I’m always looking for new and exciting gadgets and innovations to add to my home. Of course, I don’t have the budget to spend like crazy to make all kinds of improvements at once. It’s all about planning out the bigger changes around the house and supplementing them with smaller ones to give your house an upgraded feel.
Since we moved into our home, we’ve made some big changes, like adding a generator and a fence. But there have been smaller upgrades we’ve made that have boosted our home’s value as well. Some of them we may one day see returns on when we sell our house. Others have just been for us and improving how we live in the space. The four smaller additions to our home that have made a big difference recently, I can’t recommend highly enough.
4 lessons homeownership taught me that no one warned me about
It’s been learning on the go for sure.
A smart pizza oven transformed dinners
This was a game-changer in summer and winter
When my wife and I got married, we lived in a small apartment. We had considered registering for a smart pizza oven, but realized we didn’t have a suitable place to store it. It wasn’t going to hang out on a counter for years without us really being able to use it much. Once we bought a home, we realized it was a possibility again for us.
We got the Current Model P Smart Pizza Oven and have loved it. It’s a smart kitchen device that’s actually useful. It can make pizzas in a variety of ways, as there are settings for Neopolitan, New York, Frozen, Thin Crust, and Broil. The most amazing thing about this pizza oven is that it can cook a pizza in two minutes. The pizza oven can reach 850°F, so it cooks pizzas quickly.
We’ve had so much fun this year making pizzas, calzones, and more. You can use it indoors or outdoors, but we’ve found that it’s easier to use outdoors. We usually prop it up on our table on our deck and run an extension cord to the house, as the cord is a bit short. But we’ve turned it into a family affair, as everyone gets to prep parts of the pizza.
Another huge plus of the pizza oven is its app, which lets you connect via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. You can monitor your pizza in your app if you’re doing multiple things in the kitchen and have to run back inside to continue prepping. It will tell you what temperature it is at during the preheating stage and can give you ideas for your pizza based on the ingredients you have. Plus, if you have ingredients that take longer to cook, it automatically adjusts the timing based on the Build feature, which lets you type in what you’re putting on your pizza.
A Skylight Calendar has organized my family’s schedule
It’s a great display in the kitchen as well
Trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules has proven to be difficult. We have a shared calendar between my wife and me on our phones, but we don’t look at each other’s work schedules unless we ask the other person. We now use the Skylight Calendar to coordinate more easily.
You can upload multiple calendars to Skylight, and it can show you different people’s schedules for different days on its bright touchscreen display. It helps us track work calls, in-person meetings, extracurricular activities, and family plans on the weekends, all while color-coding the calendar for the various people.
While the Skylight Calendar also is a digital picture frame that shows photos when it’s not showing us our schedules, its best feature is arguably that it can build to-do lists that anyone can check off. I can make a list of tasks for myself and assign them to me, or we can do ones that need to get done by someone in the house. We’ve started having my daughter keep tabs of her chores on here as well, letting her mark them off when she’s completed them.
Skylight Calendar works well with our Amazon Alexa smart home ecosystem, so I can ask Alexa to add tasks to the Skylight Calendar. Using voice commands is easier than going and typing in the corresponding app or manually on the display. Plus, you can type in the ingredients that you have in the house, and Skylight Calendar can offer recipes, helping on those hectic evenings when our calendars are packed.
Painting the deck has been a nice outdoor upgrade
We’ve given it a fresh outlook
Some of the boards of the deck had to be replaced, and we had to wait for them to settle before painting them. The winter hit before they were fully settled, so they will be painted in the spring.
The owners of our home before us had repainted the deck prior to them selling the house. It was a light gray color that looked outdated and drab. After a while, the paint started to peel in areas, showing a reddish color that had previously been there.
After a few power washes to clean up the deck, the paint was really starting to chip off even more. We decided it was time to upgrade the outside as well.
We used a water-based solid stain to change the deck’s color to brown, so it blended in better with our furniture and yard. It took multiple coats of the stain to deliver the look we wanted, but it has turned out well. We’ve been incredibly pleased with how it looks, and we upgraded some of the rugs we had out there as well to give the entire area a more modern look.
It took rollers and hand brushes to deliver the desired look. It has been a pleasant change when either on the deck or looking out from the family room.
A combo mop and vacuum is two times the fun
It saves a lot of juggling
We have hardwood, tile, and carpets in our home, so finding the right ways to clean the different surfaces has been a challenge. You can use a mop on some, but not all. The vacuum works well on a few of the surfaces, but not all of them. Having to go from mop to vacuum to sometimes using a Swiffer was getting frustrating.
The Dream H15 Pro CarpetFlex has been a solid addition to our cleaning stable. This combo mop and vacuum lets you swap out brushes quickly and efficiently, meaning you can go from mop to vacuum in a few moments. Dreame is known for its innovations in robot vacuums, and this is another solid entry from the company.
It offers multiple suction levels, so you can choose how much cleaning you want to do. But it also has intuitive suction, so it can judge how dirty your floors are and change its levels accordingly.
Adding cleaning solution to the water bin for the mop is easy, and the dirty water collects in a different area. However, vacuum debris collects in the same area that dirty water did, so you can get wet pet hair if you don’t dry out the compartment.
But the gliding of this machine is the real star. It moves effortlessly, helping you get around objects, under tables and chairs, and into every corner you need. It’s so easy to use, and changing modes is just a push of a button.
These additions made a big difference
I’ve been able to add some great gadgets to my home over the past few years. A combo vacuum and mop can do the job of two devices without needing to have two separate ones. A smart pizza oven can be used indoors or outdoors and lets me monitor its progress from my phone. The Skylight Calendar keeps my family’s schedules coordinated. Plus, some fresh coats of stain have changed how our deck looks. I look forward to continuing to make changes to my home, hopefully for the better.
