When Jim and I were on our 2-week RV adventure in July, we took a side-trip to a couple of malls.

Shocker! I dislike malls almost as much as Jim does. But we both felt that it wouldn't have been right to pass both malls on this particular trip and not stop in to see what all the talk is about.

Here are the highlights from my visit to the two largest malls in the world...

This is all you need to repair a leaking toilet... if the leak is due to a bad seal on the flapper.

Ours was.

You'll recall that we had 2 toilets that were leaking profusely, even though we thought they were only small leaks at first. To give you some idea... our monthly water bill nearly quadrupled during this time!

Here's how we fixed our leaky toilets...

We've got the blueprints completed and printed for our new log home. We are about to sign on the dotted line for the loan. Now we're just waiting for the county's final approval before we break ground.

If all goes as planned, we should close by the end of the month and begin the excavation work to lay the foundation for our log home soon thereafter. With that in mind, it could be anywhere from 6 to 9 months before we move into The Fun Times Lodge (...wait til you see all the other fun names I've come up with for our log cabin home!).

Let The Home Staging Begin...

At this point, I'm getting into the "packing" mode... doing a lot of cleaning, purging, and donating in order to lighten our load for the upcoming move.

At the same time, I'm also trying to "de-personalize" our current house a bit -- which, they say, is one of the most important steps in "staging" your home.

I like at least 10% of a display space, such as a bookcase, to be empty. A coffee table and other practical surfaces should be only 10% full." -- Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, makeover expert on HGTV's "Small Space, Big Style"

With that in mind, here are some tips from the pro's about staging your home for resale. Hopefully, these staging tips will help you get top dollar for your home...

...and how people are going to utilize the old "junk" you decide to give away (for FREE) on Freecycle.

You've probably seen Randy Pausch a lot on the news lately. He's the Carnegie Mellon Professor who is dying from pancreatic cancer.

What makes him -- and his message -- so memorable are the amazing details of his life (and our lives in general) that Randy shared in his "Last Lecture" on September 18, 2007.

Watch the video below...