Cabin Chronicles

Live Plant

Spring is here, and many of our customers will be returning to their summer homes in Minnesota to find their precious house plants alive and well, thanks to Home Halo! Many of our customers entrust us to keep their green friends hydrated and sunned while they are away. One customer really keeps us a busy with a basement full of plants! Most people only leave a few behind for us to care for. We can rotate them so they are properly sunned, and we can water them as needed. We did well this year. All of our customers’ plants are still alive. We hope to keep them alive again next winter season. Thank you to all our customers that used our service this long winter season. We appreciate it.

It’s April, and for many of us this means it’s time to start thinking about deep cleaning at the house or cabin. It seems like there is a new cleaning product on the market every day. But do we really need a blue solution to clean our windows or a purple liquid to clean our floors? I don’t think so! People always ask us what cleaning products we recommend. Our response is simple. It’s water. We tend to get funny looks from people when we tell them that. When did it become strange to use water and a little soap to clean? Call us old fashioned, but some hot water with rags or nonscratch scrubbies are generally all we ever use, and they work just fine. For really tough stains (like hard water or rusty iron stains from well water) we do use commercial products like CLR or RustOut, but this is only in extreme cases. So this year when you are doing your spring cleaning, think of the environment, your family’s health, your own health, and just use plain old water rather than harsh chemicals to do your spring cleaning.

Here in Minnesota, people tend to have great memories of ice skating or playing pond hockey on the neighborhood rink as a child. It brought the neighborhood together and provided kids with hours of fun, whether the rink was made on an existing pond or lake, or if it was created by flooding someone’s backyard. It seems like kids these days are stuck inside playing video games. It’s easy to make an ice rink, and I think you’ll find that if you take the time to make one, your children or grandchildren will love it. In fact, you might like it just as much as them! It’s pretty fun to shovel the rink on skates. We’ve made rinks for our customers at their cabins. There is nothing better than spending a weekend at the cabin in the winter and having your own private ice rink! Feel free to comment by sharing your memories of the neighborhood ice rink with us. Video music provided by Danosongs.com

Minnesota snow storm continues today

The Snow Storm of Christmas 2009 is still going strong here in Crosslake! Today is Saturday December 26, and it has been snowing for a full three days now. I just took this photo of the snow coming down on the Adirondack chairs by the fire pit and wanted to share it with you. Two of our caretakers are out plowing driveways and clearing walkways of snow with shovels and snow blowers. Earlier this season, the caretakers helped some of our customers mark their private wells and septics with flags. Doing this allows the wells and septics to be easily spotted underneath the snow if they need to be serviced during the winter. This is something all homeowners should be doing on their own if they do not have a company like us to do it for them. We have more helpful snow and ice maintenance tips on our site. It sounds like our customers are having a great time enjoying the fresh snow at their cabins this weekend. They’re hopping on their snowmobiles and creating ice rinks to go skating. Is it snowing where you live?

Christmas Eve 2009 Minnesota snow storm

We are having a white Christmas here in Minnesota at Home Halo! This is fantastic. It’s like a fairy tale Christmas in this town. It’s so fun to drive down the snow-covered roads and look at all the evergreen trees coated in snow and see the beautiful log cabins with big snowflakes falling all around them. Of course, I am working when I do this! We have been busy getting homes ready for guests that are visiting over the holidays or homeowners that haven’t been to their cabins since last summer. We have also been plowing driveways and snow blowing and/or shoveling walkways to house entrances, propane tanks, and anything else that should be accessible for the maintenance of the home and the safety of the homeowner. We have had about 5 or 6 inches fall today, but reports are predicting much more snow over the next 24 to 48 hours, possibly for a total of 20-plus inches when the storm ends. Merry Christmas Eve!

Today was fantastic! I got a concierge job baking someone a pineapple upside-down cake. My fellow concierge co-worker got stuck doing some outdoor work, and it was zero degrees today! So, while he was outside working on a wood project, I was in the warm kitchen making goodies for one of my favorite customers. These cakes are so pretty, and they are easy to make. I made a video of how to make one of these great cakes so I could share it with you. These cakes are the perfect dessert to accompany a holiday meal. Here is the recipe I used:

3 tablespoons of salted butter
1/3 cup brown sugar (packed)
maraschino cherries, cut in half
pineapple rings
boxed yellow cake mix

1. Melt the butter in the microwave. Then, pour the melted butter into a round cake pan. Mix in the brown sugar until blended. Arrange pineapple rings and cherries in a pleasing manner. Set aside.
2. Mix the yellow cake according to the directions on the box.
3. Pour the cake batter into the cake pan on top of the sugar/butter/fruit mixture.
4. Cook according to the directions on the cake mix box.

That’s it! Quick, easy, and beautiful. It’s great served warm or cold. I like it plain, but it can be topped with whipped cream, ice cream, or rum sauce as well.

The former Pillsbury Estate, Southways, on Lake Minnetonka is up for sale by way of a sealed-bid auction. The deadline for delivering sealed bids on this 40,000 square foot home is December 9 at 3 p.m. central time. There is a lot in the news right now about this sale, but what about after it’s sold? Whoever purchases this magnificent estate, whether it’s a family or a corporation, they are certainly going to need some help maintaining it! With 13 acres and 1,700 feet of lake frontage, the groundskeeping is going to be an ongoing task. And, how about maintaining the inside of the home? Wow! How would you like to clean all those bathrooms? There is a caretaker’s cottage on site. Thank goodness, because the new owner of the estate is going to need one! Depending on the situation, it may need an entire staff to help maintain the property, or a domestic couple at the very least. If we were caring for it, the first thing we would do is create a household manual. The property is actually being offered for sale as five separate parcels or as an entire estate. Either way, domestic help will likely be necessary. And domestic help is what we offer at Home Halo.

Conventiently, this estate is near us. We have many customers that live on Lake Minnetonka. It’s located only a couple hours away from us here in Crosslake, and several of our clients who have cabins in Crosslake also have homes in Minnetonka. If you’re not familiar with Crosslake, when we say cabins….we mean sprawling estates that people refer to as “cabins.” For more information on the estate and the sale/auction of this property, you can do a Google search to see who is selling it. I emailed the company asking them for a good photo for the blog, but they didn’t respond to me, which I found quite rude, so I removed their link! If you’re thinking of buying it, remember we’re here to offer you professional and reliable domestic help after you purchase it! Video courtesy of Fox 9 at www.myfoxtwincities.com

Today we got a request to go to the post office for a customer who had several large packages and odd-shaped items to deliver. Going to the post office is one of the most common errand requests we get from our customers, especially this time of year. Most of our customers are getting ready to leave their cabins for the season, and going to the post office is just one more thing they don’t have time to do on their own.