Kids Room Designs

We came across an outstanding designer from Barcelona who visualizes and creates high quality, photorealistic renders of kids rooms. His name is Sergi and here is his blog. You will find tons of inspiration here,

Birds on the Balcony - Finally

It's taken years, but I've finally managed to convince a couple of birds that they will not be eaten alive if they come onto the balcony.

OK, it's only the odd common-as-muck Great Tit - I can't offer you anything exotic. But I'm proud as punch.

I've had a feeder up since January, but it hadn't been touched and I was about to throw it away. And then when I went onto the balcony one day last week, two tits suddenly flew off.

But if they weren't afraid to come onto the balcony, why weren't they touching the nuts?

Probably, I thought, because by now they were stale. So I replaced them - and within twenty four hours - bingo. I had birds feeding on the balcony for the first time.

I think it's just one pair that come. They turn up at exactly 8am for breakfast every morning. The female is more wary - if she sees me she's gone for good. But the male is more confident. He just waits a minute till I've gone and then flies back. He didn't spot me this morning. I was in the bedroom hiding behind the bed with the French doors wide open, camera at the ready ...

Hope he enjoyed his breakfast.

Skywatch Friday - Stormclouds Building

Italy has has disastrous weather over the last week or so. Hailstorms, thunderstorms and lightning strikes, high winds and tornadoes have caused five deaths and considerable damage.

The worst weather, however, has been in the south, and although the north has been hit, we've missed most of it. Temperatures have been lower than usual with cool breezes, but the storm that is building in these pictures was about the worst of it, and it brought no more than an hour or so of heavy rain.

The cloud started to build at about 8pm. These photos were all taken in the next five to ten minutes, from the back balcony.

You can find links to more Skywatch Friday posts on the Skywatch site. Of those posted so far, my favourite this week are these photos of the midnight sun in Finland. I lived there for a year once, and the photo brought back memories of parties by the lake at 2am ... Super.

It's Time to Build!

I attended an online seminar ("Stimulus and the Housing Market") yesterday put on by Professional Builder Publications. Here are a few interesting tidbits.

1. First time home buyers can still get an $8,000.00 tax credit if you purchase the home by December 1 of 2009. There is speculation that this credit may be extended or even expanded to non-first time buyers. Let's hope.
2. For those thinking of remodeling tax credits are available for window and door replacements and / or other energy improving strategies. You can get more information on this at www.energystar.gov/taxcredits
3. The Home Affordability Index is at a record high. This means that construction costs are low and financing is still relatively cheap. If you are in a position to build or buy, this is truly the time to do it.
4. Consumer confidence is just beginning to improve.
5. Single Family housing is expected to begin modest recovery soon. Multi-Family is expected to lag for a while.
6. Existing home inventory is still high, but it is going down. This is a good sign.
7. U.S. construction spending is expected to start increasing by end of 09' or early 10'.

So what is the point? Now is really a good time to buy, build or remodel. Low consumer confidence and low demand are keeping construction costs down while financing costs are still relatively low. This is a good combination if you are in a position to take action. Once recovery starts to happen you know where construction costs are going to go.

Bathroom Remodel by Larson Brenner Architects

Simple,Unique, Creative and Green House Plans

Talking (sternly) to my mesembryanthemum

Now listen. It's time we had a little talk. How long have we known each other? Five years? More you think? Maybe. And in all that time you haven't given me one single measly flower. Not one.

I didn't blame you the first year. Well, you should know me well enough by now. When have I ever condemned a plant without checking first? And sure enough, all the sites told me you wouldn't flower if you were overwatered. So I cut back. And still nothing. The next year I cut back still further. You just turned brown and tatty.

Now credit where credits due - I've tried hard. I've tried fertilising and not fertilising. I've put you in the sun, out of the sun, half in half out. And still you just sit there. I've pruned you back, I've let you grow, I've taken cuttings. And where did that get me? I now have two of you who won't flower instead of one.

So here we are again. You're supposed to flower from June to August and what have you given me? Not so much as a bud.

Well I'm sorry, but I've had enough. You know I never throw a plant away unless it dies, but I think you're just taking advantage. You're a tatty mess and you refuse to perform. So this is your last chance. I'm afraid you take up too much space for me to be patient any longer. I've checked all the gardening sites I can find, and I'm following their advice to the letter. I've put you in the sunniest spot I can. I'm watering very moderately and you're not getting fertilised if you beg for it. But this is it - you give me some flowers by August or I'm afraid we'll be parting company.

