A dispatch from the International Builder's Show

The International Builders' Show is big Kahuna of builder and renovation trade shows. It rivals in scope and size the trade show of the kitchen and bath industry, KBIS. KBIS and the IBS are large on a scale that's hard to describe accurately. These shows are so big that there are only four convention centers in the US large enough to handle them. So they rotate between Orlando, Atlanta, Chicago and Las Vegas. This year, KBIS is in Chicago and the IBS took place in Las Vegas last week. I love going to these shows. They are closed to the public and they provide a forum where manufacturers can meet with specifiers face to face. Becasue nothing's for sale, it's a chance too for some great product previews and product training.

I couldn't go to the IBS this year but I'm fortunate in that I had a pair of eyes on the showroom floor. Jamie Goldberg is a friend of mine and she was gracious enough to share with me some of the highlights of what she saw. Jamie writes the terrific blog Gold Notes as well as writing for a whole host of industry publications and websites. She's one of the more savvy designers I know and if she noticed it, that's all I need to know. So without further ado, here's Jamie.

Kohler

Kohler always has innovative and stylish products. On the innovative end is the Conceal Mirrored Cabinet and Lock Box. What a terrific way to keep prescription medicines secured from curious children, prying guests or open house shoppers.

On the stylish end, Kohler has introduced the Vault 18-gauge stainless sink that works as a drop-in or undermount. While good-looking contemporary sinks are easily found in the undermount class, they’re much harder to find for drop-in applications. This one has a very sleek edge that separates it from its clunky cousins! It's also available in a single bowl style.

Brizo

Always in style, Delta’s upscale Brizo brand, introduced an elegant new faucet series called Virage. It’s available in numerous finishes and a non-aerated water stream that accentuates its clean, classic lines. I personally loved the polish nickel. Not a game changer, just a lovely looker worth writing home about.

KitchenAid

KitchenAid has come up with a new French Door refrigerator that answers the prayers of moms everywhere who want to show off their kids’ photos and art. Rather than magnets and paper, parents scan juniors' artwork onto a memory stick and upload it to the fridge's USB port, where it will "hang" for as long as you want to display it. The LCD panel has other functions, as well, like displaying recipe substitutions and measurement conversions, but to my mind, the ability to personalize it with kid pics and vacation shots tops them all! (FYI, I mentioned to KitchenAid's brand manager that a future version with food preservation guidelines would be another great feature to include. She agreed.)

Amana

Also in the Whirlpool family is a fun new fridge called the Amana Quick Tap. The dispenser can be filled with any beverage of your choice, and would be ideal for game rooms. It’s adorable and affordable.

Whirlpool

Whirlpool also introduced a super-convenient feature to its newest refrigerator called MicroEtch. What it does is prevent spills from escaping from a shelf and leaking down the sides and bottom of the fridge. I wish I would have had that last month when a Coke glass tipped over on the top shelf just before a house showing! This fridge also has good lines, LED lighting and excellent capacity, too. The anti-spill feature, though, is what makes it a must-have.

You can read more of Jamie's findings on her post Live from the International Builders' Show on her blog Gold Notes

© 2010, Jamie Goldberg, AKBD, CAPS.

Living and loving in 450 square feet

Katie and her husband Martin live in a 450 square foot apartment in Berlin. Katie's and American ex-pat and she writes a blog called Making This Home. Her blog's about renovating all of those 450 square feet, one task at a time. She takes plenty of time along the way to tell stories about sustainability, life, love and being a stranger in a strange land. As much as I love a good ex-pat blog I have to say that what's has me so taken with Katie is the feat she and Martin performed on their 36 square foot kitchen.

That's right a 36 square foot kitchen.

But look what they've done. It's beautiful and I don't doubt for a second that it does everything they need a kitchen to do. Living big is easy, living small on the other hand takes some real skill. Skill that these two have in spades. Schöne arbeit! Glückwünsche!

Check out the rest of Katie's blog, Making it Home, here.

Ramón Coronado's art speaks quietly

Ramón Coronado is a Los Angeles-based Cross-Media Visual Designer and one of my new favorite visionaries. He calls this project Mercado Negro.

Mercado negro means "black market" in English and it consisted of a 12-week process to reclaim an artifact of urban blight and to find a new use for it. Along the way, he wanted to make a statement about the lack of parks and recreational facilities in LA.

From the Artist's Statement:

Mercado Negro is a Spanish word for Black Market. This 12 week project deals with reclaiming an ordinary, everyday object and transforming it into something with a completely different purpose. I also wanted to create a project that commented on the shortage of parks and recreational functions in Los Angeles.

Moving to Los Angeles four years ago from the small population of Cathedral City was a major eye opener. Los Angeles felt like an entirely new world separate from everything that I had known or experienced before. With little knowledge of LA and it's neighborhoods, I ended up living across the street from MacArthur Park, a dangerous lower income area, overpopulated with homeless, and trash, but with a heavy Hispanic influence.

Spending a year in this area exposed me to the lack of recreational areas for kids in Los Angeles. The irony being that I lived across from MacArthur park, but because of it’s dangerous reputation, no children would ever go there to play and often resorted to playing on the streets running in and out of traffic.

