. “People’s Choice” Award of $1000

3. Increased Exposure For Your Blog – This remodeling contest will be heavily promoted throughout the duration of the contest, and having entered – your site will be listed on the blog contestant’s list. This will generate exposure for your site and increase your sites traffic as homeowners, bloggers, and press visit your site to see your entry.

4. Increased Traffic For Your Blog – The public will be voting on entrants for the Peoples Choice Award, and this will cause registered and non-registered voters to visit your site in order to cast their vote, so this is another way that this contest will boost your sites traffic.

5. Link Juice For Your Blog – As I said earlier once you enter the contest there will be a link to your site posted on the Remodeling My Space site. One of the rules of the contest is that you must link to one of the sites resources that you thought was helpful for your project. There will be a lot of links going back and forth from contestants, the sites and other sites that discuss the contest like I’m doing now. Occasionally some of the contestants blogs will be linked to in order to highlight their project and blog postings.

6. Meet Other Bloggers Not In Your Niche

7. Create Valuable Content For Your Blog

8. Elevate Your Creative Mojo

9. Learn New Stuff With Our Tools

10. Get Inspired To Get Work Done Around The House!

11. contractors.com will also be cross promoting the site and thus your blog entries.

Now, I’ve only summarized a few of the ways that this contest will be beneficial to those who enter. Please visit the site to read more about the contest benefits for bloggers.

So what are the rules and how do you enter?

Now, if I list all of the information about entering and the rules here, this article will be far too long. I’m just going to highlight some of the important information that you should know, and you can continue to read the rest of the contest information at Remodel My Space.

This is a contest for anyone who has already started a remodeling project or who is about to start one. Everyone will have a chance to win. The judging criteria for the grand prize is based on creativity in both your actual remodeling project and how you go about showing your projects progress on your blog. Your budget, or the amount of resources available to you doesn’t factor in to the judging criteria. Creativity is key.

The contest began at midnight March 1st, 2007, and it will end at 11:59:59 p.m. EST on Friday, August 24, 2007. Contest winners will be announced Saturday September 1st, 2007. Public voting and automatic entry into the random voter draw will begin at 12:00:01 a.m. EST on Friday, May 1, 2007, or once they have 100 contestants – whichever comes first.

Entries can consist of projects and blog postings that began before the contests start date.

The grand prize of $5000 will be judged by a judging panel made up of 6 judges. 3 of the judges will be blogging experts, and 3 will be home improvement experts. The judges haven’t been announced yet, but they will be listed at least 30 days before the contest deadline.

Entries will be judged for best use of space, best use of materials, as in choices in decorating with color, and best use of your available budget for the project. Whether your project is big or small, done on an interior or exterior room it will be eligible for entry into the contest.

You can complete your project on your own, work as a team, or hire a professional contractor to complete your project.

Now to enter the contest you have to be able to show the judges and all the voters what your project looks like, perhaps even a step by step, start to finish article or series of posts. RemodelMySpace.com would like you to show your entries via blogs. If you don’t have a blog yet, no worries, you can take a look at their list of free blogging resources and start a blog or page at sites like MySpace, Blogger, or WordPress just to name a few.

Your blog posts will be judged for “Best use of blog space” as in – is your story an interesting read? Inclusion of pictures, images and videos including before and after pictures are encouraged. So is explaining your projects steps, what materials you used and how you used them. Did you tell your readers about resources you used to plan your project or about sites that inspired your design?

The Peoples Choice Award of $1000 US will go to the contestant with the highest number of votes.

As I mentioned earlier there will also be a prize of $250 for a random voter. Register on the site to vote in the contest to gain eligibility.

There’s already been a few great entries into the contest. Want to check out your potential competition or just get some great ideas for a future project? Visit the contest entries page.

One of the entrants – Grassroots Modern – is an all round great blog for those looking for modern renovation ideas. They have an ongoing kitchen remodeling project and they are keeping their readers up to date with postings on their progress.

