Reader question: What is this and what do I do with it?

Help! I bought this bedroom set but I've no idea what the style is called or how to decorate around it. The bedroom is a square 17 x 17 with light grey carpet and walls. Nothing else is in the room at the moment. I'd like to find a paint that fits the furniture (no yellows) and decorate the room from scratch. Learning the style name would help. I'll take any ideas!

Before I get into your questions, I have a question for you. Is it too late to return it? If the answer's yes, check out the Silentnight web page for a great selection of beds and mattresses.

Oh my. Wow. I'd call that "style" a cartoon. It's a really poorly executed attempt to capture the allure and glamor of Italy. People who don't know any better refer to that "style" as Tuscan. Please see my post from 27 February, How Do I Decorate My Tuscany Dining Room. But really, it's wrong on a whole lot of levels.

So to answer your question about how to integrate it into a large bedroom so that you can decorate from scratch, I say scratch the bedroom suite and start over. You've fallen into a trap that catches a lot of people by the way, so don't feel too bad. 

That trap of course is not planning. If you're going to decorate that bedroom from scratch, the first thing you need is a plan. I know that taking the time to put together a plan removes the thrill of stumbling across treasures you'll impulse buy (like that Godawful bed and night stand), but trust me, it's worth it.

Step one in a plan I'd suggest is to hire an interior designer. But if you don't want to do that, start with a list of needs. Figure out what you need the furniture in your bedroom to do. You'll need a bed, obviously. Then you'll need night stands, lamps, a carpet, linens, window treatments and then furniture to hold your clothes. Inventory your stuff and think about how much storage you actually need. Don't think about what any of this stuff will look like yet, concentrate on function first.

Once you know what this bedroom furniture is going to do, then you can start thinking about how it's going to look. Before you start picking finishes though, you'll need to draw up a floor plan so you can make sure everything will fit. You can do it old school and get yourself a sheet of graph paper and draw a room in a scale where a quarter of an inch equals a foot. Or, you can do it new school and draw it in SketchUp. Keep it simple and go easy on the themes. After all, the theme should be you and your life.

Based on your selection of that bed and nightstand, you like things to be a bit on the traditional side. That's perfectly fine, just be careful of scale and proportion. The bedroom suite in your photo is massive and ungainly. Something like that will overwhelm that bedroom. Take it down a few pegs. Look for smaller-scale stuff and don't buy a suite. Your furniture shouldn't match necessarily, but it ought to come together into a cohesive group.

Now, if you can't return that bedroom suite and you're stuck with it just go for Baroque (bad pun I know) and pretend you're the Sun King. recreate Versailles with it.

Actually, please don't. Beg if you have to but return that bed and night table.

Break a CFL? Don't panic.

Lisa Sharkey had a piece in yesterday's Huffington Post where she described her panic over a broken compact fluorescent light bulb in her home. She then listed a series of clean up procedures that could only have been written by a personal injury attorney. Sheesh. Calm down already!

All fluorescent light bulbs contain elemental mercury. That includes the long, skinny ones in offices and schools. Elemental mercury is a naturally-occurring heavy metal that's also a neurotoxin in high enough doses. Elemental mercury is a liquid at room temperature and it evaporates into a gas easily. That gas glows when electricity passes through it. Hence its use in light bulbs. Mercury has a long list of practical uses and is found in everything from Mercurochrome to mascara. High concentrations of elemental mercury are more damaging as a gas than as a solid, so there are some sensible precautions you'll want to take should you break one of these bulbs.

But let's get a little perspective first and do some math.

Let's say you break a CFL containing five milligrams of mercury in your child’s bedroom. Further, let's say that bedroom has a volume of 25 cubic meters (that's a medium-sized bedroom). For the sake of illustration, let's assume that the entire five milligrams of mercury in the bulb vaporizes immediately. This would result in an airborn concentration of 0.2 milligrams per cubic meter. This concentration will decrease with time, as air in the room leaves and is replaced by air from outside or from a different room. So even if you do nothing, the concentrations of mercury in the room will likely approach zero after about an hour or so.

Under these relatively conservative assumptions, this level and duration of mercury exposure is not dangerous, since it's lower than the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard of 0.05 milligrams per cubic meter of metallic mercury vapor averaged over eight hours. 

To equate the level of exposure in our broken bulb scenario with OSHA's eight-hour standard Imagine the immediate level of mercury in the room immediately after the bulb broke to be 0.2 milligrams of mercury per cubic meter. If we assume the air in the room changes every hour, then the eight-hour average concentration would be .025 milligrams per cubic meter.

See? No need to panic. While I wouldn't call it harmless exactly, it's not something you need to call a Hazmat team over.

So, in the event that you break a CFL, open a window to speed up the dispersal of the mercury vapor. If it makes you feel better, leave the room for a half an hour. Then come back and clean up the broken glass. 

