Finding a good contractor for your remodeling project can be a dicey proposition. A friend of mine recently interviewed a contractor who got into a screaming match with his ex-wife on his cell phone while she was interviewing him. My parents hired contractors who left the state, leaving their job unfinished and with their money long gone. We've all heard the contractor horror stories before.

If only you knew who to call, to avoid getting ripped off. Well, now you do; our friends over at CALFINDER has started a network that has taken the worry out of the process. CALFINDER was developed by homeowners for homeowners.They do the screening of contractors for you as well as conduct ongoing monitoring and customer satisfaction surveys. All CALFINDER's contractors are carefully pre-screened and monitored. Here's just a few of the services you get when you partner with CALFINDER to find your next contractor;

"Before we certify a contractor we perform a variety of checks. Below are just a few of those checks:In-depth check of current license and insurance coverage   

• Personal interview with at least 10 previous clients ensuring customer satisfaction and business reliability
• Ongoing monitoring and customer satisfaction surveys
• Follow up with each homeowner we work with to ensure that our contractors are providing a great service

CALFINDER’s founders, who have a diverse background in construction, computer technology and business management, realized that planning and executing home improvement projects are incredibly time-consuming and expensive and believed they could fill a void by developing a reliable source to help local homeowners find high-quality contractors. CALFINDER was established in 2005 covering main home improvement projects including home remodeling, painting and window installation. Working with a vast network of 200 top-notch, professional contractors, CALFINDER handles more than 600 homeowner service requests per month."

We at Shakhammer think this is a great solution to taking the worry out of finding a good general contractor who is good enough to work on one of your most valuable assets- your home. Check out their home improvement and remodeling blog too for the most up-to-date information on home rejuvenation trends and remodeling projects.

When you get fed up with the same old looking fridge, maybe it seems a bit tired or the colors a bit faded, so what do you do? Go out and buy a new one or just transform your fridge into some that looks like it belongs in a celebrity household?

These fridge revivers are in fact giant stickers that are place onto the surface of the fridge, and there you have it, an instant revamp which will bring the whole kitchen into the world of “Lost” you can just imagine opening up the fridge and finding a selection of Dharma products inside.

The fitting of this would appear to be fairly easy, but it has to be said the actual fitting of the sticker should be done with caution and very eased into place, this will prevent any bubbling and creases forming which would really spoil the effect completely.

One other point, I know that this is going to sound condescending but please remember to check which way up the fridge and sticker are, after all you do not want to stand back to admire your handy work only to find that is on upside down! Only joking of course. These come in four designs and cost around $20 (£10).

Source  [Dr Gadget]

Sometimes home repair isn't putting a new addition on your suddenly too-small house; it can be as simple as making your household more accessible for the people you love.

Light switch extenders are perfect for giving your toddler the ability to practice their independence and those all-important "big kid" skills. Mastery of darkness can be a huge boost to your little one's confidence.

And the usefulness of a switch extender doesn't stop at the pre-K demographic...older kids with short stature and family members who use wheelchairs will also find extenders profoundly useful. They might not, however, want to use moon-shaped devices.

In that case, you're in luck, because there's a variety of styles out there to choose from, including a clear plastic one here and a simple wand shaped one here.

If you're particularly handy, you can even cobble one up yourself using a wooden dowel and some electrical shrink tubing, both of which you can find at your nearest True Value or other local hardware store. You can also use one of those plastic rods that control the slats of any standard mini-blind unit. All you have to do is find shrink tubing that's just big enough to fit over both your rod and the light switch. Fit the two pieces together and then apply heat with a hair dryer until the tubing is tight and the rod secure. Easy as pie. A complete home improvement project, done and finished in under two minutes--doesn't get better than that.

When we bought our house, we bought the location more than the house. The house needed everything.
It's hard to narrow down where to start when the list includes the roof, the flooring, and everything in between. We found it was helpful to split it up between the ugly and the non-functioning.

One of the first ugly projects we took on was lighting. Every fixture in the house was awful. The best of them looked like an antiqued kerosene lantern monstrosity that had most assuredly been rejected by a keen-eyed Spaghetti Western set designer and the rest of them were the kinds of things that you'd see left over in the free pile at a garage sale.