Another contestant to visit would be Carley Brook Farm. This site has some great posts about planning your budget for a remodeling project, and fantastic “how to” articles. Check out their posts about frozen winter pipes, old plaster walls, and scraping painted wall paper. This is definitely a site to bookmark if you are doing a lot of work on your home and want to read about the trials and triumphs of others before you tackle your own project.

The last entrant I’ll discuss is 10K kitchen remodel. Almost everyone becomes interested in remodeling their kitchen at some point. I certainly belong in that group, and I’m interested in doing it as inexpensively as possible which of course means I’m going to get my own hands dirty. The owners of 10k kitchen remodel would also like to complete their kitchen remodeling project for a reasonably low cost of only 10K. That’s a tight budget for a complete kitchen remodel but it can be done, and this site will show you how they are managing to remodel their kitchen without spending too much money.

Are you up to the challenge? I think this is a worthwhile contest, and I’m certain that many of you would qualify for some aspect of this contest. Please do visit the site and read all of the contest information. There’s nothing complicated about the contest, and of course there are a lot of benefits as far as site promotion goes for all of the bloggers who enter too.

But wait! There’s more!

As for the RemodelingMySpace site itself? If you are working on, or planning any kind of remodeling projects, you simply must visit this site. I could easily write another one or two posts about this site as it’s just chock full of free resources. You’ll find all kinds of how to articles and ideas, photo galleries full of design ideas, how to and do it yourself videos, and useful tools like the remodeling cost estimator, and measurement conversion tools.

RemodelingMySpace also has free software downloads like Googles 3D remodeling software. Then there’s the online home value estimator.

Plus for those of you who are not DIY’ers there’s the contractor finder/locator. You can find a contractor for just about any kind of remodeling work pretty much anywhere in North America using contractors.com contractor finder. There are listings for contractors who build home additions, decks and porches, kitchen, basement and bathroom renovations and many more. Use the Contractor finder/locator search tool on RemodelingMySpace’s front page to find a contractor that suits your needs in your area.

I really could go on and on about this site. RemodelingMySpace.com has a motto and it’s “The Best Ideas Come From Sharing…”. They live up to their motto. Their site is so full of information that I don’t think they will have any trouble becoming the authority site for anyone who’s planning any kind of renovation or remodeling project. I’ve already bookmarked the site, and I’m going to link to it in my blogroll for easy reference as well. That’s how strongly I feel about this sites importance as a top resource for DIY’ers. There’s a wealth of information within the site. I urge you to begin exploring now.

Spruce up a wall with a Wallhog

April 15, 2007 by Tricia

Have you guys heard of walhogs yet? Wallhogs are basically posters, vinyl or canvas prints that you place on your wall.

Wallhogs can be created from your own digital photos or images to create wall posters, large reusable vinyl wall hangings, and canvas prints in a variety sizes with the largest being up to 7 feet tall. If you don’t have great images of your own to use, you can browse through the wallhog image catalogue to chose a photo or image that suits your needs.

Imagine that? Think of how thrilled your child would be to have a photo or image of one of their favorite things, scenes or people on their wall? If you wanted to, you could probably cover one whole wall or the majority of a wall with one of the vinyl wallhogs. I know if I was still a kid I’d just love that.

When I told my husband about wallhogs we both immediately thought of using one in our soon to be refinished basement. I could take a photo of our garden, perhaps a view from the house looking out at the whole garden and we could put a wallhog on the basement wall that would be closest to our garden. Every time we’d go into the basement and look towards that wall it would be just like looking out into our garden. No more dingy dark basement for us. It would be alive with the feeling that our garden gives us when we are sitting in it.

Businesses could use wallhogs to display life size images of their products, logos or perhaps even corporate events that they are proud to have taken part in.

There are simply so many ways that home owners and businesses could use wallhogs it’ s unbelievable.

Posters can be created in sizes from 24″ tall and 4 feet wide, or as large as 7 feet by 4.5 feet. Posters have a high gloss finish and just like any of the wallhog products, they are usually created quickly and shipped out within 72 hours of the time that you placed your order.

