I want a fireplace

Check this out! I wish I had a fireplace pretty badly, but alas a fireplace retrofit is out of the question. Talk about an expense! Times is hard you know. But this baby is a fireplace with something extra.

Meet the Chimo by Bloomer. Leave it to the Germans to come up with something so practical yet so beautiful. It makes me feel European to make sweeping generalizations about other groups of people by the way. Anyhow, these things mount on any wall and burn ethanol as fuel. There are no emissions, so there's no need to vent anything, let alone have a flue. Brilliant! You can find them at the great online store Lekker. Stay warm this winter the easy way kids.

Here's an awful kitchen

I got a note from a reader the other day and she told me that she likes my occasional looks back at old trends. Go with what you're good at I always say, and so I was trying to do just that. I want to write about renovating old stuff I was thinking. So I started Googling for blog topics and I entered the terms "'70s kitchen design."

I came across the online photo gallery of a woman who'd renovated her "1970's [sic] Kitchen" in 2005. She was very proud of the job she'd done when in fact, she ought to hang her head in shame. This was clearly a do-it-yourself project --I cannot imagine a professional of any kind coming up with this. Unless it was a professional hack that is. I'm not linking back to her site to try to give her a rest of the drubbing she's already taken, the poor thing. Let this be a lesson to one and all, be careful what you post on the Internet.

So here's where she started. She's calling this a '70s kitchen (actually, she keeps referring to it as a 70's kitchen but I can't bring myself to repeat her typos), but I question that vintage. I would call this more an '80s job, but the point remains that where she started is where a lot of people start. This is a dated room that's not a very efficient use of space. It's also a mess. "I hate my kitchen" is no excuse for slovenly housekeeping. Ever.

So there it is in all its dated ugliness. It has a tiny space for a fridge, the dishwasher's to the left of the sink and the range is at the end of a run --no counter on the right side of it. The lighting's terrible and that range/ microwave combo probably stopped working ten years ago. I get it, I get it. I see rooms that look like this on a weekly basis and what's cool about them is that they can be made to look any way I want them to. It's not as if they're jammed into a galley, and these folks could go in any direction they wanted to.

So they start tearing everything out.

Once torn out, they upgraded the electrical service, moved the plumbing, rebuilt the ceiling, etc.

As I was going through her photo gallery, my mind was reeling with all of the possibilities for this now-empty room. What would it be? What would it be!

All of hopes were dashed as soon as I saw her new cabinetry stacked in the garage.

I see standard overlay cabinets with a Roman arch and they're in honey oak. This is the very stuff of my nightmares. NEVER let anyone talk you into arched doors, standard overlays or heaven forbid, honey oak. This poor soul is ripping out an '80s throwback and replacing it with another awful '80s throwback. I don't care what this layout ends up looking like, already this job can't be salvaged.

So here it is going in. Note the position of her hood. It's hanging at the manufacturer's suggested height. Those kinds of hoods come with a low-power blower motor and they only work when they are hanging in the position shown above. They aren't strong enough to work effectively at height of a full-powered, pro-style hood.

Note too the three cabinets in the foreground. She's putting in what's called a bat wing island --that's an island with two, 45-degree angles in it. When you make a bat wing island out of square cabinets you end up with big dead zones in the corners of your island. You can see the tile setter's mud bucket sitting in one of these dead zones. When it's all said and done, what you get is an island that takes up a lot of room but one that gives you very little storage space. She would have been infinitely better served by a rectangle or a square. Beware the bat wing folks.

So here's the installed cabinetry, flooring, counters, lighting and appliances. Ewwww. All those efforts wasted on something that looks like a builder without a conscience is doing a flip property.

The third photo shows how the hood was jacked up to the point of uselessness to get it to the same height as the corner wall cabinet. This is the crime against the Rule of Three that prompted me to write about the Rule of Three yesterday. Anyhow, jacking up the hood has made this room further out of balance than it would have been had the corner wall cabinet been the tallest object in the room. Two, non-symmetrical, tall objects on the same wall look lopsided and make me uncomfortable. Guests will feel uneasy and get vertigo from standing in this room. 

This whole thing is just bad and it's a shame. She spent the same amount of money (probably $25K to $30K) should would have spent had she consulted with a professional. That money could have been spent adding to the value of her home but all she's succeeded in doing is throwing away $30K. A bad renovation adds no value to your home.

