Bettering My Home and Garden

Since I've been hanging around the house a lot lately (kids with chicken pox, remember?) I've started to feel a little Ty Pennington coming on.
That white dining table set that I can never keep clean is about to become black. The ceiling fan got a face lift and the upholstery is in the process of being tidied. [Tangent Warning: When we bought the red couches, I was SURE that they weren't going to show dirt. I wanted a dark color for that exact reason. Plus red seemed a little funky, and I was going through a red phase (If Picasso can have a blue phase, I can have a red one). Well, I was wrong. Consider yourself warned. Nothing shows dried toddler snot better than red microfiber upholstery. End Tangent.]

I've been shopping for cheap decor ideas on the internet and have found a few gems. At www.eddieross.com you will meet a man who can work magic with bargains from The Salvation Army. A little paint, a little glue . . . and the guy turns a $4 find into a masterpiece.

At Better Home and Garden's website there is a cool tool called "Color a Room." It allows you to pick a room similar to your own and change colors on the furniture, walls, and accents so you can see what things might look like if you actually got up the guts to paint that coffee table burnt orange. (Me, I'm trying to convince Michael that our knotty pine media cabinet would look splendicious if I painted it a slate blue or dark teal, but so far he's not seeing the vision. I think he knows that after I've painted the table and chairs and put the second coat on the front door I'll be tired of home improvement and move on to Christmas shopping.)
The obnoxious thing about the "Color a Room" tool is that it requires you to sign up as a (free) member to BHG.com. If extra mail annoys you then give them your junk e-mail address (What? You don't have a junk e-mail address? Log onto hotmail right now and register for whatever name you would have picked for yourself had you become a famous rock star.) I told the site that my last name was Fred . . . do you think that little white lie will keep me from getting into heaven?