11 more days 'til I pick a lucky winner

11 days kids, that's it. In just 11 more days I'll pick a name randomly and make some one's day for sure. Get your entries in! Information here.

So it's Earth Day...

So today marks something called Earth Day and as a blogger, I'm somehow expected to prattle on about saving the earth today. Well, I would if the earth indeed needed to be saved. 

The simple fact of the matter is that the earth doesn't need to be saved. The earth will continue spinning away as it circles the sun and so it will go until it meets a force strong enough to stop it. If this were about avoiding a collision with another planet I'd be all about saving the earth. But that's not what this is about. This is about preserving an earth fit for human habitation. For the life of me I'll never understand why, but that underlying motive never makes it into discussions about Earth Day. Ignoring self interest will doom a movement that has some real potential to bring about meaningful and lasting change and that's a shame.

Into the void left by an unspoken motive floods all manner of absurdity that culminates in a rejection of science and the scientific method. Odd, since science is the only means to identify a problem and the only valid way to prescribe a course of corrective action. 

It's an unarguable point that's it's better practice to use natural resources efficiently so that they'll last longer. Equally valid and unarguable is that the judicious use of limited natural resources saves money. Why then is it laudable to switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs to "save the earth," but making the same switch in order to save money is suspect? Why set a side a day to plant a tree in your front yard so you can "save the earth?" If that tree gets irrigated with potable water and fertilized with phosphorus and nitrogen that foul whatever waterway your street drains into, what' the point?

I was going to write something flippant and caustic for today so I went to Treehugger.com to gather some of their inflammatory rhetoric to pick apart. That site gets on my nerves in more ways than I can count, mostly because I agree with them in principle. It's their delivery, the environmentalist pose, that I can't bear. The occasional valid point made gets lost in a fog of irrationality and emotion and in the end they lose me. As a case in point, I came across an article by Jasmin Malik Chua there that I found particularly enraging, No Kidding, One in Three Children Fear Earth Apocalypse.

There's a new bogeyman lurking in the closet, and this one isn't imaginary. Us. One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won't exist when they grow up, while more than half—56 percent—worry that the planet will be a blasted heath (or at least a very unpleasant place to live), according to a new survey.

Commissioned by Habitat Heroes and conducted by Opinion Research, the telephone survey polled a national sample of 500 American preteens—250 males and 250 females.

The results of that poll are reported as cold, hard fact by Chua and received as good news by most of the commenters. The idea being that children have a wisdom all of us corrupted adults lack. Please. As if these kids came up with these irrational fears on their own. These poor kids are parroting back the fuzzy-headed propaganda they hear from every quarter.

Congratulations to Treehugger, Earth First, the Animal Liberation Front and all of the rest of the nutjobs who set the agenda for what's now a mainstream movement. 25 years worth of emotion-led, irrational arguments have succeeded in scaring the crap out of a generation of kids. It's unnecessary and it's also dishonest. This does little to advance a goal of having people use resources more intelligently.

Not only that, you've set yourselves up for a backlash that gets played out every afternoon on such popular entertainments as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

Yes, the earth is getting warmer and what there is to do is minimize the coming changes and prepare for the changes that can't be avoided. Telling a generation that they have no hope for a future doesn't do that. In fact, it does the opposite. It encourages them to do nothing because all hope is lost. All the energy spent on fear mongering could just as easily have been spent on explaining scientific concepts and introducing them to a framework of critical thinking. But I suppose it's easier to manipulate than it is to educate and that seems to work on both sides of the aisle.

So on this Earth Day, and the 364 earth days that follow it, why not ignore the hype? When you see Gwenyth Paltrow start to move her pouty lips, turn off the TV. Rather than listening to Gwyneth or Madonna or Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, whattya say you get your science from scientists and entertainment from entertainers?

As a species, we have a couple of situations that need to be addressed, sooner rather than later. These problems are by and large human-caused. The solutions will also be human-caused in the form of human endeavor, human technology and human science. It's in our best interest to adopt the behaviors suggested by the greatest minds in our time and it's OK to call self interest self interest. Be more efficient, be smarter, spend less money, think about the long term. Most important of all, elect politicians who are capable of thinking in the long term.

Earth Day? Eh. Being smarter and more rational every day? Sign me up.

Yet another blogging adventure

I started a new blog for the design studio where I hang my shingle, Kuttler Kitchens Design and Cabinetry. I've been working on it for about a month and it went live this morning. So if you just can't get enough of me here, there's even more of me over there.

If you recognize those posts as reworked posts that made their debut here, you're correct. For the time being, I'm rewriting some of my previous articles to make them a little more specific and local to folks here in St. Pete.

Eventually, I'll be rolling out some very specific and local content over at the other blog. I said eventually. In the meantime, if you're curious about where I hang my hat and actually ply my trade, give us a look at Kuttler Kitchens, and on our (my) new blog. Thanks!