Jeld-Wen has a new idea for a pantry door

Every new construction project I get involved with anymore involves the inclusion of a walk-in pantry. I swear, walk-in pantries are the new trophy car. Time and again though the question comes up about what do to with the door on the new walk-in pantry.

Jeld-Wen has been making windows and doors for the last 50 years. Now Jeld-Wen has a new pantry door that just might work in a number of these walk in pantries.

They've managed to come up with a design that whispers pantry. It's a type treatment that looks fantastic and upon further inspection consists of a number of home spun recipes. The recipes range from apple pie to espresso biscotti and it's a clever design.

Jeld-Wen's new pantry door is available in nine species of wood, so it will match the millwork used in any home. If you'd like more information about Jeld-Wen's doors and windows, check out their website here.

Autumn re-runs: Reader questions --Thorny dilemmas on stony subjects

I love it when people write to me with questions. Really. Back in the old days, it happened so infrequently that I made a blog post out of nearly every one. I don't have the room for that any more but I do reserve the right to make a post out of any question I can answer that makes me look clever of funny. Preferably both. My personal responses are always a lot kinder than what ends up in the blog, I promise. Also, I will always disguise the identity of a someone who asks me something. Here are some from last year. This post ran originally on 4 October 2009.

Help! We're getting our new granite on Monday hopefully and I'm sure they will tell us how to clean??....but was wondering how you clean your granite. I sure don't want to damage it.

Thanks in advance.

Hey, thanks for your question and congrats on your new addition. Granite is exceptionally easy to live with, despite the nonsense you may see and hear about it. You don't need any special cleaners for it, really. The easiest way to keep it looking good is to clean it with soap and water, rinse it and then dry it. You don't need to scrub it, treat it, buy special cleaners or give it any kind of kid glove treatment. Your fabricator will sell you on an annual resealing package and that's fine if it will give you peace of mind. However, in ten years of dealing with granite counters, I have never once seen anyone stain it or wear down the seal that's already on it when it's installed. The only way you can damage that counter is if you do it on purpose with a hammer. I'm sure there are anecdotes out there about so-and-so's neighbor's cousin's sister-in-law reading something on the internet about some nightmare stained granite incident, but I've never come across one first hand.

Help! My hairdresser told me yesterday about veneer granite transforming her daughter's kitchen... do you know anything about it? cost? installation?

Those granite and composite veneer overlay counters are generally supplied by an outfit called Granite Transformations. Granite Transformations is an international franchise that employs some of the most heavy-handed and shrill sales tactics I've ever come across. That alone makes me wonder about them. Even if the finished product didn't look cheesy (and this finished product looks cheesy), I question anybody whose marketing message consists of slamming their competitors rather than extolling their own benefits. Their latest tactic seems to be touting their "green" credentials. I may be alone in this, but to me that's another red flag. In a world where polyethylene grocery bags and Mylar juice boxes are somehow green, I'd say that's a meaningless descriptor. Proceed with caution. My advice? Go to a reputable counter fabricator that sells a number of materials and see what they can do with your budget.

Help! I can't pick up a home or kitchen magazine without seeing white marble counters. Yet for our complete kitchen renovation, I've gotten total NO! gasps when I share we want marble on the island. Folks tell me Marble is for those who don't cook.

We want a sophisticated library look -the cabinets are mahogany with Jacobean stain, cabinets to the ceiling with white crown molding and we'd love white marble counters.

Do you have experience with white marble counters? The kitchen is 30x15 so the investment is great and I don't want to buy something that cannot withstand children, entertaining and years.

Have you never read my blog before? White marble counters (honed please) are my all-time favorite material, to hell with its detractors. Click on the word countertops in my glossary to the right and you'll be treated to 45 articles I've written on counters. About half of them are devoted to singing songs of praise to white marble. your kitchen sounds beautiful, send me a photo when it's done.

Marble is not high maintenance, but marble is also impossible to to keep looking pristine. If you have an obsessive personality, marble is not your material. Find a white quartzite instead. It will keep a glossy shine and repel damage almost as well as granite will. But if you like the idea of your life leaving a mark on things, then marble is for you. Trust me, white marble will scratch and stain and get more and more beautiful with each passing year. It's marble's nature and there's nothing you can do to counteract it completely.