Small but Unique, Cheap but Nice House Plans

I was discussing home design trends with a builder friend of mine the other day. He said to me that "small is the new big". This is true because people are demanding much more value in their purchases now. But they also still want quality. So how can designers and builders deliver on this? Here are a few of my thoughts:

• Build it small - but liveable. A floor plan needs to be smart in order to be functional while remaining compact. Every space should be analyzed for efficiency. Better hire a pro.
• Keep it simple. Roof form and wall massing should be as simple as possible. This reduces labor costs and additional materials.
• Keep it square. A square plan has much less surface area than more complicated plan shapes. That means less roofing, wall and foundation materials.
• Keep it square 2. Square plans have less jogs. And jogs are transitions that cost money. Think about it. It is faster to build one long wall than 3 or 4 separate walls that total the same overall length.
• 1 for 2 special. One big window is less expensive than 2 small ones. Labor and materials included.
• Get rid of the ginger bread. A quality design does not need ornamentation but a bad design does. We call it "putting earrings on a pig".
• Eliminate redundancy. Most folks don't really need 3 places to eat (kitchen island, kitchen nook and formal dining room). Most folks don't use a formal living room if they have a main floor family room. It's not the 1950's anymore Beaver.
• Use the basement. You have to build that foundation anyway (up north anyway), so you might as well incorporate it into your plan.
• Use the garage. Many times we will use the space above the garage as a master suite or family room space.
• Question everything. Look at every building system and every component critically. Ask yourself if there is a better choice to be made. Make sure it's functional as well as beautiful and economical. If it's functional but ugly - I don't call that value.
• Plan ahead. Get your plan completely right before you build. Work with a pro. If you get the plan right then you can build without changes. Changes during construction always cost time and money.
• 
  Afton Cottage House Plan
  
  
  Ok, I'll stop. There are a million other great ideas. I'd like to hear some of yours. Please comment.

Simple,Unique, Creative and Green House Plans

If you garden, you're at risk ...

Now, I have to admit that the Daily Telegraph is not what I normally read over my morning coffee. And not just because I'm in Italy. And if you'd told me that I'd find myself reading an article from their on-line version and going Yes, yes you're right, so right I'd probably have asked you if you'd perhaps had a bit too much sun.

But the other day I came across an article in their gardening column - and that's exactly what I found myself saying. And ironically, it was an article about exactly that - getting a little bit too much sun.

If you garden, you're at risk from skin cancer. And as Matthew Appleby pointed out in his column, it's something that most gardeners don't take seriously. The lack of an immediate cause/effect link - the damage is done slowly over a long period - means that we tend not to think about it. Not that is, until it's too late. The sun doesn't seem strong enough to bother with suncream. And anyway we're only going out for half an hour. And we can't be bothered with a hat - it keeps falling off.

There are various types of skin cancer. Some are rarer than others, and some are more dangerous than others. But most - certainly the three most common types - are generally triggered by long term exposure to the sun. (Other triggers include contact with certain chemicals, a weakened immune system, and other factors.) And they are on the increase.

Your skin type may mean you are more or less at risk - basically the fairer your skin the more damage the sun can do. When you get sunburnt, the UV rays mutate the DNA in your skin cells. And it is this mutated DNA which years later may start to cause cells to grow out of control - forming the tumour. Click here for an animated explanation which you might want to show to your kids too.

But you can get skin cancer however dark skinned you are - and there is one type which is actually more common amongst people with darker skins. Which means that everyone needs to take precautions. Both to protect the skin and, if the damage has already been done, to ensure early detection in case anything does develop. Most types of skin cancer are easily curable if diagnosed early enough. But leave it too late and - well, cancer is cancer.

Most of the precautions are by now well-known :

• do your gardening in the morning and evening, avoiding the hours between 11am and 3pm when the sun is strongest
  
• always use suncream with a protection factor of at least 15
  
• keep your arms and legs covered and wear a hat which shades your neck as well as your face

But I'd add a couple more :

• don't think it couldn't happen to you. It can.
• be aware of what the different types of skin cancer look like, even at the earliest stages, and if you have any strange growths or blemishes, check with your doctor.
• In any case, if you have a lot of moles, it's worth asking your doctor if s/he thinks an annual check up would be sensible. Even if you know the warning signs (size above 1/4" in diameter; irregular shape and colouring), you won't always be able to distinguish those which are merely "at risk" from those which have just started to develop. A dermatologist will. And as I said before, it's early diagnosis which makes the difference ...

And at this point I have to confess to why Appleby's article caught my eye in the first place. A few years ago I was diagnosed with a melanoma - a more dangerous type of tumour than the two most common forms of skin cancer. Not only am I fair-skinned and freckled, but I come from a generation which knew nothing about the effect of sunburn . Until I was well into my thirties I didn't see getting burnt as being anything but a joke - if a somewhat painful one.

