Reader question: How do I display small objects?

Help! I know that it is better to have a few large items for more impact, but what do we do if we have many small items of interest? Do you have any ideas of how to display such things (ex. teacups, small bottles, pin cushions, button hooks, etc.)?

No. Unless getting rid of it counts as an idea that is.

I am the wrong guy to ask for advice as you contemplate how to clutter up your home. What you're asking me about is room dandruff, but since you asked I'm going to take the opportunity to pontificate about clutter.

Before. Look at the cluttered up home of someone who probably feels overwhelmed by the business of living.

Displays of small objects are clutter, especially when they exist for no reason than to sit there and add "character." Piles of junk don't add character, they add confusion. A couple of objects that tell the story of your life, and that serve as reminders of experiences you've had, are perfectly fine. In fact, I can't encourage you strongly enough to use your living space to recreate the narrative of your life. If these objects have some actual utility, then that's all the better.

After. These folks are about a third of the way through the decluttering they need to do. Happiness will elude them until they get rid of the crap hanging from the ceiling and the rest of the junk on the counters.

I'll use myself as an example. I like to travel. Every time I go somewhere I bring back a rock or a shell or something along those lines. I keep these rocks and shells and sticks and what have you in a jar on top of my dresser. Now if I had those fragments of my memories laying loose and strewn across every horizontal surface I have it would be clutter. In a jar, those rocks and shells and sticks are a display, and they become a single object that encapsulates everywhere on earth I've been in the last 20 years. When I want to remember Rome or Panama or Grenada or San Francisco, I pull out a rock from that place and get wistful for a moment. Ahhhh, that jar's one of my life's great treasures. What makes that jar so useful is that when I put the Colombian pebble or the Costa Rican twig or the Bahamian feather or the tiny Roman bell back in the jar, I'm not held hostage by my own history. I can stay engaged in my life today. Spookily controlled, isn't it? Hah!

I get it that I'm more rigid than most when it comes to these sort of things, but it's what works for me. However, I am convinced that clutter will prevent you from thinking clearly and it serves as a huge distraction from the business of living right now. If you have to display small stuff, put it in a curio cabinet or a jar or a basket so that it takes up less visual space and stays out of the way. Try it some time. Put away all of your small stuff for a couple of weeks and watch how quickly you pay bills and how closely you pay attention to the people in your life. Cleared surfaces will keep you in the now, believe me.

Reader questions: thorny dilemmas on stony subjects

Help! We're getting our new granite on Monday hopefully and I'm sure they will tell us how to clean??....but was wondering how you clean your granite. I sure don't want to damage it.

Thanks in advance.

Hey, thanks for your question and congrats on your new addition. Granite is exceptionally easy to live with, despite the nonsense you may see and hear about it. You don't need any special cleaners for it, really. The easiest way to keep it looking good is to clean it with soap and water, rinse it and then dry it. You don't need to scrub it, treat it, buy special cleaners or give it any kind of kid glove treatment. Your fabricator will sell you on an annual resealing package and that's fine if it will give you peace of mind. However, in ten years of dealing with granite counters, I have never once seen anyone stain it or wear down the seal that's already on it when it's installed. The only way you can damage that counter is if you do it on purpose with a hammer. I'm sure there are anecdotes out there about so-and-so's neighbor's cousin's sister-in-law reading something on the internet about some nightmare stained granite incident, but I've never come across one first hand.

Help! My hairdresser told me yesterday about veneer granite transforming her daughter's kitchen... do you know anything about it? cost? installation?

Those granite and composite veneer overlay counters are generally supplied by an outfit called Granite Transformations. Granite Transformations is an international franchise that employs some of the most heavy-handed and shrill sales tactics I've ever come across. That alone makes me wonder about them. Even if the finished product didn't look cheesy (and this finished product looks cheesy), I question anybody whose marketing message consists of slamming their competitors rather than extolling their own benefits. Their latest tactic seems to be touting their "green" credentials. I may be alone in this, but to me that's another red flag. In a world where polyethylene grocery bags and Mylar juice boxes are somehow green, I'd say that's a meaningless descriptor. Proceed with caution. My advice? Go to a reputable counter fabricator that sells a number of materials and see what they can do with your budget.

