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Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005 | ||
Bad Links? | Home briefsCurl up by the fireFor romantic ambiance in a room design, smaller and cozier is often better, like this hearth room located right next to a kitchen and dining area. The ceiling soars to an octagonal peak for interest, and the knotty pine adds a woodsy feel, perfect with a flickering fire in the fireplace. Wide pine planks for flooring add a nostalgic appeal, while an area rug softens the hard-surface feel. With todays gas fireplaces, you can curl up by the warmth and glow of the fire at the flip of a switch, rather than requiring the time and logs for building a real fire in a wood-burning firebox. Some weeds have beneficial qualitiesUntil stopped by cold, annual weeds continue to spread their seeds, which will sprout next year and in years to come. Cool, moist autumn weather helps perennial weeds get a stronger hold on the soil. Besides this, all those weeds will smother cabbages, asters, chrysanthemums, and all the other wonderful garden plants of fall. Weeding is not as daunting a task as it might seem at first, because weeds also have weeds. If your garden is very weedy, there usually are a few very large weed plants rather than many small plants. Forget about using a hoe in any garden inundated by weeds. Instead, starting in one corner of the garden, grab each large weed and give it a tug. This wrenches the whole plant from the soil, roots and all. Weed pulling is very satisfying, as long as you keep facing the clear brown earth that you have cleared rather than the sea of weeds still to be cleared. Alternatively, eat the weeds. Make believe you are cultivating them. Many late summer weeds and three in particular are edible. If weeds have not grown so large as to completely shade your garden, you undoubtedly will find some purslane growing near ground level. This ubiquitous weed, with reddish stems and fleshy, spoon-shaped leaves, is cultivated as a vegetable in India and France, but all you have to do is to go out to your garden to weed and eat at the same time. The flavor is slightly tangy and the texture is crunchy, with that thick oiliness of okra. Its good either raw or cooked. If your garden is overrun with giant weeds, chances are youre cultivating two fine edibles, pigweed and lambs-quarters. Both are similar to spinach and taste best harvested young and cooked. Pigweed is an upright plant with few branches, each of which is now capped by fuzzy spikes of seed heads. The roots are bright red. Lambs-quarters, like pigweed, grows from a foot to a few feet high, but is more bushy. The leaves have a slight bluish tint and a mealy white coating, and their shape leads to another of the plants common names, goosefoot. Purslane, pigweed, and lambs-quarters all are nutritional powerhouses. For instance, lambs-quarters has three times as much calcium and half again as much vitamin A as broccoli, and purslane has more iron than spinach. You might wonder, if fact, why you bother to cultivate spinach. Beam your room upWhen you walk into a room and look up and see nothing, you are likely to walk right back out. Walking into this room with decorative beams, you are likely to linger. The beams create an Old World look of class and permanence. These particular beams are not particularly expensive to build since they are made primarily of drywall, not wood. Wood cove mouldings and trim make the look of wood beams without the price of solid wood. Enamel brightens the room, and contrasts with the ceiling color boldly. If you have a nicely sized room that needs some class and drama, think about beaming up the ceiling. Flashing likely cause of trapped moistureQ: The following refers to a two-story frame house with basement in upstate New York, the new part of which was completed in 1820. The exterior wall is wood clapboard on the outside and wood lath and plaster on the inside. In 1930, a brick chimney was constructed on the outside next to the wood clapboard, and is connected to an oil burner (furnace) in the basement. The house is now closed during winter and open only in summer months. In the last few years there has been moisture on the inside of the wall in the chimney area. This may be only leakage from chimney flashing, or ice formation under eaves, but since the house is closed and unheated in winter, could it be bricks retaining moisture? When re-papering and plastering should a moisture barrier be put on the chimney wall, or would moisture be trapped either on the clapboard side or the inside wall and ultimately produce dry rot? I have heard the Carey Bros. indicate that improper use of moisture barriers can produce problems in dry rot. Is this such a case? A: You have all the answers written into your question. By adding a moisture barrier to the inside surface of the wall, you will stand the chance of creating a rot problem. Moisture will condense on the outside surface of the moisture barrier (the inside face of the wall studs) trapping moisture against the studs, and eventually causing a fungal growth, and yes, this can happen even on a house as old as yours. The clapboard is a good moisture layer and doesnt sound like the culprit. Our guess is that