This area is filled with trash on the sidewalks, people sleeping everywhere, and an abundance of shopping carts. Shopping carts exist everywhere and anywhere throughout the city of LA and include themselves as part of LA's landscape. A shopping cart says a lot about a city. Seeing one on every block adds attention to the poverty and that there is no control of private property.

I took it upon myself to take a shopping cart and make a statement with it. I reclaimed LA's iconic shopping cart and created furniture for kids to enjoy in these urban Los Angeles areas. The project is a criticism of the scarcity of recreational functions for kids growing up in a dense city like Los Angeles.

Who thinks to take an abandoned shopping cart and actually do something with it? Over the last 30 years or so, it's become acceptable to blame the marginalized for being marginalized. Ramón Coronado's work is a clever remonstration of that entire way of thinking. Blame solves nothing and makes finding solutions more difficult. Thanks for giving me something to think about Ramón Coronado.

It's a New Ravenna give away

The great Sara Baldwin writes a blog about her art and her company, New Ravenna Mosaics. Sara has a deep love and respect for classically Roman-inspired stone mosaics and she's been writing a series called Rome if You Want to for the last couple of weeks.

In her latest installment, she tells the story of the Roman mosaics left in Tunisia and how they influence the work of New Ravenna. To make that point, Sara's giving away a copy of a rare art book, Mosaics of Roman Africa. Click on this Amazon link to see how much it's worth. Wow.

But there's hope, pop over to Sara's blog and leave a comment. She'll be drawing a lucky winner from the comments left after Rome if You Want to Part II. So enter her contest and stick around long enough to soak in some inspiration.

Particle board vs. plywood: the first follow up

OK, on Monday I wrote a post and detailed my plans for finding out what happens when a six inch by six inch sample of 3/4" veneer plywood and a six by six sample of laminated 165 lb. particle board get dumped in water and left for a few days.

The water immersion part of this test ended yesterday and before I get to what I've observed so far, let me state a couple of things. For starters, if your cabinetry ends up floating in water for a couple of days, how well it's going to hold up is the least of your problems. So the odds of immersion are slim at best. Secondly, this is not a scientific experiment by any means nor are the findings that follow some kind of a sweeping indictment or endorsement of these products' categories. All this test does do is test a hunch I had about these very specific samples. OK, with that out of the way, let's get to it.

On Sunday morning at 11:15, I dropped this sample

and this sample into two separate bowls filled with three liters of tap water.

It was 73 degrees and sunny on that fine morning and here's what the samples looked like when they first went into their watery graves.

So I went about my day and waited to see what would happen. I knew they'd be fine for the first couple of hours and sure enough they were. I fished out my samples and photographed them at 15 minute intervals for the first hour. Then I photographed them again at two hours, four hours, six hours and 12 hours. I won't bore you by showing you all of this but if you really want to see exactly what these samples looked like at any of those intervals, I'll gladly send you the images. OK, moving on.

On Monday morning, I fished them out and this is what I saw at the 24 hour mark.

Both samples were still pretty intact. The laminate on the particle board had started to to blister a little bit and its once smooth surface felt almost like an orange peel.

The plywood seemed to be faring better.

Though some of the veneer had begun to delaminate. Neither sample had warped.

At 48 hours things were a little changed but nothing really dramatic.

This is the plywood's edgebanded side. It's still pretty intact and hasn't warped.

This is the particle board's edgebanded side. The particle board's not faring as well as the plywood, but I expected that. It's still not warped but it's about a sixteenth of an inch fatter than it was 48 hours before.

From the side, the plywood looked like this. There's a little veneer delamination going on but for the most part it's still intact.

And this is the side of the particle board. Pretty much the entire surface now has that orange peel texture from the individual wood particles swelling.

At 72 hours I pulled the samples out of the water for the last time.

The particle board suffered the most.

This is the edge, fresh from the drink. The edge tape seems to have held the shelf together and the water got in through the seams along the upper and lower surfaces.

The side's pretty chewed up too. If you click on this photo it will expand and you can get a better feel for the orange peel texture this thing's adopting.

The plywood behaved a little better after 72 hours.

This is the edge of the plywood sample.

And here's its side. You can see some of the veneer bubbling along the left edge.

You can also see a seam where two pieces of veneer meet up. That's the line about 2/3 of the way up the sample.

All in all, this was nowhere near as dramatic as I expected it to be. And frankly, I thought the particle board would hold up better. The plywood's pretty unusable at this point too. I mean, any finished wood that's thrown in water for 72 hours will be toast. Despite that though, I expected both samples to be in far worse shape than they are. That's a good finding.

But we're not done yet. Each of these samples absorbed a fair amount of water over the course of this test and they are both drying out as I type this. As the absorbed water evaporates, the samples will start to shrink.

That my friends is phase two. What do you suppose will happen now? Once either of these engineered products endures a 72 hour flood, what do you think happens? Will either of them still be viable? The humidity's been pretty low so they'll dry out in a couple of days. I will photograph them one last time after they've dried. What wonders await I wonder wonder wonder?