The New Outdoor Kitchen, a review

Now that spring is springing in the northern hemisphere, I'm sure a lot of people are dreaming of summertime dinners outside. The kind where you linger for hours as the sun sets. Conversations by the dim light of patio torches and citronella candles. Ahhh, good food and good company; it gets no better.

Photo by Chipper Hatter, used with permission

If you're of a mind to entertain al fresco, The Taunton Press has a great resource for you in Deborah Krasner's The New Outdoor Kitchen; Cooking Up a Kitchen for the Way You Live and Play.

The photography in Krasner's book is gorgeous, but this is not just a picture book. She offers reams of practical advice that can be applied to projects as simple as moving a table into the yard to outfitting an outdoor kitchen with $30,000 worth of appliances.

Photo by Eric Roth, used with permission

The book's broken into chapters that deal with planning; outdoor fireplaces; outdoor cabinets and counters; dining and entertaining; lighting; sound systems and landscaping. She leaves no topic untouched and at the same time, allows her readers to apply her points and ideas to their own homes and lives. Krasner broadens the appeal of this book through a series of outdoor kitchen case studies, actual and live examples of how other people have integrated an aspect of outdoor living into their lives. These examples' locations range from California to Maine. With locations as diverse as these, there's bound to be something (several somethings I'd bet) you can apply to your own home.

So, are you ready for summer?

Holy cow!

I came across this yesterday on Igloo Studios' School blog. Check out this movie, it's only a minute long but it represents such a huge leap forward I'm struggling to wrap my head around it.


Man! How cool is that?

That's a demonstration of Inglobe Technology's ARmedia Plug-in for SketchUp. That means that Inglobe Technology developed a separate piece of software that inserts itself into Google's SketchUp to make it do things it otherwise couldn't. ARmedia stands for Augmented Reality, and how it works is that from SketchUp, a user can activate the ARmedia and turn on a webcam. The Augmented Reality plug in will then project what ever model the user's working on into the video feed from the web cam. The result is a fully 3-D SketchUp model projected into something that approximates the real world.

If you watch the guy in the video, he spins his model and changes the view from a rendered model to a wire frame diagram and back. Just imagine where this kind of technology will lead.

I'm completely captivated by Google's Street Views in Google Maps, and I liken it to going on a virtual walking tour. Now imagine if instead of still photos knitted together in Street View, there were real, three dimensional images anyone could walk around and interact with. The technology behind the ARmedia Plug-in will some day soon allow me or anybody else to walk up to the Pantheon and pound on the bronze doors. Or window shop along the Champs-Élysées. Or pick lavender in Provence. This thing is going to change everything from how you watch a movie to how you study art history or genetics. WOW!

Inglobe has a free version of this plug-in available from their website, believe it or not. Free. There's also a pro version for € 99, a student version for € 49 and an educators version for € 29. I know, I think listing prices in Euros is a pose so the US dollar prices are $131, $64 and $38 if you're not up on exchange rates.

Again, holy cow!

My name will live on in infamy

Igloo Studios' School blog just posted another one of my "designer's perspective" columns. It feels great to be a SketchUp evangelist. Somebody from Google called me that yesterday. A SketchUp evangelist. Thank you Chris! He meant it, and I accepted it, as high praise indeed.

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.