Then, when people started seeing the effect the hole in the ozone layer was having on skin cancer rates in Australia and New Zealand, the news slowly started to filter through. But by that time the damage, for me, was done.

I was lucky. By the time the tumour was diagnosed, I'd realised I had some rather dodgy looking moles and had been having annual check-ups for about ten years. Which meant that it was still at a fairly early stage when they found it, and very easy to deal with. A couple of small operations to remove it were all that were needed.

My check-ups are now six-monthly. If you've had a melanoma once your chances of having a second one increase. So needless to say, you never see me outside in the summer unless covered from head to toe with both clothing and sunblock. And so far, so good ...

But to finish with something a bit less gloomy ... There's a saying in Italian : Non tutto il male viene per nuocere. Which roughly translates as Not all that is bad comes to harm us or, if you like, Every cloud has a silver lining. Although easily operable, the mole they took out was in a very awkward place, right on my calf muscle. And the surgeon was worried that if I started walking around too soon, I'd rip all the internal stitches - he'd taken a fairly good chunk of my leg away. So he said - three weeks in bed. Well it seemed like paradise at first - three weeks in bed, without feeling ill, being waited on head and foot, and with nothing to do but read. But after about a week it started to get boring. At which point my son plonked the portable computer on the bed and said : Why don't you start a blog?

My initial reaction was Who me? What have I got to write about? But then I looked up from the bed and out onto the balcony. Hmmm, I wonder .. Might give it a try.

And here we are.

But I'm sure I'm not the only one with a Why I started blogging story. What about you? Leave a comment telling us or, if it's a long story, turn it into a post and leave us a comment with a link.

Oh, and if you nip out to stake the beans while you're in the middle of it - don't forget the sunblock.

Thanks ...

...to the following photographers for making their photos available under Creative Commons License on Flickr : Hawk684 (sunburn) Annie Mole (protective clothing)

And for more information on skin cancer

The National Cancer Institute (US): Non-melanoma skin cancer and Melanoma
Cancer Research UK : Non-melanoma skin cancer ... and Melanoma

SEHD and Southern Living House Plans

Simply Elegant Home Designs is announcing a new relationship with Southern Living House Plans. Southern Living will be marketing two plans as seen below.

The "Marine Farmhouse"

The "Stillwater Craftsman"

Ron Brenner, President of Simply Elegant Home Designs had this to say -

" We are so excited about the opportunity to work with Southern Living House Plans. What we are trying to do here at Simply Elegant is to make truly good home design more economically achievable for the general public, and we see this new relationship with Southern Living as a great way to do that. We think our designs are special, and we want to get them out there for as many people to see as possible. The additional exposure we receive through SL will be more valuable than many press releases."

The Marine Farmhouse is being featured this week (week of June 22nd) on the Southern Living Custom Builder program at http://www.southernlivingcustombuilder.com/

Paper Architecture

"Paper Architecture" is a term in our industry that has traditionally referred to buildings that we design that never get built. It seems in this current economic situation there is an awful lot of paper architecture going on.

Over the weekend I ran across this more literal example of "Paper Architecture" - that being the art of creating an object out of a single piece of paper. A single sheet of paper is cut and folded into an intricate miniature structure. Here are a couple of examples:

Before the final design is finished, something like 20 to 30 (sometimes even more) prototypes are made by Ingrid Siliakus. Drawing paper architecture designs to Ingrid is as building: first one layer, with a single shape, will be drawn and than layer after layer are added. Read More:

Skywatch Sunday - or why I've never been able to participate in Skywatch Friday

Almost a year ago now Skywatch Friday took off. Just in case you've never come across it, it's an invitation to bloggers to post their photos of the sky once a week - and some of them have been stupendous. Roiling clouds , red and gold sunsets, eagles soaring against blue skies. Oh how I would have loved to join in. But as I explained to someone in a comment once (I don't think she believed me, but it's true), in Milan we don't have skies. First of all because you can barely see more than a square inch of it between the buildings, but then because of the weather conditions. The sky here tends to be uniform blue or uniform grey. Period. One of the things I still really miss about England is the way it can be raining one minute and bright sunshine twenty minutes later. That doesn't happen here. Whatever it's like - sunny, raining, foggy or anything else - it's like that for at least three days. The changeover from one type of weather is slow and gradual over a day or so, meaning there's nothing dramatic to photograph. Certainly nothing like the skies in some of the other participants' photos - like for instance this one from New Zealand .