Help! I can't pick up a home or kitchen magazine without seeing white marble counters. Yet for our complete kitchen renovation, I've gotten total NO! gasps when I share we want marble on the island. Folks tell me Marble is for those who don't cook.

We want a sophisticated library look -the cabinets are mahogany with Jacobean stain, cabinets to the ceiling with white crown molding and we'd love white marble counters.

Do you have experience with white marble counters? The kitchen is 30x15 so the investment is great and I don't want to buy something that cannot withstand children, entertaining and years.

Have you never read my blog before? White marble counters (honed please) are my all-time favorite material, to hell with its detractors. Click on the word countertops in my glossary to the right and you'll be treated to 45 articles I've written on counters. About half of them are devoted to singing songs of praise to white marble. your kitchen sounds beautiful, send me a photo when it's done.

Marble is not high maintenance, but marble is also impossible to to keep looking pristine. If you have an obsessive personality, marble is not your material. Find a white quartzite instead. It will keep a glossy shine and repel damage almost as well as granite will. But if you like the idea of your life leaving a mark on things, then marble is for you. Trust me, white marble will scratch and stain and get more and more beautiful with each passing year. It's marble's nature and there's nothing you can do to counteract it completely.

Just about every horizontal surface in Southern Europe, indoors and out, is made from white marble. Most of it is hundreds of years old. It looks spectacular and is but one of the many ways that the people of Southern Europe get tied to their surroundings. Think about it. If five generations of your family lived in the same home and the matriarch of each generation chopped vegetables in the same spot on the same marble counter, each of those women left a physical mark on that counter. Every time you walked into that kitchen and looked at that counter, you would have an instant reminder of the women who proceeded you to that spot. Wow. Far from detracting from the beauty of the surface, that kind of history and character is the ultimate enhancement. Having white marble in your own home is an opportunity to capture some of that history and character for yourself and for your family.

You keep hearing an emphatic NO! because you haven't spoken with me. I say go for it!

Help! I’m sitting here crying because I’ve looked at so much granite that I want to give up. I’m trying to brighten my kitchen up so I put in Biscotti colored cabinets (already installed 3 weeks ago) to go with a new countertop and flooring (waiting for granite color before picking tile color). I have mainly white appliances. New range top is black and the top section of the dishwasher is black. Other than that it’s all white. My small appliances are black. (Toaster, coffee pot, can opener.) The wall color can be changed to whatever. My dining room table and chairs are light oak.

I’ve run the gamut from light to medium to dark granite and now I’m back to light. I’m ready to give up completely and put the old countertop back in which was wood block.

Hey, chin up. You're fortunate to have a life where you have choices. Having too many choices is a symptom of a life of plenty and certainly nothing to shed tears over. Too many choices can also be intimidating and overwhelming and it sounds like your stuck on overwhelmed. I have no idea what the color "Biscotti" is without knowing who the manufacturer was and I'm not even going to try to make a recommendation. What I do recommend strongly though is that you find the most reputable granite fabricator in your area and give them a call. Please note that this will not be in a big box store. Set an appointment and then take one of your cabinet doors over to the fabricator and look at granite slabs in their yard. You cannot pick a granite counter from small samples. Run away from anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.

I would never turn someone loose with all the options available, it's too much to process. Instead, I do pre-selections for my clients. I talk to them, find out where their interests are and then show them three options rather than 150. If they don't like any of the first set of three, then I show them a second set of three and sometimes a third set.

You need someone to do something similar to that for you in a granite yard. Talk to a salesperson before you go look at slabs. Tell him or her the primary colors you're interested in and then be honest about your budget. Let the salesperson guide you through their slab room. A reputable fabricator will have a good cross section of what's available, so pick something from what you see that day. Just breathe and know that based on your budget and the other colors you're using in your renovation, the right granite will end up picking you. So get out of the way and let it.