As if the bat wing island, the jacked up range hood, the white and black free-standing range and the counter microwave pretending to be a built-in weren't bad enough, here's a close of the wall tile on that back splash. Why not?

As a side note, the correct way to abbreviate a decade is to use a single open quote, the decade and then a lower case "s," set tight. Like this, '70s. That single open quote indicates an abbreviation, and in this case, we've left off the century, 19. When it's shown like this, 70's, it's indicating possession. You see that's what an apostrophe does. Apostrophe S indicates possession every time save one. The only exception to that rule is the word its. Its with no apostrophe means belonging to it. It's with an apostrophe is a contraction of it is. Remember this sort of thing. It will save you from looking like a fool later. Of all the arcane rules of English grammar, the distinctions between plurals, possessives and contractions are some of the easiest to master. Misplaced or unnecessary apostrophes top my list of grammatical pet-peeves by the way. I realize too that I'm tilting against a windmill at this point. Possessive, contraction and plural S distinctions are rapidly going the way of the dodo, the thank you note and the earned standing ovation. Argh!

Behold the power of threes

In interior design (and in a thousand other disciplines), we rely on a series of simple rules of thumb, the most basic of which is called the Rule of Three. In essence, we use it to achieve balance. Three repetitions of a given element is generally considered to be balanced. The Rule of Three is a basic, easy guideline. For the most part, it's just that: a guideline. It's hardly some kind of a universal law. However, it's not some arbitrary thing pulled out of a hat.

Human beings' brains are pattern-seeking machines, each and every one of us does it automatically. So much so that I doubt it's possible to look around and not see patterns. Pattern-seeking is the key to our survival as a species and to a human brain, three is the simplest pattern there is.

Threes are fundamental to human culture and they show up everywhere from the three little pigs to the Holy Trinity to the Three Stooges. Threes mean pattern more than symmetry and I use odd-number patterns to achieve balance in all of my work. I get accused of worshipping symmetry but that's not really true. What's true is that I love, love, love odd-number patterns.

Here's what I mean. I just took this photo of three old candlesticks.

Now watch what happens when I take one away and have two old candlesticks sitting on this table.

When there are three, the candlesticks own the space and look like they belong there. When there are two, they seem to be overwhelmed by the table.

I'm bringing this up because I found a kitchen design online that I'm going to critique later as soon as I calm down. This room's ignorance of the Rule of Three is actually the least of its problems as you'll see tomorrow. But simple adherence to things like the Rule of Three when you don't know what to do with a space can save you a lot of heartache. Not to mention a bunch of blistering critiques on the Internet.

Hard Times centerpiece

So in the spirit of the current economic mess and in anticipation of the worse mess to come, I put together a centerpiece last week on the cheap. So much so that I'm including it in my growing library of cheap fixes. Check this out:

I took a plate I already had and set it in the middle of my dining table. Then I filled three jars with sand. I'm forever soaking the labels off of jars and never using them for anything. Well, now I found a use for three of them. So the jars were already in my cabinet and the sand is what passes for soil in my part of the world. I sank a taper candle in each jar. I bought 8-inch ivory taper candles in a package of four from a dollar store. So at a quarter apiece, I'm up to 75 cents out of pocket for this thing so far. Then I pulled some mistletoe out of an oak tree in the alley and just broke off the sprigs and piled them onto the plate. Ta-daaa! Instant centerpiece and I collected compliments for the entire time it sat on the table. 

75 cents?! Martha Who?

Embarrassing recipe: the back story

Over dinner on New Year's Day, the conversation turned to those Rolo Pretzel things I wrote about earlier.  One of the assembled mentioned that they are nearly crack-like in their appeal --it's not possible to have just one of them. One taste brings about a Rolo Pretzel madness and a compulsion to eat all of them. He then reminded me that the originator of the recipe was lost to the haze of actual addiction some years ago, the poor thing.

Anyhow, since it's a holiday weekend and I've granted myself a free pass to write about anything I bloody well please, here goes. The whole drug addiction thing reminded me of a video I came across a couple of weeks ago that I find hilarious. Tragedy begets comedy folks, it's a tale as old as time. Besides, this video stars none other than Kristin Chenoweth, one of my favorite stars of stage and screen.

Intervention with Kristin Chenoweth by Kristin Chenoweth