Home Front

By JUDY STARK, Times Homes Editor
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 29, 2003

Briefs and news of note

The big pitch

With Devil Rays opening day coming up Monday (Tropicana Field, 5:15 p.m. against the Red Sox), set your table from now till season's end with plates, soup bowls, mugs and glasses bearing images that show how to throw a curve ball, knuckleball, spitball, fastball and much more. A dinner plate is $12.50, a mug, $9.95, a beverage glass, $5.95. These are from www.fishseddy.com, the new online store of Fishs Eddy, the Greenwich Village store that supplies lots of tableware for the TV cooking shows. (Click on "dinnerware," then on "baseball.") Or call toll-free 1-877-347-4733. Play ball.

Buy the book, sell the house

Real-estate columnist Ilyce R. Glink offers advice to sell your home fast and profitably in her aptly named book, 50 Simple Steps You Can Take to Sell Your Home Faster and for More Money in Any Market (Three Rivers Press, $14). She suggests cleaning, decluttering, and spiffing up your home before you put it on the market; offers tips for choosing and working with a realty agent; and offers advice on pricing the house and negotiating the deal. The book is full of personal anecdotes, checklists and quick tips. A section called "When Nothing's Working" offers last-ditch ideas to move a house or hold a deal together.

Can it dig a hole in the yard, too?

Everybody knows a pressure washer is useful for cleaning the siding of a house, washing down a fence or blasting off chipped paint or mildew. Briggs & Stratton, manufacturers of pressure washers, offers these offbeat uses as well: cleaning off your house after it has been egged; getting a plastic flying disc out of a tree; spraying off the trees somebody toilet-papered; dislodging a kite from a tree; destroying photos of a former significant other; opening a suspicious package from a distance; testing the water-resistance of a tent before you go camping; making crop circles in your neighbor's yard; peeling a stubborn bumper sticker from your car.

-- Compiled by Homes editor JUDY STARK

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