Thanksgiving is a great time to welcome friends and family into our homes and enjoy home-cooked meals together. It’s also a great opportunity to incorporate some fun decorations to really get into the holiday spirit. Here are a few ideas that might just spark your imagination.

• Message board

Here’s a different way to talk about what everyone is thankful for. Put up a message board and as guests arrive, have them write down their ideas. You can even have small leaves cut out of construction paper to further the Thanksgiving theme.

• Use the mantle

The mantle above your fireplace is a great place for decorating for the holidays. Consider a harvest theme with plenty of ceramic pumpkins and maybe some ornamental plates. Bundles of dried wheat also look very fall and festive. You could even use a small chalkboard to write inspirational or seasonal quotes.

• Wreaths

Decorating your front door ensures that guests get into the holiday spirit the moment they arrive. Consider creating your own Thanksgiving wreath this year. Start with an evergreen wreath and add your own touches like pine cones, roses, berries and hydrangeas.

• Candles

The warm glow of candles throughout your home certainly creates an inviting ambiance. You don’t have to be limited to plain candles, however. Decorate your glass votive holders by wrapping them with paper, corn husks or anything that you can think of. Add a feather, bow or other item for some flair. Just be sure the decorations are far from the actual flame.

• Cornucopia

This is a Thanksgiving tradition that immediately brings back memories. There’s no better Thanksgiving centerpiece than an overflowing cornucopia. Fill it with anything meaningful to you. Leaves, fruit, gourds, or even photos could make an ideal filling.

• Glass containers

Sometimes, the simplest decorations can be the most effective. Take, for example, this idea of filling glass containers with signs of the season. Fill one with a variety of colors of leaves, another with gold and red ribbons, and one with walnuts, or pecans. Adorn the containers with bows or ribbons and you’ve got a simple decoration that’s easy to make.

• Family photos

The holidays are a great time to teach your children about their ancestry, or just to remember your loved ones. There are a number of creative ways you can use family photos in your decorations. Consider making copies of baby pictures, then cutting them out and making a family tree on your wall. The best thing about family photos is everyone can enjoy them and they never look out of place.

These are just a few options for decorating your home for Thanksgiving.

If you’re ready for a new home to decorate, contact us at Perry Hood Properties. If you act now, you could still close on one of our currently available homes in Tulsa, Broken Arrow and Bixby before the new year.

With colder weather coming in the near future, most homeowners are already getting out the quilts, space heaters and winter clothes to attempt to stay warm during this harsh Oklahoma winter. That also means it’s time to get your fireplace cleaned and inspected before another season of use. If you don’t have a fireplace, you may consider adding one to your current or future home. Here are a few benefits you’ll get when you do.

• Ambiance

Imagine walking into a room with a roaring fire on a cold, gray, winter afternoon. Now imagine walking into the same room, with the same furnishings and decorations, but no fireplace. It’s a completely different feeling and the room even looks different. In many ways, a living room or den is incomplete without a fireplace. Not only does it add a rustic charm, but the warmth, glow and sound of a crackling fire even serves as a relaxing addition. So, in addition to the design benefit of making a room look more inviting, there’s the added benefit of making a room feel more inviting too.

• Energy costs

This is perhaps the most obvious benefit of having a fireplace in your home. When you’re able to use your heater less, your utility bills will decrease significantly. Anyone who has regularly used a fireplace in the winter can tell you that the heater isn’t necessary when the fireplace is in use. While you can’t expect the fireplace to heat your entire home, it heats up the room it’s in quickly, and retains heat for a long time. Over time, that heat moves to other rooms to keep them warmer too, so you can keep your heater off for longer. In most cases, any costs associated with your fireplace are off-set by your energy savings.

•  Easy to use

There was a time when you needed to be able to build a fire from scratch in order to make use of your home’s fireplace. That’s no longer true, however. Starting a fire in your home’s fireplace is often as easy as flipping a switch. Whether you have an electric, wood or gas fireplace, the process of starting a fire is simple and easy to learn. Additionally, clean-up and maintenance of your fireplace is as easy as ever. While regular cleaning is required to keep dust and soot from building up, modern fireplaces stay cleaner for longer and don’t require you to regularly sweep the chimney. All of this contributes to the overall experience of owning a fireplace being easier than ever before.

At Perry Hood Properties, we regularly include fireplaces in our homes and floorplans. You can even enjoy an outdoor fireplace on the patio, as well as a fireplace in your living room. Browse through our currently available homes or call us to start building a home specifically for you and your family.

