The art displayed in a home provides personality, creates a welcoming atmosphere and offers a glimpse of your unique style to guests. And while there aren't many unbreakable rules for choosing and arranging art, you still don't want to fling it all over the place with little thought to how those pieces work with each other or the space.

Here are four guiding principles that will have your home looking like an expertly curated gallery in no time.

Inside the home, lighting does so much more than help you see. The right lighting can improve your mood, create the perfect atmosphere and highlight all the features of your home that you love the most.

If your current configuration is coming up short, here are four foolproof tips for taking your home's lighting to the next level:

The trials and tribulations of dealing with scale in the yard and garden

Last week, I was outside in the shed sorting last year's plastic pots before bringing them inside for cleaning.
When I came in, I noticed a sticky mess on my little lime tree. Sadly, I knew what the trouble was. It was the same trouble I have been tackling since I bought the tree a year ago.

The trouble was scale — insects that have a crawling stage where they march up stems to new leaves, insert their pointy beaks into the leaf and build a hard tortoise cover over themselves, often looking like bumps on a branch.