Shopping for lighting can be a daunting process, especially right after you've closed escrow...too many choices and not nearly enough money, but we had to feng-shui some of the ugly out of there and soon. Fortunately we found a great (temporary) solution at Costco. On our way to the Giant Muffin sector, we saw a huge pallet stacked high with fluorescent ceiling fixtures that, while we didn't absolutely love them, at least they were better than half of what we'd seen at some other stores and they bore only a passing resemblance to anything from the Star Trek set--certainly a step up from where we'd started.

Plus, if we acted now, each gleaming, non-fugly fixture was only $8.50 each! At that price we were practically making money on the deal; the bulbs alone were worth $5 something! I thought we needed six of them; naturally, my better half thought the correct number was more like seven-- so we bought eight and it was still less money than the one light that we really did like.

We blasted home like we'd just won the lottery and installed six out of the seven in about an hour and a half. We only got shocked once, each.

So the moral of the story today kids, is even if you don't absolutely love it, it's OK to make a temporary improvement. As long as it's a real bargain.

In the days of the Roman gladiators, toasting bread was a way to prolong its life (not the gladiator’s; the bread). In fact, the word “tostum,” from which toast derives, is actually Latin for scorching or burning.  (In my house, the word would be synonomous with ironing, but that’s another blog entirely.)  In their conquests, the Romans took their love of toast with them and spread the custom as far away as Britain.

Following the Roman tradition, English colonists brought the toast tradition to the New World. In pre-electric times, there were a variety of methods employed to make toast. They ranged from using a hot hearthstone to putting bread on toasting forks and holding it over a fire and fancy bread holders that could be attached to the side of a fireplace and rotated into the flame.

Crompton and Company invented the first electric toaster in England in 1893. In 1909, it was developed in the United States. It was labor-intensive however, as it required someone to manually turn the toaster off when the toast was done and it also only toasted one side of the bread.  In 1919, the pop-up toaster as we know it today was invented by Charles Strite.

The popularity of the toaster spread even further with the invention of pre-sliced bread in 1928 by Otto Frederick Rohwedder. When Wonder Bread introduced pre-sliced bread back in 1930, the toaster became the coolest thing since...well…since sliced bread!

Happy toasting!

What connection does the modern blender have with a famous American bandleader?

In 1910, Fred Osius, L.H.Hamilton and Chester Beach formed the Hamilton Beach Manufacturing Company. Osius held the patent for the blender although his was not the first one created. He did not have the money to thrust his new invention into the marketplace. He knew that gadgets always fascinated Fred Waring, who had achieved fame with his big band, Fred Waring and The Pennsylvanians and that Waring had the money to indulge in his hobbies.

One night, after a radio broadcast at New York’s Vanderbilt Theater, Osius talked his way into Waring’s dressing room and pitched his idea. Waring agreed to fund his research but six months and $25,000 later, there were still blender problems. Waring then dumped Osius and redesigned the blender himself. The result was the “Miracle Mixer Blender,” which sold for $29.75, and was introduced to the public at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago. In 1938, Waring renamed his Miracle Mixer Corporation to the Waring Corporation, and the mixer’s name was officially changed to the Waring Blender.

Waring once said that this mixer “will revolutionize American drinks” and he was right. He could not have imagined, however that the blender would be used inn hospitals for the implementation of special diets and research. Dr. Jonas Salk used it while developing the vaccine for polio.

So the next time you blend or pulse, stop for a moment and think about how much easier your life is because of this machine that asks nothing of you and sits quietly on your kitchen counter. Maybe you should consider even saluting it once, just to show it a bit of the respect it deserves.

Tackling a lighting project sounds ominous - in addition to the jokes from family and friends about dim bulbs, or maybe getting a jolt from your work, there's the actual problem of putting in lights.

Felicia of Homefront Insecurity does a noble job working to putting in dimmers and light switches at her house without the expense of an electrician.

Inside the box, there are four sets of wires; four whites (uh, hubby informs me they're "common", so fine, Mr. Engineer Smartypants), all tied together. Each of the old dimmers had two black wires. One was connected to each of three black wires, then the others were connected to the fourth "live" wire. And only one of the dimmers was grounded. Hubby says "but they're all touching each other, right? Forgodsake, I'm supposed to INTUIT what that means?! Anyway, none of this was making sense to me at the time.

Faced with the prospect of calling for professional help, Felicia went back to the books. Her results include photos, so take a look.

Update:  The updated dimmer problem - they didn't work!  But Felicia checked again and solved the problem, leaving her now with just one problem - getting the family to turn the light completely off when they leave the room.