But browsing through the photos each week, I saw that lots of people were posting photos of things against a plain sky background, so why not me too?

And that's what you've got today. The first is a tree that was in bloom around Milan about a month ago (can anyone identify it?), the second was last night. Planes in the sky always fascinate me. Where have they come from? Where are they going? There are real people on board - I'll never know who they are, they'll never know I'm watching them. Who is the pilot? What nationality is s/he? Is s/he married? With kids? They're all there now - passengers, crew - working, reading, eating, drinking and experiencing. And me. We all experience the plane from totally different viewpoints and know nothing of each other, can have no idea of the experience of the others. It fascinates me.

But I'm digressing ... Initially then, my Skywatch contribution was going to be a one-off post - a couple of photos collected over a period of time and then forget about it. But this month the weather has been strange. We've had wind (rare in Milan) which has brought scudding clouds. And we've had showers which lasted for no more than half an hour and then cleared up. And consequently the sky has been changing at a rate of knots. So I've been building up a collection of photos, and for the next couple of weeks I'll be joining in - and I'll try to do it on Friday, I promise.

Oh Leander!

Oleander (Nerium oleander). Doesn't it just scream "Mediterranean" at you. Not of course that you won't find it elsewhere - but for me, the image of the oleander has always been connected with lines of rather dusty and straggly trees lining the roadsides in southern Italy. Too dusty and straggly for me occasionally. A bit like buddleia - one of those trees which should be lovely but sometimes disappoint.

But that was before I moved here. The gardens and courtyards around the flat are full of oleanders, and they seem to thrive on the smog and pollution of Milan. All the gardens in our street have them, and at the moment they're in full bloom - I took all these photos in a ten minute walk up the road this afternoon.

Oleanders can be yellow, orange, white, red or a multitude of shades of pink. But here at least the yellow and orange varieties seem to be much rarer. Flowers can be single, or as with the wonderful specimen from our courtyard in the top photo, double.

It's said that they get their name from the myth of Hero and Leander. Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite who dwelt in a tower in Sestos, at the edge of the Hellespont (now known as the Dardenelles - the straits which, together with the Bosphorus, divide Turkey geographically between European and Asia), while Leander was a young man from Abydos on the other side of the straits. Leander fell in love with Hero and would swim every night across the Hellespont to be with her. Hero would light a lamp at the top of her tower to guide his way.

This went on all one summer until one stormy winter night, the waves were too strong for poor Leander and the wind blew out Hero's signal. Leander lost his way, drowned, and Hero found the dead body washed up on the shore, still clutching a flower in one hand. I don't know who it was who heard her lament of Oh Leander! Oh Leander! and decided to rename the flower but, rather than trying to make their name in botanical history, you'd have thought they'd have decided to spend their time looking after the poor girl and preventing her from zapping back up to the tower to throw herself off. Such is love ...

Though my sympathies lie rather with the more cynical view of my favourite Shakespearian heroine Rosalind, who in Act IV of As You Like It exclaims : Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was 'Hero of Sestos.' But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

But back to the tree : Oleanders are hideously poisonous. Well, some sources say reports of their toxicity are exaggerated, but I didn't experiment. Keen as I am on writing killer posts, there are limits ... Keep them away from your kids, pets and horses, don't eat any part of the plant, keep the sap off your skin, and don't try burning the leaves or branches - even the smoke is toxic.. Check here for general information and here specifically for horses - apparently an ounce of oleander leaves can kill a 1,000lb horse.

Presuming though that you can trust your family and pets to lay off the tree, I'd strongly recommend an oleander if you've got the right conditions. It will grow in most soils, and is drought tolerant. It will survive down to about -7°C (20F), but may suffer frost damage - in which case it will need to be pruned back. However, it needs the summer sun to flower properly. Plant it in the shade and you won't get the sort of blooms you can see here. It flowers off the new growth, so prune after flowering.

They'll grow to 20ft in the garden, but also do well in containers. Look up at the balconies in Milan and you'll often see them leaning over the balustrade.

They're easy to grow from cuttings, and I started one a couple of years back. It did well at first and even gave me some blooms, but last year was badly attacked by red spider mite - trust them not to find it toxic. I had to cut it right back and this year, though it's back in growth, there have been no blooms. The cutting came from the tree below - now imagine that on the balcony ....

Classic Bedroom Photo Ideas

Classic Bedroom Photo Ideas

Traditional Style Bedroom Picture

Traditionaly Styled Poster Bedroom Set in Classic Pecan Finish, 'Monte Carlo' Collection by AICO. FREE SHIPPING.