mzp's Profile

My best friend in elementary school lived in a big old Victorian house. They had TWO staircases -- the main, open, sweeping formal staircase, and what would have been the servants' staircase hidden behind doors at the top and bottom. The house was completely divided in half by huge fancy wood double doors -- separate servants' quarters and the homeowners' space. It was an amazing house, we had so much fun in that place!

Another friend's parents were both doctors, and so they had two phone lines so they could always be reached when they were on call, even if one of their three girls was on the phone. They also had a heated pool, and a hot tub, and a second kitchen in the basement..... Colour teen-aged me impressed!

Another friend's place had a cool pantry closet that is almost indescribable. It had a 3'x3'square door partway up the wall, and inside was a normal-looking shelf. But that shelf swung in on hinges to reveal a 5'x5' space with more shelves lining the walls... except the back wall, which had another little door that opened into the staircase to the basement. We would hide out in that strange closet for hours! Their basement was weird, too.... creepy and unfinished, with troughs lining the walls for water drainage.

I've had this product bookmarked for more than a year, waiting for the time when I can buy it and get it shipped to Canada. It is SO COOL! I'd love to have a pair of these legs and a couple of table-sized boards stored behind the sofa to pull out when we need a dining room table (we don't have a dining room!). Someday....

Wow. I'm in Canada, and a lot of these things are second nature to me. We air dry all of our clothing (indoors in the winter, we just hang them on hangers and hang the hangers on the shower curtain rail; outdoors in summer!), we use tea towels and dish cloths, we use an electric kettle (what else would you use?), we use those screen dome things for when we eat outside all summer long, and we close the curtains or blinds in the summer to keep the heat of the sun out!!! I also know lots of people who have dual-flush or low-flow toilets, and it's pretty hard to buy other bathroom fixtures (sink and shower taps) that aren't water saving.

Hmmmm, maybe an article on things you can learn from Canucks should be next!

I just DIY'd a mini modern tree last night! I had 1" wide bamboo slats, I cut them to various lengths and drilled a hole in the middle. Threaded them on a dowel with large hex nuts as spacers in between the sizes, spread them out, and stood it in a vase! I think it looks great! (a pic: http://twitpic.com/7lx0p8)

As a Canadian, this issue doesn't normally come up. We just take off our shoes. In everyone's house. Even if invited to keep them on, I would usually remove them, unless I was barefoot. Like some have mentioned above, I bring socks (or borrow) if I don't want to go barefoot, and if I have an outfit that requires shoes to be complete, I don't wear them to the guest's home, I change into them once I've arrived.

I always cringe when watching American TV shows, and you see the characters wearing their shoes as they lounge on the sofa (what if they lounge with their head at the other end tomorrow...? EW!) or put their feet up on the coffee table (don't people put food on their coffee tables?).

Shoes off!

Link for the chairs???? I love them!

We have a small bathroom. We used the Skar shoe cabinet for our miscellaneous toiletries storage. http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/products/00141849

It has big plastic bins in tip-out "drawers" that hold a ton of stuff. Spare toilet paper goes in the bottom one.

Here's a couple of pics:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizpaton/3932355643/in/set-72157622407382488/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizpaton/3932356059/in/set-72157622407382488

We live on the 11th floor of a condo building, and we love to keep the windows open, and we have all hard floors. These things add up to LOTS OF DUST! We dust most surfaces in the living area (closest to the big windows) every time we clean, but even that doesn't do much good. We can dust, clean the house top-to-bottom, and an hour later there is dust on the surfaces again. That's just the nature of where we live!

We keep the dust collectors to a minimum, and keep our books flush to the fronts of the shelves so we don't have shelf edges like in the photo!

We have a shelf unit with super deep shelves. We store DVDs on it, and stash all manner of random stuff behind the DVDs. Mostly we store boxes from electronics and camera gear (those pesky things way increase the resale value and make them worth keeping). You don't see the boxes behind the DVDs, but our shelves are much more closely spaced than yours. Still, you could use the same principle with large books or magazines in magazine boxes....

Yeah, the data issue comes into effect. You could end up paying roaming charges, or being somewhere where there is no data! We were in Newfoundland a few weeks ago, and we brought our GPS knowing that we would get limited cell service. Turns out we didn't get a cell signal the entire time we were in the province!