New media musings; quo vadis?

If I'm asking a rhetorical question about new media, I think it should be "Qua es vos iens" instead of "Quo vadis." I think. I guess it doesn't matter though. Latin's dead and everybody knows what "Quo vadis" means. Right? Well just in case, "Quo vadis" means "where are you going?"

I've been talking a lot about new media and social networking for the last couple of weeks. I never set out to become some kind of a player in the communication revolution going on in the world, but from the sound of things, that's precisely what I've become. I say from the sound of things, because I get approached pretty often by people who are looking for my opinion on these matters. This amuses me to no end. I'm just a guy of varied interests who likes to write. But I'm also someone who's been infected with a zealot's passion about all things new media. Even though I never set out to do anything but provide an online resource for my clients, this blog has taken on a life of its own and in so doing, it lit a fire inside of me I never knew was there.

I am amazed by the number of people I've met through this blog. And these are people with whom I've cultivated real relationships, despite the fact that I've never "met" most of them in the traditional sense. Were it not for blogging, news aggregators, Twitter and Facebook there is no way our paths would have crossed. Or could have crossed. This kind of global community building was impossible a short time ago. Never before in human history has it been possible to connect with people on a global scale like this. It's new, it's interesting as all get out and it's happening at increasing speed. I find it thrilling, but a surprising number of people are petrified by it. Along those lines, this video was being batted around Twitter this week:




Pretty wild stuff. This communication revolution isn't without its detractors or its casualties though. I've been a diehard newspaper guy my whole life and it's painful to watch them committing hara-kiri. I'm convinced that it is a suicide though. Print media won't adapt to the changing ways people get information and they won't let go of an old business model. Journalism's not going anywhere and Lord knows punditry's not either. But the idea of buying a newspaper every morning is dying fast. I'll miss newspapers as I've known them my whole life, but if we're lucky they'll take local TV news with them to the gallows.

Last Sunday I was caught in a traffic jam of biblical proportions on the freeway that connects Orlando to Tampa and then to St. Pete. What's ordinarily a two- to two-and-a-half hour drive turned into a five-hour-long ordeal. Clearly, there was a problem somewhere on I-4. As I was sitting in traffic, I started looking for a live traffic report on my iPhone so that I could find out what was happening and how long I could expect to be delayed. I Googled every search term I could think of but could only find the most vague of mentions of what I was involved in.

This is an actual photo I uploaded to Twitter as I sat in traffic last Sunday.

Whatever it was that was causing the delay, I couldn't find anything substantive on the websites of the newspapers or TV stations from Orlando, Tampa or Lakeland. It was a Sunday afternoon after all. So on a whim, I started Tweeting about being stuck on I-4. There were thousands of cars sitting all around me and as I started searching for Tweets about Sunday afternoon traffic in central Florida, I hit a goldmine of other people who were stuck in the same jam and Tweeting about it. Within five minutes I learned that there was a massive pile up about 20 miles ahead of me and that there was another big one about 50 miles ahead of it. These pile ups affected hundreds of thousands of people that day, not the thousands I suspected.

The traffic woes had erupted quickly and since it was at 5pm on a Sunday, the traditional new sources couldn't or hadn't responded to it yet. However, a couple of hundred participants in the actual event were armed with smartphones and Twitter accounts, and together we pieced together what had happened and how long we'd be sitting in traffic. That knowledge didn't speed anything up or make it better, but it sure was nice to know what to expect. It was a perfect illustration of the power of new media, or citizen journalists, or the communication revolution or whatever you want to call it.

I hear and read all of the hand wringing and the dire predictions of a falling sky, but I don't believe it for a second. It's human nature for some people to resist technological change. In another great find from Twitter this week, someone Tweeted a link to a blog called Alas, a blog. The post on Alas, a blog was an excerpt of an interview from Slate with a man named Dennis Barron. Dennis Barron just wrote a book about social media called A Better Pencil.