Just about every horizontal surface in Southern Europe, indoors and out, is made from white marble. Most of it is hundreds of years old. It looks spectacular and is but one of the many ways that the people of Southern Europe get tied to their surroundings. Think about it. If five generations of your family lived in the same home and the matriarch of each generation chopped vegetables in the same spot on the same marble counter, each of those women left a physical mark on that counter. Every time you walked into that kitchen and looked at that counter, you would have an instant reminder of the women who proceeded you to that spot. Wow. Far from detracting from the beauty of the surface, that kind of history and character is the ultimate enhancement. Having white marble in your own home is an opportunity to capture some of that history and character for yourself and for your family.

You keep hearing an emphatic NO! because you haven't spoken with me. I say go for it!

Help! I’m sitting here crying because I’ve looked at so much granite that I want to give up. I’m trying to brighten my kitchen up so I put in Biscotti colored cabinets (already installed 3 weeks ago) to go with a new countertop and flooring (waiting for granite color before picking tile color). I have mainly white appliances. New range top is black and the top section of the dishwasher is black. Other than that it’s all white. My small appliances are black. (Toaster, coffee pot, can opener.) The wall color can be changed to whatever. My dining room table and chairs are light oak.

I’ve run the gamut from light to medium to dark granite and now I’m back to light. I’m ready to give up completely and put the old countertop back in which was wood block.

Hey, chin up. You're fortunate to have a life where you have choices. Having too many choices is a symptom of a life of plenty and certainly nothing to shed tears over. Too many choices can also be intimidating and overwhelming and it sounds like your stuck on overwhelmed. I have no idea what the color "Biscotti" is without knowing who the manufacturer was and I'm not even going to try to make a recommendation. What I do recommend strongly though is that you find the most reputable granite fabricator in your area and give them a call. Please note that this will not be in a big box store. Set an appointment and then take one of your cabinet doors over to the fabricator and look at granite slabs in their yard. You cannot pick a granite counter from small samples. Run away from anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.

I would never turn someone loose with all the options available, it's too much to process. Instead, I do pre-selections for my clients. I talk to them, find out where their interests are and then show them three options rather than 150. If they don't like any of the first set of three, then I show them a second set of three and sometimes a third set.

You need someone to do something similar to that for you in a granite yard. Talk to a salesperson before you go look at slabs. Tell him or her the primary colors you're interested in and then be honest about your budget. Let the salesperson guide you through their slab room. A reputable fabricator will have a good cross section of what's available, so pick something from what you see that day. Just breathe and know that based on your budget and the other colors you're using in your renovation, the right granite will end up picking you. So get out of the way and let it.

Autumn re-runs: A microscopic view of some counter materials

This was one of my favorite posts last year. It ran on 21 December 2009. As proud of it as I was at the time, it's a work of scholarship for crying out loud, I ran it last year during Christmas week and no one saw it. Now I ask you, what other design blog partners with a scanning electron microscope manufacturer to test a marketing claim? Who?

Me, that's who.

Dartmouth College

Another great contact I've made through Twitter in the last few months is the Aspex Corporation in Pittsburgh, PA. Aspex has been in business since the early '90s and they have embraced social media with a savvy and confidence that makes them stand out. The Aspex Corporation makes Scanning Electron Microscopes among other things and that a company in a very technical field and a kitchen designer could strike up a casual acquaintance is a great example of the expansion and simultaneous contraction of the world made possible by social media.

A scanning electron microscope (or SEM) is an instrument for visualizing the surfaces of objects and materials not possible through ordinary optical microscopes. Rather than using a lens to magnify reflected light (an optical microscope) SEMs use a focused beam of electrons to scan a surface.

Aspex Corporation

The electrons bounce back to a detector and the detector generates an image. SEMs can only "see" a small section of an object at a time. So the object being examined is placed on a Sample Stage in the SEM and the stage makes small, incremental movements called rasters. The rasters are then compiled into a complete image and displayed on a screen. It's pretty cool stuff. Most people have seen SEM images of ant's heads or snowflakes and that's a quick explanation of how those images were made.

Well Aspex is running an offer to scan and analyze any sample that can fit inside the chamber of one of their SEMs for free so I took them up on their offer.

