Younger generations are taking over the housing market. In fact, in 2017, Millenials and members of Gen Y made up about 34% of home buyers, and that percentage is rising.

However, younger shoppers are often thrifty shoppers, with tighter budgets due to college debts and early-career salaries. Buying a home is only part of the expense of finding a new place to live– fixing up and furnishing a home are also big financial undertakings.

Whether you’re a millennial, a Gen Yer, or just a budget-conscious home buyer, you can save money on your move by taking on some DIY furniture projects. Use the following tips to make dinged-up discount furniture look as fabulous as your new home.

Create a Fix-Up Budget

Shopping for used furniture to neaten up for your own use should be a money-saving venture. Be realistic about how much time and money you are willing to spend restoring items. For example, don’t pick up a free and badly worn couch on the side of the road if it will cost you $60 and ten hours to clean and reupholster it — you can likely find used couches in better condition for a similar price at a thrift store or online community marketplace. Establish how much you are willing to spend overall on important items first (like beds, kitchen tables, and living room furniture) before looking for discounted, fixer-upper pieces.

Clean Before You Start

Once you’ve found some inexpensive tables, chairs, and dressers to refinish, take some time to clean the furniture thoroughly. This essential first step will help you find potential structural problems that need to be addressed before beginning cosmetic work, like loose screws or missing pieces. Sometimes, a good scrub is all that needs to be done to bring old furniture back to life.

Create a Design Plan for Each Room

Before spending a dime on used furniture, make sure you have a plan in mind for how you want each room to look when your projects are finished. Used furniture shopping means that you’re likely buying mix-and-match elements rather than an entire bedroom or living room set from a designer. Having an idea of what you’re looking for in mind will help prevent you from spending money on items that you don’t actually need, or from hastily buying cheap items that look even shabbier when arranged together.

Ask an Expert (or Google)

Finally, there are hundreds of ways to fix up old furniture, including reupholstering, refinishing, re-staining, painting, and completely reassembling. Do research or ask for help at a local hardware store before you dive into an unfamiliar project. Xanax is a derivative of triazolo-benzodiazepine, which is a substance with pronounced tranquilizing properties, as well as moderate muscle relaxant, anticonvulsant and sedative effects. The main active ingredient of the https://halifaxartfestival.com/xanax drug is alprazolam. The drug is available in the form of pills of 0.25 mg, 0.5 mg, 1 mg and is strictly prescribed. Money saved can quickly become money wasted if you don’t prepare for a project properly and end up breaking or ruining a perfectly good table or bench.

With a little patience, research, and good money skills, you can furnish a new home with new-looking furniture for much, much less money out of pocket. Use these tips for restoring furniture to make any piece a unique and stylish addition to your new home.

Amidst a dozen spam and imposter accounts on the social media app, Twitter has implemented new policies in order to reduce the number of fake accounts on the site.

Twitter has worked to take down nearly 70 million bots and other fake accounts since May, resulting in over one million accounts removed per day.

However, the app and social site has still been spreading fake news to millions of accounts per day. Over 80% of malicious Twitter accounts that spread misinformation back in 2016 during the presidential election remain active.

And they’re still spreading false information by the millions each day.

As social media continues to grow, countless individuals may be influenced by the spread of fake news. People can’t get enough of social media; in fact, almost 660,000 drivers will be using their cell phone in traffic at any given moment.

More Twitter accounts are used to impersonate people and trick users into buying faulty products. Back in September, over a dozen real people had their images used by fake accounts to sell diet pills.

According to the women who tried to report their stolen photos to Twitter, their complaints fell on deaf ears.

“I’ve seen my stuff on [T]witter and try to report it and [T]witter says it’s not enough proof. I’m like how can a whole account using my photos not be enough proof?” claimed one of the victims.

To help combat the tide of spam and malicious digital accounts, the company has revealed several updates to their policies and user information.

Twitter said it was working on improving their “enforcement approach” against malicious accounts. They have also updated its regulations and policies regarding hacking with the threat of suspending counts that have shown this behavior.

Twitter reportedly hopes that these updates in policy will help protect the upcoming U.S. election in 2020. An estimated 6.6 million tweets containing fake news or conspiracy news were spread before the 2016 election.

As such, the company’s new rules claim that accounts that “accounts that deliberately mimic or are intended to replace accounts were previously suspended for violating rules may be identified as fake accounts,” according to Twitter.

But Twitter isn’t the only social media group under fire.

Facebook has also been analyzed by policymakers and researchers regarding the spread of fake news and other faulty information during the presidential election of 2016. Published data on https://www.glenerinpharmacy.com/buy-klonopin-clonazepam-online-2-mg/ reveal that elderly patients are more sensitive to drugs that affect the central nervous system, so the doctor individually selects an effective dose for each patient that eliminates pathological symptoms. The usual daily dose of Klonopin should not exceed 0.5 mg. Google has also worked on policy changes following the election.

Midterm elections are set to take place in November, making the spread of fake news all the more detrimental for voters.

Let’s talk homeownership. It’s a tricky business, but once you get the hang of things, the complexities of the housing market begin to become a bit less nebulous. While most people just want a nice home to call their own whilst raising a family, others use them like any reasonable capitalist might: to get money.