From the piece in Slate:

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, "A Better Pencil." His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced.

Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it's the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they're interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn't, they don't buy into it.

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

I think I just added a new title to my reading list. But I think I'll buy a copy of it for my Kindle.

A shower fit for a king

In about three hours I'm going to sign a contract on a house renovation. It's a nice job, we're transforming a waterfront ranch house that's currently a rabbit warren of small rooms into an open floor plan with a water view from nearly every room in the house. The centerpiece of the new floor plan is a large, efficient kitchen of course. There's also a reconstructed master suite. The current master bath is a thirty-year-old afterthought. It's what a bathroom looked like in its day, and mercifully that day has passed.

Make that, it's about to pass.

The new bath has an open shower in it and more than any other aspect of this project, I cannot wait to see this shower once it's built. I've put together similar showers before but the shower in this job will feature a Sensori shower by Brizo. I've specified Brizo faucets before, but this is my first Sensori shower .

Ordinary shower systems are complicated, unnecessarily so. Cobbling one together using another brand's components was always a crap shoot. Manufacturers tend not to make whole suites of shower fixtures and it can be frustrating to try to put together a multiple component shower that has some cohesion. Is it too much to ask that the body sprays, handhelds, ceiling-mounted showerheads, mixer valves, etc., all look the same and have the same finish? Unfortunately, it is too much to ask of most brands.

However, like so much of what Brizo does, Brizo threw away the business as usual and started over when they developed the Sensori shower system. Each collection is a complete collection of coordinated parts available in all of Brizo's finishes. Specifying shower parts is now an à la carte process. I pick the parts from a list, specify the finish and I'm done.

The technical part's relatively easy too. Brizo's website has a custom planning guide that takes the guesswork out of the plumbing side of these showers. I'm impressed with the thought that went into these showers, add to that that these components are exceptionally well made and we have a winner all around. My clients know that I'm pretty jazzed by this shower, but they have no clue the wonders that await them when this project's complete. I cannot wait to hear what they think when it's all finished.

Go for it Melody!

The image above was taken in downtown Lancaster, PA. Lancaster's my home town. Actually, I grew up in a one-horse town just north of Lancaster, but Lancaster's a good reference point. Besides, it's a lovely town. Another good friend of mine hails from Lancaster too.

Melody McFarland grew up in different one-horse town a couple of miles away from the one where I did. Our paths probably crossed hundreds of times, though we never met. When we did meet, it was many years after we left our quiet home town. She lived in Japan then and I lived in Florida. Melody's one of my favorite people. She has a perspective I admire and more talent than should be allowed by law.

After a nearly 20 year absence, Melody and her husband moved back to Lancaster last summer. The reports of profound culture shock I was expecting never materialized. Instead, Melody's found her way into the burgeoning art scene in once-sleepy Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Melody's a biologist by training and an artist at heart. She's a photographer's photographer and I have long admired her work. This weekend, she's mounting her first public exhibition of her photography. Yokosuka in Lancaster opens at Circa, in downtown Lancaster tomorrow evening. If you find yourself anywhere near South-Central Pennsylvania this weekend, head over to Circa and see some of Melody's work.

Melody's exhibition consists of images she captured while she lived in Yokosuka, a city at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. Her goal in this collection of photographs is to show images of Japan that get beyond the expected. You won't find any sumo wrestlers or cherry blossoms, but you will find long-horned beetles and the close up of a crow's eye.

I love her ability to find beauty in unexpected places and settings. Through her camera's lens, anyone can see the wonder she sees when she comes upon a stinkbug or a stand of azaleas on a misty morning. Hers is an appealing and inviting perspective and I can't get enough of it.

I've included some of her images in this post, and she has the rest of them (along with a price list) on her blog, I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does. Break a leg Mel, you're going to do great!