Are you the type of person who bristles at the sight of Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving? Many of us want to enjoy fall and its holidays before fully embracing winter, but when it comes to preparing your home for the winter months, it could be costly to wait. Here are a few winter preparation tasks to finish ahead of the cold weather to ensure your winter is comfortable and your home is able to stand up to winter weather.

• Inspect your heater

In Oklahoma, it’s not a question of if you’ll need your heater this winter, but a question of when. Fall temperatures have been mild so far, but eventually, you’ll want to kick on your heater. Be sure to have a professional inspect it before you need it to ensure it’s both as efficient as possible and safe to use. Before the professionals arrive, you can perform so simple tasks yourself. Change the filters, clean the vents and look into your ducts for signs of leaks. Performing these tasks and having routine inspections can prolong the life of your heating system and ensure it doesn’t break down in the dead of winter.

• Prepare the outside of your home

By looking for damaged areas and properly sealing your home before the cold weather arrives, you help to make your home more energy efficient and easier to keep heated all winter. You also help to prevent moisture and water from causing costly damage to walls and floors. Start by walking around your home and looking for any cracks to the exterior. You can fill and seal any that you find with caulk. Then, look at the weather stripping around your doors and windows and replace any that is damaged. Ineffective weather stripping can allow a great deal of heat to escape your home and is inexpensive to replace so it’s worth this exercise.

• Yard maintenance

Most of us would associate yard work with the spring and fall, but there are a few chores to get out of the way to prepare for winter also. First, trim your trees that are close to your home. As snow and ice accumulate on the branches, they’re likely to break and fall on your roof, gutters or other areas of your home. Similarly, it’s important to trim shrubs and bushes before winter, especially those located near your air conditioner. Keeping the unit free of debris will be helpful when you’re ready to use it again next spring.

These three tasks will help you prepare your home for the winter months.

If you’re ready to move into a brand new home before Christmas arrives, contact us at Perry Hood Properties. We have several move-in ready homes that have been recently finished available in Tulsa, Broken Arrow and Bixby.

If you’ve been renting, living with family or with roommates for the past few years, you might feel it’s time to buy your own home. Or, maybe you’ve just gotten married and you and your new spouse are ready to buy a home to start a family. Before making the investment into a house, however, be sure you’re ready for the commitment. Here are three tell-tale signs that you’re ready and able to buy a home.

• 6-month reserve

There’s much more to consider when buying a home beyond just the price of the house itself. First, consider some worst-case scenarios. What if you lose your job or are unable to work? Are you able to continue to afford your home while you get back on your feet? There may also be unexpected costs that make one month’s expenses substantially more than the average. A tree could fall, a pipe could burst or an appliance may suddenly fail. These are just some of the reasons why it’s important to have plenty of money saved up before you purchase a home. The general rule of thumb is to calculate your average monthly expenses. You can do this by looking at your spending over the last 18-months and adding in an estimated mortgage payment instead of your rent payments. If you could reasonably survive for 6-months off your savings by paying that average each month, you should have enough for any unexpected circumstances.

• Staying put

If you’re forced to turn around and sell your home within two years of buying, you’re likely to lose money on the deal. In that short of a time period, the amount your home is likely to increase in value will be negated by inspection fees and real estate commissions. Some of the tax benefits you get from buying a home could be negated, as well. Of course, it’s not always up to you whether you have to move or not, but if you aren’t fairly certain that you’ll be in your new home for at least 2 years, it might not be the best time to buy.

• Household income

This last step is almost a combination of the first two. You not only need to be able to accurately estimate your finances for the foreseeable future, but you also need to have a sense of stability. You’ll want to try to estimate the annual income you and the rest of your household is likely to bring in for the next few years. This doesn’t need to be accurate to the dollar, but rather in a range. This would be where you consider details like changing to a one income household when you have a child, or if you’re planning a career change or want to start a business. If you already know any significant changes are in your future, be sure to account for them now so you can decide what your budget for a new home is and whether or not you want to buy one before that change occurs.

By going through the exercise of looking at your finances and planning accordingly, the home buying and owning process becomes much less stressful.

When you decide you’re ready to buy a new home, call us at Perry Hood Properties. We have existing homes throughout the Tulsa, Broken Arrow and Bixby area or can walk you through the building process to create your dream home.