Funny thing about houses — they don’t comprehend that the economy is less than stellar. They still need regular maintenance. January is my time for organizing, cleaning closets, tidying cabinets, and overall rearranging. This creates lots of opportunities to notice all the things I want to fix and update in our home. Unfortunately, with the holidays just finishing and a tight budget, much of our home improvements may need to be put on the back burner for a while. This is just a preview...Read... more

Once upon a time the kitchen was a room only for servants. In fact in many homes, the kitchen was not even part of the main house. With the rise of the middle class, the kitchen moved into the home, but was still reserved for the servant, now called the “little woman.” Jumping a few decades and the ERA: When “the little woman” went to work and both mom and dad started sharing in the kitchen duties, the new kitchen appeared. This is just a preview...Read the rest... Read More →

One of my favorite things to do at the end of a long day is to relax in a long hot shower. As one who, as a child, was taught the environmental benefits of a “military shower,” the occasional long hot shower is a luxury to me. Unfortunately the long shower sometimes becomes an opportunity to notice just how badly my shower needs to be redone. This is just a preview...Read the rest... Read More →

The kitchen can be the most challenging room to light. Your surfaces need to be bright enough to be able to see where you are chopping, soft and inviting for conversation and midnight snacking, and in many cases, available to show off collections or family heirlooms. This is just a preview...Read the rest... Read More →

The Arts & Crafts or Craftsman movement came to the U.S. from England around the early 1900s as a reaction to the “soulless machine-made production” of the Industrial Revolution with the belief that aesthetics would help society to be more “rational and harmonious.” Many tile artisans considered the machine as the cause of “repetitive and mundane evils” and encouraged the movement towards handcraft work. The goal was for more authentic design and decoration. Design elements of this... more

One of my biggest pet peeves is when professional designers use “Modern” and “Contemporary” interchangeably. In fact; they are two completely different design styles. Modern: 1935 to 1985 It is commonly believed that Modernism grew as a reaction to the “lavish stylistic excesses of the Victorian Era and Edwardian Art Nouveau” periods. This is the movement of “form follows function” and the house as “a machine for living in.” This is just a preview...Read the rest... Read More →

I am not one to push or tout trends. My belief is that your home should reflect you, your family, your lifestyle, and the way you live in your home. The reality is, as consumers we tend to want a lot of the same things. This is just a preview...Read the rest... Read More →

Often times, the impetus for beginning a kitchen remodel is the simple fact that the appliances are in the process of a slow (or sometimes fast) death. Only one burner works on the range, the shelves in the refrigerator are broken, or the oven stops altogether. A journey to the appliance showroom gets scheduled. This is just a preview...Read the rest... Read More →