Just like posters, vinyl images can be created in very large sizes. They can be made in sizes from 2 to 7 feet in height, by 4.5 feet wide. That’s huge! You could certainly cover all, or a large portion of a wall with one of the vinyl wallhogs. Vinyl images are shipped out within three days of your order and like all of the wallhog products there is no minimum order. You can order just one, or as many as your heart desires.

The vinyl images are reusable too. You can install one on a wall very easily and if for some reason you’d like to take it down you can store it and then reuse it where ever you please.

As you can see from this image they can remove the background from the photo in order to highlight the focus of the picture. Background removal is free of charge.

The third type of wallhog that you can create is a canvas print. Canvas prints can be create in sizes from 11 x 14 inches up to as much as 24″ by 36″. The inks and canvas material used are of high quality. Canvas images orders have a fast turn around and are often shipped on the same day.

As you can see wallhogs are quite versatile and they are simple to order too. To create a wallhog you just need to decide whether you’d like a poster, vinyl image or canvas print, pick an image from their catalogue or upload your own image, and then follow the easy steps to create a wallhog of the exact size and type that you’d like.

The prices are reasonable too. Going over the site the lowest price I saw was 19.99 for a 2 foot by 4 foot poster, and the highest priced item that I saw was the very large 84″ tall X 52″ vinyl image for $79.99. Don’t you think that’s reasonable for the versatility, size and quality that you’d get when ordering a wallhog?

If you are a photographer or artist you can upload your own images and sell them in the wallhog catalogue. Photographers and artists who sell their images in the wallhog catalogue are also offered a discount price on wallhogs of their own so that they can sell them to their customers through the wallhog reseller program.

I’ve posted some photos on my sites that some people have left comments on stating “that could be a wallhog”. So, I’ve been thinking of placing some of my images in the wallhog catalogue too. Why not? If people like my photos enough to leave comments suggesting that they’d make great wallhogs why not allow them to use them for that purpose and make a little bit of money too?

If you think that wallhogs are a great idea why don’t you go on over to the Wallhog.com website and see what you can create with your images. Browse through their catalogue while you’re there too as there is a wide assortment of images and I’m sure you’d find something that you’d enjoy using.

Wallhogs they have kindly offered to host a contest by supplying a free wallhog to the contest winner. The wallhog would be of the winners choice. If they’d approve my idea I’d love to hold a contest where my readers could submit landscape, cityscape, wildlife and nature photos. I’d hold the contest and allow my site visitors to vote on the images. The best 10 images would then go through a secondary voting process to pick the grand prize winner. If the people at wallhogs approve this contest idea I’ll let you know and we’ll have ourselves some fun.

If you’d be interested in participating in this type of contest please leave a comment so that the people from Wallhogs can see that the contest would be a great idea to host.

The whirrrrrrring sound meant trouble

April 14, 2007 by Tricia

This morning my husband turned on my computer. He often does this if he’s up before me and he hears me moving around upstairs. My usual routine is to get up, get myself a coffee and sit at the desktop computer and check my email as I wake up.

My routine was severely altered this morning!

Chris turned my computer on and said “Oh oh …” and you know anything that starts with Oh oh is not going to be good. “your computers making a sound that I just know you’re not going to like” he said. I called downstairs “What do you mean? I can’t hear it from here. What is it doing?”

He didn’t really say, he just kept telling me that I wasn’t going to be happy with the noise. Then he said I think it’s the fan.

As I came down the stairs I could hear the noise. It was a high pitched whirrrrrring noise. He was right. I didn’t like that sound at all.

Chris took the side panel off the computer and figured that it was the fan on the power supply that was making the noise.

Ok, that’s not too bad. We’ll take the computer to Best Buy or Future Shop and get a new power supply for it. We had to replace a power supply for our old computer a few years ago after a power failure zapped it. It had been easy to find the right replacement and the computer was only down for a few hours. No problem.

Chris went off with the computer and I got on the laptop to check my email.

Chris came back a couple of hours later. Much later than I thought he’d be. It turns out that the power supply in our 2003 HP Media center computer is a very special one, much smaller than most and only made by one company that supplies HP directly. Arghhh.

