Bad trend alert

I keep seeing this in a couple of the design blogs I read and it's a trend that can't go away fast enough if you ask me. Since I'm going to start writing about cheap fixes, this is an easy one to avoid at all costs. Chalkboard paint isn't cool. Ever. 

A couple of the guys who write for Apartment Therapy have never seen a use of this nonsense that they didn't love. Last week, one of them wrote a glowing review of a chalkboard headboard in somebody's bedroom. Yeah, I can see me living with something like this over my head every night... Give me a break.

Chalkboard paint is juvenile and cheesy looking. Two things to avoid at all costs if you're going to tackle something on your own. Ugh. It strikes me as some kind of a forced march back to childhood. As lovely and idyllic as my childhood was, it was my childhood for crying out loud --something adults are supposed to leave behind. Or are we not doing that anymore? 

Next!

Times ain't THAT hard

I swear, counted among the subscribers to my RSS feed have to be Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. Thanks girls! Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos were the Three Fates Greek mythology. They controlled the thread of a person's life and even the mighty Jupiter cowered in front of them so powerful were they.

I think they read this blog because after my whine yesterday about how put-upon I was to have to assemble a cheap bid for a builder, things took a turn for the better in the form of another builder who met with me yesterday at 11.

Mr. Wise and Brave Builder is building a three million dollar spec house and came to me with a six figure budget for a kitchen and four bathrooms. This same builder handed me a set of prints and told me that he didn't like how his architect had arranged the interior spaces and he wanted me to take a look at everything and make whatever changes I thought would be a good idea. Now that's how it's supposed to work. Hah!

So I suppose my boo-hoo-hoo-ing was heard by somebody. Or not. Maybe it's just that I have a good reputation and a proven track record. Hmmm. OK, new rule. No more doom and gloom Sunday morning pundit shows on MSNBC. Now I just need a visit from Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia --the Three Graces. Hah!

So despite my pleasant uptick in both my outlook and my workload yesterday and in keeping with the times, I'm going to spend the next couple of days talking about cheap and quick fixes. Reasonable, simple ways to give your home interiors a tune up. So stay tuned. 

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to talk about the dos and don'ts of painting existing cabinetry for the next couple of days. I've been researching the topic and I heard from a reader in Minnesota who told me a cautionary tale about his cabinet painting project gone wrong.

Times is hard

I signed a contract with a builder last week. Ordinarily, that would be no big deal. But this contract with a builder was the first contract I'd signed with anybody in weeks. I do my best to resist the punditry's cries of wail and woe concerning the state of the US economy, but enough of it gets into my head that I start to get nervous when my phone doesn't ring for a couple of days.

Anyhow, in order to get this job with this builder, I had to do a couple of things I wouldn't normally agree to do. But as everybody knows, times is hard and the time to relax standards is upon us. Well, it's upon me at any rate.

The first thing I agreed to do that I wouldn't do normally was to prepare a bid. Now, under ordinary circumstances I decline to participate in bids. I don't sell tile, cabinetry, counters, etc. What I'm actually selling is me --my perspective and my expertise. I'm the only one who has those things, so a "bid" is meaningless. I normally work within a budget, but a bid? I don't think so. That was until I remembered the stories I'd read that morning about a collapsing Florida housing market.

So anyhow, my new pal the builder had a parts list, a layout and a bid from another supplier. "Can you beat this?" he wanted to know. My blood pressure started ticking up and I had to talk myself out of explaining to him that I wasn't in the business of helping people to shop. Since I'm more worried about business slowing down than I am in holding onto my pride, I looked over what he'd prepared.

The layout was appalling, just bad --real suburban tract house crap. I told him that there were some technical problems with his layout and he said that I'd be able to change things around if I got the job. Then he left me his set of prints and I told him I'd get back to him the following day. The only technical problem was my bruised ego by the way.

I spent the next four hours putting together what I would do with the space if these were normal times and I were free to do my thing the way I've become accustomed to. With that out of my system, I spent a half an hour recreating the crap he left me and preparing his bid. I used half my normal mark up and spent the rest of the day being with the idea of not making as much money as I'm used to. This was a double whammy I haven't had to deal with in years. This guy was not only telling me what to do, he was controlling how much money I stood to make at the same time. Ugh.

So I wrote up a bid and faxed it to him the next day as promised. He called me almost immediately and told me that I had the job. I'm grateful to have one last thing on the books for 2008. Really I am. But I can't help but wonder if this is what 2009 is going to look like.

It's a Shapeways Christmas

In September, I wrote two posts about a company and website called Shapeways. If you're so inclined, you can re-read them here and here. Shapeways is a three-dimensional printer that allows anybody with access to a 3-D renderer to upload a model and they will print it out and ship it back. Three-dimensional model printers have been around for a while, a little while at any rate. Where Shapeways takes it a step beyond is that they have an online rendering program and anybody with a computer can make his or her own fully customized and one-of-a-kind thing.

This kind of technology integration curls my toes. I mean, ten years ago nobody'd ever heard of Google, or a blog, or a 3-D model printer for that matter. Amazing!

Well, just in time for Christmas, Shapeways has come up with a couple of seasonal offerings and the one that I think is just plain cool is a napkin ring that sells for between $5 and $7. This napkin ring is silver and it can be composed of any copy you'd like it to be.

So to prove that anybody can do this, I went through the process and made a set of napkin rings of my own. I mulled over ideas for a couple of days. I wanted to have my rings be both seasonal and related to food. Hmmmm. What to do what to do? Visions of sugarplums danced in their heads? Nah, too precious. So I pulled out my copy of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and re-read it for the first time in years. I kept coming back to this part of it:

Then the Whos, young and old, would sit down to a feast. 
And they'd feast! And they'd feast! And they'd FEAST! 
FEAST! FEAST! FEAST! 
They would feast on Who-pudding, and rare Who-roast beast. 
Which was something the Grinch couldn't stand in the least!

That's it! So I used the line They would feast on Who-pudding, and rare Who-roast beast. And it came out looking something like this:

Not bad for six bucks apiece. Let me now state for the record that I am ready for Christmas. On second thought, let's make that I'm ready to start getting ready for Christmas. So to quote How the Grinch Stole Christmas again:

Fah who foraze! 

Dah who doraze! 

Welcome Christmas! 

Bring your cheer. 

Wow, wrap your head around this

Last week, the gang over at Consumerist ran a short piece on the amount of money on the line for 2008's historic bailout. The numbers being bandied about are massive to the point of incomprehensibility and all of these numbers are being removed of all context in order to make the whole unseemly thing more palatable. Anyhow, Consumerist put all of it in an inflation-adjusted context and every one needs to see this. Check out this pie chart:

Mind bending. Really. Here's their inflation-adjusted breakdown:

Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion

Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion

Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion

S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion

Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion

The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)

Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion

Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion

NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3,920,000,000,000

2008 BAILOUT TOTAL AS OF NOV 2008: $4,616,000,000,000

This is being undertaken by a Republican administration. Can we please never hear the phrase "tax and spend liberal" in another campaign?