I enjoy cutting through marketing speak to an almost unhealthy degree and counter materials are a product category rife with it. For as long as they've been around, I've heard the claims made by quartz composite manufacturers that their products were "perfectly smooth and non-porous." Since this claim is always made during a comparison with the surface irregularities of granite my BS meter goes off.

Quartz composites are a perfectly fine material and I specify their use all the time. In my mind, they are an alternative to natural stone counters but not a substitute for them. They have a very unique look and there are specific times when their use is called for. At the same time, sometimes the over all look of a room calls for granite or soapstone or marble. These materials are not interchangeable and each one has its strengths and weaknesses.

So when Aspex Corporation made its offer to scan any sample I could fit into the chamber of one of their SEMs, I decided to put to the test the quartz composite claims of perfect smoothness and non porosity.

I took two samples that had been sitting on the end of my desk for years and shipped them off to Aspex.

The samples I sent were a piece of Santa Cecelia granite and Sienna Ridge by Silestone. This is by no means an accurate sampling of an entire industry's products. Rather, this is a test of two very specific and very well handled samples. The evidence presented here is anecdotal at best but I still there's something valid to be learned.

photo from Aspex Corp.

Here are my samples upon arrival at Aspex.

photo from Aspex Corp.

Here they are relaxing in front of the PSEM eXpress, Aspex Corporation's bench top model.

The degree of magnification in the following examples is expressed with a scale in each image. The scale is in microns and a micron is another word for a micrometer. A micro meter is a millionth of a meter, put another way, a micron is 1/1000th of a millimeter. Microns are abbreviated as µm. To give you a little more perspective, a human air is 100µm wide and a red blood cell is 8µm in diameter. Salmonella bacteria are 2µm in length and 0.5µm wide.

So here's what my sample of Santa Cecilia looks like.

In this image, the scale at the top reads 200µm. So if you took two human hairs and set them side by side, they would be as wide as the scale.

In this image the scale reads 1000µm. So if you took ten human hairs and set they side by side, they would be as wide as the scale.

Here's another Santa Cecilia granite image at 1000µm.

Now it's quartz composite's turn.

Here's my quartz composite sample with a scale that reads 200µm.

Here is is at a higher magnification, 1000µm

And another shot of it at 1000µm.

Pretty cool, huh? Now, I will grant the quartz composite people an acknowledgement that this sample is smoother than this sample of granite, but I would hardly call it "perfectly smooth and non porous."

So what I take away from this is that I won't be swayed by claims that I should specify quartz composites over natural stone because they are smoother and non-porous (and more hygienic by implication) and I will continue to use composites where they would look best and natural stone where it would look best.

What do you think?

In the meantime, poke around on Aspex Corp's website. You can even send in something of your own with this form. They have a pretty cool contest every week where they invite people to guess what a scan is. Here's last week's:

Care to hazard a guess?

Why it's a Post-it note being pulled back from the pad of course.

Thanks Aspex!

It's a seminar day today

In about an hour the first seminar of my social media series kicks off and I go on. It's a sold out session and I'm beyond psyched.

I know I'm not supposed to admit this in public, but I still can't get over the fact that people pay money to hear me speak.

Delta Faucet wants to take a shower with you

Last week, I wrote a post about Delta Faucet's new TV spot that I think is so clever. Here it is again:




Well, that ad for the In2ition is part of a larger campaign and this week, Delta Faucet unveiled a new interactive game that's built around that TV spot.

The game is called Wash the Day Away and you can find it here. In Wash the Day Away, there are six characters and successive game play will unlock two more.

Once you pick a character, he or she proceeds over to the shower. Now it's game time. In this case, it's the Dad.

The game lasts for three rounds and in each round, the player's confronted with a clothed body part. The goal is to wash away as much of the character's clothing as possible in ten seconds.

Don't worry, it's all safe for prime time. Dad even clips his chest hair. Seriously! Look for yourself!

Once the player makes it through three rounds, the percentage of clothing washed away will determine how many chances the player gets for an instant win.

Players can play Wash the Day Away as many times as they'd like, but once a day a player will get the chance to go for an instant win. The instant win round is pretty cool and if you want to see it, then head on over to Delta Faucet's website.

The instant win prize is an In2ition combination shower head of course, and there will be one prize awarded for each of the 52 days that the contest is running.

So play early and play often. For the second time in a week I have this to say, well played Delta, well played.