$2000 for a lawn mower is a lot of money. $2000 for an electric car with a 3-hour charge sounds kind of amusing. It would more than get me to work and back, and wouldn't be too difficu...

"According to the article, rainwater collection is still illegal in Utah and Washington." Interesting, as I bought my rainbarrels directly from the City of Seattle... The ...

The guy who owned my house for fifty years before I bought it was a chain smoker. I rented an industrial-strength ozone generator from Home Depot and let it run for a weekend, and it took care of ...

Ironically I've never seen anyone in Germany carrying one of those. My shopping bag is a cheap nylon one that fits in a pouch on my keyring - sold everywhere for under 3 euros.

I have a small silver-and-crystal chandelier (matching the silver ceiling!) in my kitchen, which is otherwise a fairly staid modern white. Task lighting is underneath the upper cabinets.

For paper recycling, I use a box a big pair of boots came in. It had a big graphic print on the top. I cut off the end with the logo on it, leaving the print, retaped the box "closed", and stood ...

The Black Box wines are pretty reliably drinkable. There's also a powdered red wine in Europe that is... horrible, which is a shame.

"(really, who does this?)" Um, people interested in how other people think? I can easily see this as a subset of linguistics, or communication theory, or cultural study, o...

Hey, I recognize that table! I pulled apart my grandmother's vanity to make two side tables and it left exactly those scars on the side where the center boards had been attached. In f...

I second Seattle Fabrics. If they don't have the fabric, they'll know who does.

I lived with a concrete floor for a year before putting in cork, and the concrete was *cold*. I love the cork - nice temperature year-round, soft-but-not-squishy, and environmentally f...

It's the size of my work clothes wardrobe. Hmm... I could use it *instead* of that wardrobe... There'd be no "putting things away" step of laundry! (Along the same lines, if I were t...

In my house in Seattle, I think the only IKEA pieces are two Billy bookcases that I use as china cabinets. (The black wood look they sadly discontinued 10 years ago, with glass doors - these have ...

To clarify the above comment: Make sure that art is behind glass or otherwise can take a gentle cleaning, and that any paint is relatively high-gloss.

Just a warning - that soot above the fireplace means that the fireplace has a tendency to be smoky. You can clean the current soot off with TSP (er, I am told, though it has never worked for me), ...

"rotary iron". Huh - my grandmother called it a mangle. They are very cool machines, and someday when I have space I will grab either my mother's or my grandmother's mangle, even thou...

Ever since I had a job cleaning houses, I've been obsessed with keeping my kitchen as minimalist and easy-to-clean as possible. (And I still twitch at the thought of deep-fryers.) How...

"sort our recycling in TEN ways (required by German law)." Wait, what? My Hamburg apartment doesn't seem to care about recycling. I dutifully take my paper and glass to the nearby re...

I have the IKEA rack on a short wall next to a window (the pans are hung from a rack on the long wall next to it). It holds three lids and some smaller plates very nicely.

I have the Fisher & Paykel double drawers and I love them. A single drawer is more than enough for dishes for one or two people. I joke sometimes that when I remodel the kitchen I'll ...