FireFly Marketing

Winter in the North can be an ordeal every time it comes. Just the thought of below-freezing temperatures and chilling winds can make you shiver even inside a warm house. And with the changing temperature comes the precipitation—wet white snowflakes falling from the sky and piling up, freezing rain sticking to the roads as slippery ice.

When the fall starts turning to winter, you know it’s time to get ready for the coming cold season. You switch the tires on your car for snow tires with thick treads so you won’t be skidding around as you drive to work in a morning ice storm. You put lawn chairs and other items inside the garage out of harm’s way from the weather. You make sure your house is sealed up and ready for winter—heating systems working, no gaps where cold can seep in.

All too often, homeowners inspect their houses only to find that they’re not ready for the coming season. Boards are rotting way up in the ceiling, and water is leaking through. Not good for when snow piles up on the roof and melts down into water that drips through, only making a bad situation worse. Or maybe there are slight gaps in the walls where cold can seep through, making the house chilly and adding hundreds of dollars to heating costs.

Whatever problems they might find, it’s a good idea to get these problems taken care of while there is still time, before the winter comes in full. Once you get up, say, around Pennsylvania or Maryland, even areas like Bethesda, one can expect a good period of cold weather. Perhaps someone with this problem should call a general contractor to take care of structural issues before they get worse.

D. R. Hartman is one construction company that does a variety of contracting work. They are skilled in remodeling and offer a free estimate. They will work efficiently and quickly to fix up your house for the coming winter.

Once your house is fixed up, you can plan to enjoy the coming winter in peace, knowing that your house is secure and structurally sound. It will stay warm without heat leaking out and wasting heating costs.

Soon, the winter comes, and the first flurries of snow fall from the sky. The next storm that comes piles a few inches of snow on the ground. It’s time to sit inside, turn up the heat, recline in a recliner and relax while reading a good book. Or pop in a movie and pop the popcorn. Or maybe just stop before this starts sounding too cheesy.

Whatever you might do with a quiet winter day in your living room, you’ll be satisfied with the choice of a good contractor, such as Hartman Construction, to work on your house. You might give their website a look if you need work done on your home.

In the grand scheme of home renovations, the electrical wiring falls pretty low on my personal priority list, as long as it’s all working and not starting any fires. My husband, on the other hand, works as an electrician (among many, many other things) for his full-time employment, and he has seen the nasty after-effects of thinking like mine.

And so, after almost two years working on our house, only a little bit of visible progress has been made on the outside and the visible inside. The attic, basement, and walls, however, bear much evidence of many hours of work. From an exterior motion sensor for the driveway flood light to the panel in the basement, he finally just about has the wires as he likes them—neat, tidy, concise, and sensible. This goal has meant that just about every project remotely connected to anything electrical has taken a fair bit longer than expected, since he’s done all the wiring tidying in whichever area he was working. Pretty soon, we’ll be ready for some more inside work…inside the livable areas of the house, that is.

Besides his contentment and peace of mind, another of the benefits that I see in all this time spent in the attic and basement is that our future projects will be much easier, since he now knows what’s going on with the wires. A good bit of the delay in many of the past projects has been the time spent, of necessity, in figuring out why there were three different wires all feeding into one box or where the gray wire went. Already, we’ve started to see the fruits of his labors, with the last project being much simpler than many that have gone before.

It all started the first day we were in the house after settlement. We were still a few months shy of our wedding, and my folks had come over to help for the day. While they were painting, my then fiancé had me help him get all the outlets and light switches matched up with the appropriate breakers in the main panel. Although I didn’t quite see the value of all that time, then, I’ve many times since been very thankful that he started with that, with no furniture in the way and nothing else that had to be watched (like the 1-year-old we now have to keep track of, for example). Where I would have jumped right in to work on cosmetics, ripping up stained carpet and tearing down nasty ceiling tiles, he started with the guts, and life has been happier because of it.

He’s made many improvements to the electrical aspect of our home, moving switches that were in ridiculous places, installing a timer for our outside lights, and replacing the thermostat with an all-the-bells-and-whistles version. Probably my favorite of his improvements is the addition of the motion sensor to the light in the laundry room. Although I didn’t give a hearty assent to his suggestion, thinking it would be more nuisance than help, I’ve become a complete convert, to the point that I now walk into other rooms and am surprised when the light doesn’t automatically come on. Ah! the blessings and curses of modern technology….

Before retiring from full-time work outside of the home, I spent a few months working for the Human Resources department of my last employer. During those relatively few weeks, I had revealed to me a whole world I never knew existed.

There were a few people within the department for whom I was specifically assigned to work, with others welcome to any free time I had left. One of those people was my boss (she was responsible for another sub-department, where my job description formally placed me), another was one of her peers, and the other was her superior. My boss’s peer was probably the most educational of the bunch, at least as far as I was concerned. She offered me a wide range of opportunities for chores to do, ranging from proofreading website text to folding papers and stuffing envelopes to running monthly report.

One of her main responsibilities, with which I occasionally had opportunity to assist her, was managing the campus recruitment program. Of course, I saw the best part of that whole program as being the giveaways handed out to prospective recruits at the different events. Personally, I thought custom flash drives, imprinted with the company logo, would make a great impression, especially for an electronics-centered company like ours, but while I was there, the gifts of choice were travel mugs, can coolers, and those pen-size screwdrivers that always show up in Grandma’s desk drawer. We sent out hundreds of all of them, to I don’t know how many schools all over the country. Actually, I think some of them even may have headed beyond country borders to near one of our Mexico facilities.

It was amazing to me, to see how much time, energy, and effort is involved in recruiting college students before they’re even done with their schooling. Silly me, I’d always assumed that the big businesses would want people with lots of experience in their fields. In the case of this company, though, it seemed as though just as much went into finding rookies to draw into the corporate family. As much competition as our company met in vying for the attention of all those juniors and seniors, ours was, apparently, not the only company focusing on campus recruitment. I eventually decided that the theory had to do with assuming that inexperience would automatically lead to a teachable spirit, with the side benefit of thinking outside the box (since inexperience eliminates the understanding of “the box”). Funny, my contact with college students and recent graduates was usually that they tend to think they know it all—after all, they’ve just been graduated from some number of years of education!

Some of what struck my as being rather humorous was the attitude we all assumed the college students would have. A whole lot of the campus recruitment budget went to the giveaways, and I think just as much time got spent on all of that as on any of the literature that was given out with the gadgets. The gal for whom I was working seemed to sometimes agonize over making that one decision. Although I believe she did look into wholesale flash drives at some point, the can cozies won out…still don’t know why…. I have a sneaking suspicion that the unbreakable gifts were chosen for sake of shipping. Not only were they all lightweight—they were also fairly tough and unlikely to get broken during the extensive shipping process.

So, I decided, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I was not called to work in Human Resources indefinitely, but I did enjoy the time I spent there. I learned a lot and got lots of experience in a fairly wide range of tasks.