Home and Garden Show

The largest Home and Garden show in the region is on this weekend. Since we have both a home and a garden so we thought we'd check out the show.

There were a lot of window and door vendors, construction and renovation companies, and quite a few landscape vendors. We walked by most of the exhibitors but there were a few that we investigated.

We especially liked the custom fireplace and mantel products. They had a screen on the gas fireplace that was attractive when the fire wasn't burning and apparently makes the fire look more real when the fire is burning. They didn't have any fireplaces burning at the show but they have them going at their showroom. They also build custom corner mantels with shelving above the fireplace that were quite attractive. We don't like the look of either of our fireplaces and we especially dislike the one in the great room. We'll probably go and take a look at the showroom at some point.

I also liked the rolling screen doors that one vendor was selling. I'd much rather have the screen hidden than have it take up half of our patio door when it's not in use. We take bird pictures and it's hard to do that when there's a screen in the way.

We also stopped to talk to the cleaning companies about cleaning with unscented products. Molly Maid does have unscented products and their price is reasonable. The person also said that we'd get the same team each time unless someone was sick or on vacation which was a bit of a relief to us. We weren't as comfortable with the other cleaning company that was there as the representative didn't seem as professional as the Molly Maid representative. I wish that Merry Maids had been there because they're the ones who do the Cleaning for a Reason. I'd like to support that, all other things being equal, but scent-free cleaning products are important to us. I guess we'll have to call them separately and maybe get both companies to do an estimate.

Costco was also at the show and we bought ourselves a membership. We'd been thinking about getting one but we didn't really know if it would be worth it. We're still not sure if it's completely worth it, but we bought it anyways.

That's pretty much all we saw there and it took less than an hour. We'd thought it would take a lot more time to see the show but there wasn't as much there as we thought there would be. It wasn't all bad but I think we'd enjoy an interior design or do it yourself show more.

Since we were finished so early we decided to head to Costco since we had our shiny new membership. We have to wait to get our pictures taken and the cards issued until the show applications are taken to the store so they issued us a temporary pass for today. It was very busy (Saturday is NOT the day to go to Costco) so we didn't look at everything but we wandered around, picked up a few things, and got a sense of what they had. I'll go back there and take a closer look next week.