Dish Strainer
I visited my friend Silda’s apartment. The dishes in her kitchen were piled high. I channeled my inner 17-year-old — my first job was washing dishes — and got a rhythm going: scrub, dry, stack. It was a bit of a juggling act since all the horizontal space in Silda’s small kitchen was occupied with...
May Emeralds
One of the most highly prized gemstones in the world is emerald, the May birthstone. Emerald (a member of the beryl family, and first cousin to aquamarine) is fairly hard (71/2 – 8 on the Mohs scale) as gemstones go, although by no means truly durable, and is subject to chipping (or breakage) with relative...
Water Gardens: The dos and don’ts
People like to live by water. That’s why waterfront homes and resorts are so sought after. The next best thing to living on a lake or seaside is to enjoy the natural beauty of a pond, stream, or waterfall. When these natural elements are not forth coming, one can still enjoy the serenity and beauty...
The Energy-Efficient Foundation
I began this monthly series of columns by taking a look at options for building energy-efficient walls and then moved on to attics and roofs. Now let’s complete our look at advanced thermal envelopes (TEs) by checking out foundations. Most homes in Fairfield County have foundations that include basements, so we will start there. Foundation...
Mat the Knife
This is the first in a series of Homemoaner’s “Salute to Tools.” Collect them all! Razor knife, utility blade, box cutter. These are just a few of the names for the ubiquitous, handy cutting device available in most handy, Home Moaner’s tool kits. When my father recently went off to his last reward, his corporeal...
Insulating the Roof of an Energy-Efficient Home
Reducing the flow of heat from the conditioned areas of a house to either an unconditioned attic or directly through the roof itself is a critical task in an energy-efficient house. In last month’s column, I wrote about how to insulate and air-seal at the level of the attic floor. However, there are times when...
The dos and don’t of fixing leaky pipes
It starts off as a stain on a ceiling. Then it turns into a bulge. Before you know it, the bulge is as ripe as an overblown balloon and just waiting to pop. That’s when you know you must puncture it or it is going to splatter all over the place. You’ve sprung a leak....
The Jewelry Box Dilemma
I generally prefer a “soft” approach for recommendations regarding fine jewelry, but in this case, I’ll make an exception: Never, under any circumstances, use a jewelry box placed on or in your dresser for storage of your fine jewelry! I know it’s convenient, and a traditional jewelry box with all it’s little compartments works so very well doing exactly what it was designed to do,...
Keeping the heat in
We know that warm air rises. Consequently, during the cold months it’s important to stop the flow of heat through the roof or, alternatively, the attic floor. To accomplish this, the same solutions that I described for walls in my previous columns will work. First, we want a high level of insulation. Second, we want...
When the thingee that pokes out is gone
One of the perks of my new job is the snack vending machine in the hall. It is a remarkable machine. You can feed a dollar into the slot and turn it into a bag of potato chips. The technology behind the dollar bill reader has vastly improved since my first encounter. The early versions...
Gold Rush
It seems that everywhere you look, there’s an offer to buy your unwanted gold jewelry: pawn shops and jewelers, advertised “buying events”, mail-in offers, even kiosks at the mall — and each of them promises to pay top dollar! Fueled by the current state of the economy and the high price of gold, sellers are...
The Green House Effect
If you start with the premise that a “green” house is an energy efficient one, then the exterior walls of such a house should excel at keeping heat inside in the winter and outside in the summer. Most existing houses provide second rate control over heat flow, resulting in the need for lots of...