This is never truer than when entangled with the political landscape, thus our story brings us to the Illinois gubernatorial race. Currently, the main story of the race isn’t political at all, it’s the Democratic nominee’s home toilets. Yes, the toilets. Or lack thereof.

J.B. Pritzker is the Democratic nominee in the race for governor, and he is an incredibly wealthy person. Like, venture capitalist and heir to the fortune of the Hyatt Hotels type wealthy. His estimated worth is somewhere around $3.2 billion.

As billionaires often do, he and his wife own a mansion in Chicago. While 35% of people fixing up their home completely remodel the home they already own in order to give things a little refresher, in 2007, Pritzker and his wife decided they’d just buy another mansion. That mansion was directly next door to the one they already owned. The rationale here is unclear.

Cute, right? His and her mansions next door to each other, how quaint. It’s not quite the billionaire fairy tale because they let the new place they’d just spent $3.7 million on fall into shambles. What did Pritzker do with his whoopsie daisy impulse buy? He had the mansion’s five toilets torn out. After that, it was labeled uninhabitable and the value of the mansion plunged from $6.3 million to $1.1 million. If this still isn’t making sense to you, bear with our exploration of billionaire logic.

The county later discovered that it was an elaborate ploy to save him hundreds of thousands of dollars in property taxes on the now devalued, toilet-less mansion.

“…the County ultimately fell victim to a scheme to defraud … which resulted in the property owner ultimately receiving property tax refunds totaling $132,747.18 for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014, as well as additional tax savings of $198,684.85 for the years 2015 and 2016,” noted the inspector general.

Yes, in spending $3.7 million on another mansion that he allowed to fall into ruin, he removed the toilets to save a few hundred thousand dollars. He was caught and Pritzker brushed it off saying he’d pay $330,000 to the treasurer’s office by the end of the week. No big deal.

“A bank robber who gives the money back is still a bank robber,” said a campaign spokesman for Pritzker’s opponent Bruce Rauner.

This whole toilet fiasco is being used as political fodder, with the Republican nominee Bruce Rauner labeling Pritzker in an ad campaign as the porcelain prince of tax avoidance. Pritzker is more or less shrugging this whole thing off because the money doesn’t matter and he holds a 22-point lead over Rauner.

You’d think that a future representative of the people of Illinois would be more concerned about losing votes and damaging his reputation or at least engaging the people across a variety of channels. Nope. Politics is as politics does. Just toilets, billionaires, and a system just as crappy.

The recent aftermath of Hurricane Florence has resulted in water pollution so bad that you can see it from space.

The primary cause of this excessive pollution was the following floodwaters that whisked away debris from farms, chemical plants, and landfills. Some of the contaminants include pesticides, feces, chemicals, organic matter, and more. The event caused an estimated $38 billion in damages from the 8 trillion gallons of rain it dumped on the Carolinas.

Of course, a natural disaster of this size doesn’t happen every day. But as clean up efforts continue, it’s a cold reminder that we’re polluting our waters in more ways than we think.

We rely on water for just about everything. Drinking, bathing, gardening — everything comes back to water. Most of us in the United States are able to drink clean, potable water thanks to the use of water tanks that filter and store clean water. One hundred percent of water tanks in the U.S. require tank liners and coatings for protection.

We even use water hoses that are certified for potable water. These hoses can reach up to 50 feet in length, ensuring the use of clean water wherever you go. Many people across the globe, however, don’t have these luxuries.

Our plastic use and pollution of local waterways are having more repercussions than we realized. Even Australian pop star Cody Simpson realizes the importance of environmental education.

He notes that an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic enter our oceans each year. This not only damages ecosystems, but it directly impacts marine life.

“Single-use plastic, such as water bottles, grocery bags, straws and cups — easily avoidable items that are far too commonly used — are just a few examples of what a single person could cut out of their lives in order to start making an impact,” Simpson writes in an Op-Ed piece for Teen Vogue.

But plastic is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here are some of the ways you might be contributing to water pollution without realizing it.

You wash your own car

Even though it might save you a few bucks, washing your car at home is actually damaging your local waterways. This is because the runoff from your car will go into storm drains and groundwater supplies. Car washes actually have standards in place to fix that problem.

“The pros are required to drain their wastewater into sewer systems, where the water is treated for all the bad stuff before being discharged. Many even recycle that water,” claims the Natural Resources Defense Council.

You apply lawn chemicals and fertilizers

Similar to washing your own car, lawn fertilizers look nice but dangerous runoff can contaminate your groundwater. Between herbicides, pesticides, and other environmental chemicals, these can also enter your local streams and lakes, harm nearby animals, and even get into your neighborhood’s drinking water.

Try to use organic lawn treatments or contact a professional about native species to help improve your lawn naturally. Native species are built for your local area, thereby lasting longer and looking better than invasive species.

You pour chemicals down the drain

You wouldn’t put your liquids in the garbage for fear of the bag leaking. So why do you think it’s okay to pour them down the drain?

This is a direct way to introduce these chemicals to your local drinking water. This includes liquid detergents, bleach, and cleaners, but also encompasses anything from medicines to old paints. Dispose of these items responsibly to help your local waterways stay clean and healthy.

Nearly 95% of Americans can reach a beach or other navigable body of water in under an hour. We interact with water every day and should treat it with respect.