WELCOME

Welcome to Ready My Property Home Journal, your go-to online magazine for quick answers and tips on things that matter to you and your home. We all have far too much to do and not enough time to do it in, and remembering "all the things" becomes harder and harder as our life gets fuller and more rewarding.

Here, we share insightful articles that guide you through home maintenance tips, innovative cleaning hacks, helpful habits of the home, the joys of gardening, delightful recipes, and unique experiences. The Home Journal's content, updated weekly, aims to inspire and empower you to create comfortable and beautiful living spaces - one small, doable step at a time.

Join us on this journey of discovery and creativity in home management and lifestyle. And should you have a question or a topic you would like to learn more about, or even a recommended location to visit, I would love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out at amanda@readymypropertyhomejournal.com.

Until next time, live happy!

Featured Articles

How to Keep Summer's Bugs From Moving Into Your House Rent-Free

Summer arrives, the windows go up, the grill comes out, and somewhere in the fine print of the season nobody tells you that every ant, spider, and mosquito within a quarter mile has also received the memo that your kitchen is now open for business. There is no RSVP required. They just show up, they bring friends, and by August you're finding ants on the counter forming what can only be described as a supply chain.

The good news is that bugs aren't actually trying to outsmart you. They're just following food, water, and the path of least resistance — which, unfortunately, is often your house. Close off the path, and most of them will go bother somebody else's kitchen instead. Here's how.

The Chemicals Hiding in Every Load, and What Researchers Have Found They Do to Your Body Over Time

Let's talk about the thing you use fifty-two times a year (at minimum) and have probably never once thought to question: your laundry detergent.

You pour it in, you don't measure it, you definitely don't read the back label, and you trust that "clean fresh linen scent" means what it says. Fair enough — nobody has the bandwidth to interrogate every bottle under the sink. But it turns out that bottle is doing a lot more than removing grass stains, and some of what it's leaving behind on your clothes, in your air, and eventually in your body has caught the attention of actual researchers. Not internet researchers. The kind with lab coats and published studies.

So let's go through what's actually in there, and what the science says happens when you're breathing it in and wearing it against your skin, load after load, for years.

How to Actually Prune Your Bushes (and Your Roses) Without Butchering Them

Let's be honest about how most of us prune. We walk outside, look at a bush that's crept a little too close to the front window, and start hacking at it with hedge trimmers in roughly the shape we're hoping for, powered entirely by vibes. Sometimes it works out. Often, the bush spends the next two months looking like it lost a fight, and we quietly avoid making eye contact with it until it fills back in.

There is, it turns out, an actual right way to do this — and it's not complicated, it just requires trading the "attack it and hope" method for a few minutes of intention. Here's how to prune your shrubs properly, how roses are a slightly different animal, and what to do if things have gotten away from you entirely.

Cool and Delicious: Bacon Pea Pasta Salad

There are so many ways to make a salad, but one of the best ways by far, is with bacon and noodles. This salad just tastes like a summer picnic where you hunt down the person who brought it and get the recipe for your family recipe book. Enjoy!

Asheville, North Carolina: The Mountain Town That Doesn't Quite Fit Anywhere Else

You come around a bend on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the kind of curve where the trees suddenly open up and the mountains fall away in blue-gray layers toward the horizon, one ridge behind another behind another until they blur into the sky itself. You pull over, because you have to, because everyone has to at this particular overlook, and you stand there for a minute doing that thing where you take a photo you already know won't capture it, and then you just look instead.

That's Asheville before you've even reached Asheville. The town itself, tucked into a bowl of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains where the French Broad River bends through it, somehow keeps that same trick going once you arrive — it is a place that feels like it shouldn't exist in quite the combination it does. Gilded Age mansion. Street drummers. Vegan doughnut shop next door to a barbecue joint that's been slow-smoking meat since before anyone in line was born. It all somehow works.

The Two-Minute Trick That Makes You Feel Like a Functional Adult

Somewhere in your life right now, there is a version of you that drinks eight glasses of water a day, meditates at dawn, meal preps every Sunday, and has a sock drawer that would make a Marie Kondo training video. You've met this person. You've been this person, briefly, for about four days in January before life happened and that person quietly moved out without leaving a forwarding address.

Here's the good news: the problem was never you. The problem was that you tried to become that person overnight, which is a little like deciding to run a marathon by signing up for one and showing up. What actually works — and there's real research behind this, not just a poster in a gym — is almost insultingly small. It's called the two-minute rule, and it might be the least impressive-sounding productivity advice you'll read all year, which is exactly why it works.