Fix Your Garbage Disposal and Save $150

Garbage disposals are the kitchen's workhorse but they love to quit just after a big dinner you've hosted for family or friends.

But repairing them can be surprisingly easy and you can do it. I'll show you how make the repairs you need quickly and possibly save $150 or more in a plumbing service call. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through the most common garbage disposal repairs and also tell you how to avoid clogs and slow draining situations.

And get familiar with how the garbage disposal is constructed with Anatomy of a Garbage Disposal for a graphic overview of the disposal's components. And if it's your sink that's causing trouble, see Unclogging a Sink.

Fix Your Garbage Disposal and Save $150 originally appeared on About.com Home Repair on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 11:00:45.

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Companion Planting for Tomatoes

I've always found the idea of companion planting fascinating. I wouldn't swear it always works, but I suspect there's a lot more substance to it than its detractors will admit. Gardeners have been fine tuning it for years and there's no substitute for experience. Today I'm combining two of my gardening loves: growing tomatoes and companion planting. I culled through a few dozen articles and books and my own experience and pulled together my list of companion plants for tomatoes. Since you're going to grow some of these plants anyway, why not experiment with growing them together? There's still plenty of time to start some seeds.

Photo: © Marie Iannotti

Companion Planting for Tomatoes originally appeared on About.com Gardening on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 01:06:34.

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Ornamental Grasses

I greatly enjoy my maiden grass during the wintertime. After my herbaceous perennials have died back and my deciduous shrubs have dropped their leaves, it's really the only game in town in that patch of my landscape. So there's nothing else around to compete with the beauty of its seed-heads, stalks and blade-like leaves.

Not that maiden grass needs its competition eliminated in order to shine brightly. This is a tall ornamental grass; it's more likely to obscure its neighbors than to be obscured by them.

But ornamental grasses come in a whole range of heights. For example, during spring and summer, I enjoy blue fescue, that ornamental grass with an almost surreal blue color. Blue fescue is a short ornamental grass. It's not something you want to stick in the back row of a perennial bed, because you won't be able to appreciate it with taller plants in the way.

Read article: Ornamental Grasses

Ornamental Grasses originally appeared on About.com Landscaping on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 08:11:46.

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Wet Basement Repair? Don't Rely on the Waterproofing Companies to Tell You.

Wet basements are no fun.  Wet basement repair is a thousand times less fun.  One reason is because you often cannot figure out where the water is coming from.

When you call basement waterproofing companies, they may not always locate the actual problem.  Many waterproofing companies are just in the business of performing one type of waterproofing method.  For instance, they might be all about sealing your foundation walls with a special type of waterproofing compound.

Yet it's not really the job of these waterproofing companies to spend countless hours roaming your yard and basement, doing detective work to find an often unfindable thing.  Whose job is it?  Yours.

(But let's hope that the better waterproofing companies out there will tell you if the source of your wet basement is something simple and obvious--before they undertake expensive repairs.)

So, before any wet basement repair jobs you take on, make sure you have covered your bases.  There are a number of dead-simple reasons for a wet basements that you should knock off before you make a call to anyone.

Wet Basement Repair? Don't Rely on the Waterproofing Companies to Tell You. originally appeared on About.com Home Renovations on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 11:49:25.

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