the flashing you mentioned is probably leaking. The flashing can be easily checked for leaks with a water hose in the summer time! There shouldnt be any heat transmission from the chimney to the exterior wall. If there were heat transmission from the chimney to the wall, it could cause condensation. If this were the case (and we dont think it is) a heat barrier (constructed from drywall, or mortar or sheet metal) would be in order. Homeowners stuck in color rut?Now for sobering news on the home decor front: One-third of homeowners confess their color themes have not changed in five years or more. But whats to change? Statistically, its white, white, and more white with traces of beige for the brave few willing to push the color envelope in nearly half of bedrooms, kitchens and baths. A nation all-too-willing to embrace the latest gizmos and gadgets is anything but adventuresome when it comes to dabbling in color schemes. In fact, there are no schemes, unless you consider risk-free tonality a decorating plan. People are timid about color, and they think they are safe using off-white and beige, said Maggy Costandy, an interior designer in New Bern, N.C. The primary obstacle is fear. They just need to venture outside the box. Homeowners might be excused, however, for their reluctance to tiptoe beyond lighter shades. Many consumers, it seems, simply dont know how to proceed in the world of color mix-and-match. Professional decorators often recommend a palette of at least three colors to pull a room together, said Carol Williams of May Department Stores. Thats where it becomes tricky for people to figure out how to decorate on their own. When consumers do take the design bull by the horns, they usually try to match hues to everyday items and accessories. Often, the search is frustrating, if not fruitless. Linen, fabric and tabletop marketers offer roughly the same colors, but their subtle differences are just enough to be obvious when trying to coordinate a room ensemble. Williams said a long-sought solution to top-to-bottom color coordination is just want consumers need and want. May and editors of House Beautiful magazine have crafted one such collection, the House Beautiful Home Collection, where 32 colors dovetail across a broad line of products from linens and towels to glassware. Items are packaged with color chip suggestions so home decorators can shift seamlessly from product to product. The bottom line is that consumers can feel more confident about what theyre doing and be more comfortable in expressing their own style, said Williams. Something new: A different screwdriverAbout four years ago, we met with an engineer and inventor who said he had designed a new type of screw head, one, he said, that would revolutionize screws as we know them. He pulled his new driver bit out along with a handful of screws and it was unlike anything we had ever used. The driver tip looked kind of like a cross between a Phillips and a square head. What makes this new style of screwdriver different is that it has been designed with eight points of contact, which is double that of either the Phillips or the square head. The new screw tip looks like a cross between a Phillips and a square head. Actually, four little square heads clustered together and slightly offset from center (and each other). Thus, the screw offers eight points of contact. Four are perpendicular to the screw axis, like the Phillips, and four are diagonal to the axis, like the square head. There is almost zero taper, so the tip doesnt cam-out, and because of the perpendicular grip feature the screw tip doesnt wear out. Heres a real caution: Be sure to use this tip/screw combination with a reduced torque setting. Without setting the torque on a driver drill, you can literally break screws all day long. Home is where the hearth isStone and distressed beams create an Old World feeling of permanence in this hearth room. The stone is tapered to the ceiling to add some graceful lines rather than going straight up. The arch of the fireplace adds another graceful line, repeated up on the decorative beam supports of the ceiling. The ceiling beams are rough-hewn and distressed to look centuries old, and the technique is repeated on the mantle. Knotty alder cabinets on one side of the fireplace house the plasma TV, while a quaint window seat bench flanks the other side, perfect for reading a good book on a rainy day. Performance bond required to ensure contractor finishes jobQ: How do I ensure that the contractor I hire will complete the job, and how much more will it cost me? A: There is only one method that will absolutely guarantee the completion of your home improvement in the event that your contractor fails: a performance bond. Performance bond is simply an insurance policy in the amount of your construction contract, purchased by you (costs about 4 percent of the contract amount), and is secured by the contractors assets and past performance record. It is difficult for non-reputable home improvement contractors to get bonding because the criteria to acquire one is very stringent. CAUTION: Dont confuse the performance bond with the contractors license bond. They arent the same. Wire services
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