Archive for the ‘Home Improvement Dictionary’ Category.

A Fear the Has Followed Me All My Life: The Evil Doily

Growing up, my mom had a doily seemingly under everything. Every lamp and decoration on a table had these little white nightmares draped underneath them.

The name doily came from the 17th century English designer that made them. I know. You thought they were French didnt you? Nope, chalk that up with other French misconceptions like French fries and dressing come from France as well. They’re white cloth, usually cotton or linen, and have ornate patterns and many holes allowing people to see the table underneath. T

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Plan Ahead: Keeping Plants Safe During Sudden Frost

October is a wonderful month to watch the leaves change on your favorite trees, but the days and nights can have variances of more than 40 degrees in most parts of the country. Your day can be in the 70s or 60s, but when the sun goes down, you could be looking at a sudden frost.

Blooming flowers are especially susceptible to the cold temperatures and damage can be seen within a few days in the form of brown droopy flowers.

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Scary or Protectors? The Ugly Truth About Gargoyles

You have seen them gracing the high parapets of cathedrals and skyscrapers, silently watching over the city and its inhabitants, but gargoyles are far more than just a grotesque piece of architecture.

The history of these stone watchers goes back to the time of Greeks and Romans who initially began creating them out of wood, but by the 13th century, they had become most commonly seen in stone. Originally, they had an actual structural purpose.

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Interview: NeXT House

With high-end material selection combined with superb Scandinavian design and appliances from Bulthaup, Gaggenau and Hajom, it’s no surprise that NeXT House delivers some of the first class architect designed prefab homes in the market. We spoke with Thomas Mårtensson, CEO – Global sales of NeXT House, and learned that you can buy a house, designed by an award winning architect, filled with dream products at a price you never thought possible.

What inspired you to get involved in prefab?

Before I started Next House I was previously involved in a project with IKEA, where we renovated apartments for rental in a cost-effective way but still with a high level of design. The

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Gardening Project: Native Plant Garden

Many people live in concrete jungles where the only native plants that still exist grow wild in ditches and many gardeners consider them weeds. If any native grasses or flowers were to crop up in our gardens, many of us would pull them out.

Lets face it, the nature of most gardens is to eliminate what nature put there in the first place and replace it with something more colorful. No one wants to look outside their window to see a garden of cattails and prairie grass reaching to the window sill.

But that is exactly what a native plant garden is all about.

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