We got on the laptop and started to see if we could find HP parts dealers in the Toronto area, or if the HP parts store carried the power supply that we needed. HP telephone support is only open Monday to Friday so we couldn’t talk with anyone and I couldn’t find the model number on their power supply parts page. None of the computer supply stores we called could get the part either.

What a drag! Chris also told me that one of the people he talked with at Best Buy or Future shop had said the power supply would cost about $140 bucks. Much more expensive than the last power supply that we had to buy for our old old computer. I started to think, gee we could get a whole new computer for about $500 at the most. What should we do?

We decided to check for the part on eBay and we got lucky and found it. So now I’ve made my first ever eBay purchase ($36 with shipping!) and I hope that the part we got really is the correct one. It’s got the right part number but the photo’s looked a little different than what our own power supply looks like. I guess we’ll see in about a week when it arrives.

So I guess I’ll be using only my laptop for the next week or so. It’s unfortunately that all my saved emails are on my desktop, and all the info about money I’ve been making and so on. I guess we could plug in the faulty computer and move some of that info to this computer. The desktop still works but we’re pretty sure that that sound means failure is imminent. Plus, if the fan isn’t working properly the computer could over heat and get damaged. That would be much worse than not having access to some of my stored info for a few days, so I think we’ll just leave it turned off for now.

Great gift ideas at Dennisis Gifts Shop

April 14, 2007 by Tricia

If you enjoy shopping, or browsing sites with lovely items that you might treat yourself with or that would make fantastic gifts for someone you love then you should stop in and visit Dennisis Gifts Shop. The site has very nice products at reasonable prices.

You’ll find everything at Dennisis Gifts Shop from inspirational items, aromatherapy products, bath and body accessories, kitchen accessories, collectible statues, plates and figurines, and home and garden decor. If you are purchasing an item as a present for someone they also have gift cards.

The site is very user friendly with attractive and popular items listed in the top left menu, and just below this you’ll find the stores directory which lists the items that are sold at the gift shop by category. Each category page lists items with short descriptions, a small picture and it’s price. Click on the image to see a larger photo of the item that you’re interested in, and an in depth description of the product. You can easily order the product from it’s description page.

While you’re visiting the site don’t forget to take a look at their top selling products.

Right now they have a special. If you purchase any two items you’ll get 20% off your order. Just type in the promo code 103 when you reach the checkout and you’ll get your discount.

If you enjoy Dennisis Gifts Shop you might be interested in purchasing a copy of their biannual catalogs too.

WomanSavers – rate a guy and a whole lot more

April 13, 2007 by Tricia

Ladies listen up! Have you visited WomanSavers.com yet? If you haven’t you should take a moment to visit this site that touts itself as the worlds largest database rating good and bad guys. Some of the articles are amazing!

If you aren’t into reading some of the very interesting listings about good and bad guys or adding your own worst boyfriend to the list, you can chat with other site members, take relationship quizzes, join in on relationship polls and play women’s cartoon relationship games, shop, or read and join in the conversations on the the sites forums.

Speaking of the message boards. There is a large forum section devoted to abused women, called “Abuse Help” where women being abused can talk to others who can help, or who can offer support. A number of resources for abused women are also listed.

Other topics in the message board are general issues and general discussions, Infidelity and catching a cheater. There’s also a section for men too, and I’ll bet the men reading this were feeling left out. Men can use the message board to talk with others and get relationship advice, ideas for the perfect gift for that special woman, or perhaps even get some advice as to what women consider the perfect date.

One thing that I really like about WomanSavers is that all proceeds generated through donations or sale of WomanSaver items are donated to abused women and children’s charities.

Check it out. I think many of you will enjoy this site.

Remodel, blog and win contest!

Spruce up a wall with a Wallhog

The whirrrrrrring sound meant trouble

Great gift ideas at Dennisis Gifts Shop

WomanSavers – rate a guy and a whole lot more

Meta

Search this site

Blogs I Visit

Meta

Search this site

Tags

Blogs I Visit