wende in phoenix's Profile

Figure ~$4k for a 1-BR apartment with professional movers, more if you have heavier stuff. Plus, because you don't fill a truck, your stuff may be loaded and unloaded multiple times in the course of getting other loads out.

Having moved cross-country far too many times, I'm now a huge fan of the "sell everything but the keepsakes" move advocated by scmods2. After three months on the opposite coast, you'll find yourself wanting to decorate differently anyway, so you might as well save yourself the cost of moving any furniture that's not a treasure.

If we're going to try to influence the judges, let's give 'em comments that they'll take seriously. "Boring!" says nothing about what criteria the commenter is using or whether this person has a clue. A civil explanation of the apartment's weaknesses -- "the blended palette doesn't feel like vibrant use of color; it needs a pop of something brighter in the living room" -- gives the judge something to think about.

A darker ceiling is an old trick for improving proportions when the ceiling is too high for the size of the room, so there are definitely rooms where this will look incredible --including many a hundred-year-old kitchen, study, or small bedroom where you have a 10' ceiling in a tiny room.

I'd use caution and keep it subtle in mid-20th-century construction with 8' ceilings, where a much darker or brighter ceiling color is likely to make the ceiling seem to come looming down at you.

Absolutely beautiful... I want to stroke them gently in someone else's home.

The only way I'd ever grout those is with a grout the exact color of the local hard water deposits, but that's my theory on tile-setting anyway.

(Cassis, there is, alas, no way to use tiles as tiles without grout. You'd have to find some other use, like using a section as a trivet.)

The shots you show remind me vaguely of now-defunct Nest, though they were deliberately aiming to show shocking interiors...

Ross is splendidly random, which is why it's worth checking occasionally. I'd vote for Market St. and Mercado Santa Clara as the two best Ross stores in the Bay Area, but the whole point of the chain is that YMMV.

I may be a woman, but I've never had any difficulty determining whether a toilet seat is up or down before using it. Is there some complexity beyond "look at the toilet" that I've been missing?

Well, I think JonathanB remembers I'm on the Cure Lite track, as I think (and I'm pretty sure the book says, at the end), that regular tune-ups help prevent major problems down the road.

On the one hand, it's great that the site is trying to avoid the "nobody noticed I Cured" complaints of the past, and it's also important to see a move toward keeping good metrics of how people use the site. There's a point in growth when it's necessary to start collecting numbers in order to plan.

On the other hand, I took the "getting to know you" survey and discovered that the only thing AT wanted to know about me was how much I spend. That was a survey for selling space to advertisers. Great -- the site needs advertising to support the server demand and editors, and I'd rather see a smaller number of targeted ads than the Google Adsense clutter.

BUT -- lacking a privacy policy, I have to assume the site has the option of selling these addresses to advertisers. If you're excited about getting more pretty catalogs and magazine offers in the mail, this is a win-win. Stuffing my mailbox with unsolicited catalogs just annoys my mail carrier, increases my recycling, and gives me the added hassle of contacting all these companies to be removed from their lists. So unless I know my contact information can't be shared or sold, I don't provide it.

Not if you don't mind the litter of needles and used condoms, which I'm sure sophisticated New Yorkers have no problem with. San Franciscans tended to be bothered by it, but we Westerners always struggle with the glamor of big-city life.

TRUE BLUE -- You're thinking of It's (K)not Wood, which is here:
http://itsknotwood.blogspot.com/