scruloose's Profile

I have this fire extinguisher hanging on the wall (on the opposite side of the kitchen from the stove).

If I don't have a big enough cover, or the fat has boiled or sprayed out and the stovetop is burning... I'll feel a damn sight safer spraying it down from a few feet away than having to get close enough to throw handfuls of baking soda at the problem.

At less than $25, with non-toxic, non-corrosive, kitchen-use-specific powder in it... this is a purchase I feel very good about.

I'll cast another vote for replacing the tubes in your fluorescent fixture. "Daylight" tubes give a broad-spectrum light that aims to be similar to sunlight. They're good, bright light, but can be a little harsh. "Warm white" tubes give a mellower, yellower light.

And a small correction to cbaitz's comment (in case you want to go deeper than the cool white/daylight/warm white distinction): higher Kelvin colour temperature is bluer light, and lower Kelvin is yellower. It's terribly counter-intuitive, but a filament glowing with a "cold" blue-white light is actually hotter than a filament glowing with a "warm" yellow light. The mnemonic trick I use is to remember that a blue blowtorch flame is hotter than a yellow candle flame.

I'd say if the veneer is more or less intact (you mention that it's chipped, but it doesn't sound like it's missing any sizeable chunks), my inclination would be to re-glue it, then fix the cracks and chips with a decent wood-filler and lightly sand everything before you proceed with a good primer and painting.

If you have big enough areas that you'd be getting into buying veneer for patches as suggested by LovieDovie above, then it's likely easier to go with RennieLou's heat gun approach, and deal with sanding the nasty glue residue before you go ahead with your priming and painting.

@nickeshepy: Tempered glass is needed to withstand sudden changes in temperature, which can cause regular glass to shatter due to the stresses of rapid, uneven thermal expansion or contraction.

The gradual warm-up and gradual cool-down as described in the article will do no harm at all to regular glasses.

If you want a really dramatic suggestion for the faux fireplace, I once had a lot of fun with a bricked-in fireplace in an apartment by painting it in a gloss black enamel and then dry-brushing it in bronze. The dry-brushing just picked out the texture, giving the effect of solid bronze peeping out from under the black paint.
Dry-brushing is fairly easy, too: dip a large-ish brush very lightly, then wipe it vigorously on a piece of waste paper or cardboard to get rid of almost all the paint in the brush. Then quickly and lightly brush it over the surface as if you were dusting. Go over each area with horizontal, vertical, and diagonal strokes to get an even effect overall. (It's a technique I learned in my model-building days.)

Other than that, I agree with the general consensus of sticking with one consistent light colour for the whole room. The existing off-white actually looks very promising.