Can't afford to move? Get the most out of the home you have

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  A brick patio with wooden patio posts and a cover of canvas curtains. The back ground has green grass, a birdbath and hammock.iStock / ©Vallarie Enriquez

For many of us, a new, bigger home is simply out of reach. If you’re tired of your old digs and feel like your current home is bursting at the seams, here are a few tips and tricks you can use to make better use of the space you have.

Get Vertical: The first step in sprucing up your home is to solve storage problems. A cramped, cluttered house is no fun to live in, so in order to make things feel a little more spacious, you need to make better use of vertical space. Ceiling-high shelves and overhead storage bins can help you get your house in order.

Trick yourself: Lighter, brighter colors can make a room seem larger than it is, so you can start by putting up a fresh coat of paint over those darker hues. Glass-topped tables and mirrored walls can also help create the illusion of space.

A tiered garden is a great way to maximize the light your plants get in a small space.

Tidying up the yard: A weekend’s worth of landscaping can transform your cluttered yard into a garden paradise. The first step is to cut back any overgrown shrubs or trees, and replace fast-growing plants with species that are easier to control. If you’ve got a green thumb, but not a lot of room, a tiered garden is a great way to maximize the light your plants get in a small space. Trellised plants and espalier are other great ways to put your vertical space to use.

Improving flow: Sometimes you can really improve a room just by adjusting the arrangement of your furniture. Tables and couches that run perpendicular to high-traffic areas can create bottlenecks, making things seem more cramped than they are. You can also improve a room’s flow by replacing oversized furniture with sleeker, more compact items, so that the furniture better fits the space you have.

Rent a storage locker: For the stuff you rarely use, but just can’t part with, you’re better off renting a storage locker. For around $60 a month, you can pack your stuff away, keeping it out of sight, but at the ready should you need it. If there are objects that you rarely use, and aren’t worth storing, it’s time for a garage sale.

Digitize it: Books, CDs, movies and records add a lot of clutter to the home and take up precious storage space. If your shelves are overflowing with media, it might be time to ditch the physical copies for digital ones. Turning CDs into MP3s with iTunes, or DVDs into movie files with a program like HandBrake is dead simple and won’t cost you a thing.

Let the light in: Pruning a low hanging tree can do a lot to lighten up a home and turn dark, drab interiors into well-lit spaces. While you might not be able to increase the size of the room, a lighter, brighter room can feel a lot more spacious.  

Target a few spaces: Chances are there are a few highly trafficked spaces in your home, like the living room and kitchen. While you might not be able to afford a new home, a renovation project might be within your reach. By knocking down a few walls, adding extra space to the high-traffic rooms, you can make yourself feel more comfortable in the spaces you use on a regular basis.

Take it outside: With spring upon us, it’s time to take the party outside. A patio, porch or sunroom is an affordable way to add extra square footage to a home, and it’ll boost your resale value when you do decide to move.  

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Sequestration is budget freefall neither party can afford

In order to understand the political battle over deficit reduction and automatic spending cuts looming on March 1, it is necessary to visit the voting history of the Budget Control Act of 2011, a bill crafted to reduce the deficit and avoid default.

That bill created a supercommittee on deficit control, with the provision that if the supercommittee did not come to an agreement, automatic spending cuts -- sequestration -- would be imposed on all discretionary spending, including the military.  The expiration of various tax cuts would also mean tax increases for millions of Americans. 

On Aug. 1, 2011, an overwhelming majority of Republicans (174-66) in the House voted for the bill.  House Democrats split down the middle, 95-95. Republican leaders John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy voted yes. Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn voted yes. The bill passed the Senate the following day, with 45 Senate Democrats supporting the bill, joined by 28 Republicans and one Independent.

President Obama immediately signed the bill -- the product of bicameral, bipartisan leadership in cooperation with the White House -- into law.

So you can imagine the surprise of Republicans when, in the October 22 presidential debate last year with Mitt Romney, President Obama denied he had anything to do with the sequester. He even poked fun at Romney, suggesting he was woefully ignorant and behind the times in his assessment of U.S. military readiness.

We need to get our $600 billion trade deficit turned around.  We need to start taking care of things back home. 

“The sequester is not something that I proposed,” the president declared. “It’s something that Congress has proposed.  It will not happen. The budget we are talking about is not reducing our military spending. It is maintaining it.”

It was a key moment in the final debate, which was generally scored in favor of the president. It could have gone the other way if Romney had known sequester would also create a spike in unemployment, up to 9.1 percent by the end of 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which released the report just a little more than 24 hours after Romney conceded the election.

In fact, the idea of draconian cuts to the Defense budget came from the White House. Bob Woodward, in his book “The Price of Politics,” traced the sequester idea as a negotiating strategy that moved from the executive office to the Democratic leader of the Senate to Republican leaders, culminating in mutually flawed assumptions that a bipartisan agreement on the supercommittee would be reached because Republicans didn’t want defense cuts and Democrats wanted to avoid cuts in social programs.  The supercommittee could not agree, and the automatic spending cuts of sequestration are now on the way. 

As a member of the 112^th Congress, I voted against the Budget Control Act of 2011. Is there waste in government? Yes! Do we need to cut spending? Yes. We need to cut spending for wars, interventions and any foreign aid that sets the stage for interventions. We borrowed money from China to wage an unnecessary, wrongful war against Iraq.  We need to get our $600 billion trade deficit turned around.  We need to start taking care of things back home. 

The White House promoted sequester because it is prepared to agree to cut spending on important domestic programs, even to the extent of falsely injecting Social Security into the debt debate. Is this what a "Liberal" administration looks like? The American Taxpayer Relief Act, 2013, passed on January 1 this year, recovered for taxpayers a substantial amount of money that would have been lost due to the expiration of tax cuts, reducing the adverse impact of substantial tax increases on the economy.

With automatic spending cuts looming, the president will continue to distance himself from the sequestration process, and Republicans will try to bring him back to where he started: As the Initiator. After all, it was his idea and he signed the bill.  

Watch for the White House to shift to a “share the pain” approach to deficit reduction, but perhaps not in time to avoid sequester. The Democrats will attack Republicans for sequestration.  Minority Whip Steny Hoyer has gone into high gear in attack mode, last week saying that if Democrats were in charge, sequestration would not happen -- although he voted to begin the process, as did other Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. 

Senate Democrats ask for more tax revenue, or they refuse to pass a budget. They have, in fact, refused to pass a budget for years, so this latest move may not inspire their Republican colleagues to action. 

House Republican leaders who voted for the sequester process will not even bother to bring new revenue issues to the floor of the House, mindful of the fact that on New Year’s night, their conference voted 151-85 against tax increases for people in the highest brackets. 

On sequester, everyone is in.  And everyone is out.  But if congressional Democrats and Republicans are grappling with each other as they go over the sequestration falls, they may learn they have precipitated one crisis too many for an American electorate worried about the economy.

Dennis Kucinich (@Dennis_Kucinich, info@KucinichAction.com), a Fox News contributor, served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from January 1997 to January 2013.

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