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Our homes are made up of lots of working parts — bedrooms, redecorated kitchens, upgraded baths, ogle-worthy renos, ticks and tricks for cleaning and organizing, and real home tours all live here to represent the spaces of your Offbeat Home.

Hide the My Little Ponies and other tips: staging and photographing your home for sale

We sold our first house in 2007, just as the mortgage industry was crumbling around our ears. I credit staging and photography with how we were able to sell our house quickly. Here’s what I did.

Painting trees: asking for trouble or making a front yard awesome?

In front of my house, there is a very nice elm tree. I’ve been wanting to paint it. Is this resale suicide? Pure tackiness? Tree murder?!

Make it easy to use bike-centered transportation

Bicycling brought me together with my sweetie, Timo, and we were car-free when we got together. Here’s how we make it easy to depend on our bikes.

My partner wants a bland palette in our new home. What can I do to keep color alive?

If my current house was an analogy of a clown puking all over everything — which is a description I’ve heard — the new house would make that same clown drop dead from sadness. What can I do?!

One reader hosts an open studio tour, another makes driftwood useful, and there are a whole lotta clicky links in here

Also included: a hipster chandelier made of mason jars, cupcake wall art, and a documentary about Community Supported Agriculture.

Going into the closet: to, you know, work there

“Cloffice” kind of sounds like… I dunno, maybe an equine venereal disease. But sound it out with me and you’ll see we’re actually talking about offices built in closets. It’s genius, right?

Be ruthless: how to move the army brat way

I was a military brat from the age of six, and I eventually joined the Air Force. I’ve moved eighteen times that I can remember, and I know I missed one or two that happened before my conscious memories start. Suffice it to say, I’ve learned a thing or two about packing up one’s entire life and hauling it off somewhere.