April 1999

Between friends

Screening Rooms

A basic folding screen can be a star with the right "casting." Follow our directions for building and using a screen to give your room a heightened sense of drama.

Plans for Woodworkers

Dressing the Bed

Rest easy. Our guide to fashionable "sleepwear" for the bed explains today's stacks of bedding options and the new, relaxed rules for pulling it all together.

Garden Style

Decorating with ideas snipped from the garden is becoming a style all its own. Our new book, Garden Style, lets you harvest inspiration for your own fresh-air rooms.

Hobby rooms

If you're a dedicated hobbyist, check out these spare-time Shangri-las-- for an accomplished woodworker, a weekend painter, and an entire family of crafters.

Reviving a Cozy Kitchen

A hodgepodge of appliances-- an almond refrigerator, a black dishwasher, a stainless steel range, and coppertone double ovens-- is part of what inspired Rosemary and Ron Allen to remodel their 1976 kitchen in Columbia, Missouri. After all these years, they wanted to start fresh with matching appliances. The Aliens also wanted to rework their kitchen's layout and freshen its finishes, giving the space a more efficient arrangement and an updated style.

Inside looking out

Stamp Out the Blahs

Special-Purpose Built-ins

Upstairs, downstairs, and all around the house, effective storage strategies help you put things in their proper places. Adopt these innovative ways to ease the storage squeeze.

Fêng Shui

For thousands of years, the Chinese have turned to the principles of fêng shui to create harmonious environments at home and work. Now Westerners are catching on.

Duct Cleaning: The Inside Dirt

Chances are, you've seen advertisements from duct-cleaning companies encouraging you to have dust and debris removed from your home's heating and air-conditioning system. Some services even promise to improve your home's indoor air quality or make claims about health benefits associated with cleaner ducts.

The Crash Test All-Star

A minivan is the first vehicle to earn the top rating in all 4 categories of federal safety tests.

The Hybrids Are Here

Electric cars have been on the minds of Americans since the oil crisis in the 1970s, but with the exception of far-out prototypes, complicated retrofits, and a limited number of production models, electrics have been mostly unavailable. Charging the batteries that power electric cars poses a problem since there are few "filling stations." That means drivers have to stay fairly close to their home-based charging units. But in the next year, both Honda and Toyota will offer new, super-efficient, ultra-low polluting cars that are propelled by hybrid combinations of battery-powered electric motors and small gasoline engines.5

When Illness Strikes

Midway through her junior year in high school in Williamsburg, Virginia, Nicole Curtis, an 'A' student and gymnast, began to feel uncharacteristically tired, even falling asleep in class. At first, doctors thought it was the flu. A week later, Nicole noticed lumps in the lymph nodes in her neck and under her arms. The next week, she had a blood test. At 16, Nicole was diagnosed with leukemia.

Developing Problem-Solving Skills

The Scientific Method is a formal way of processing and solving problems, but it's not just for laboratory types.

EDITOR'S CHOICE

PERFECT PAIRS

LOOKING GOOD

TEST GARDEN TIP

EDITOR'S CHOICE FERN

Hummingbird and Butterfly Garden

Attract hummingbirds and butterflies to your landscape with this perennial garden available exclusively to the readers of Better Homes and Gardens® magazine. Designed by our Garden Editors, the collection was grown by Carroll Gardens and is not available in retail outlets.

Hostas to Go CUISINE

A Garden to Greet You

Planting a garden out front is a little like rolling out the red carpet. Your guests are welcomed along the walkway and deposited with a flourish at your front door. Ta-da! A front-yard garden also does much the same for you and yours, for that matter. After a long day (and this time of year they are getting longer), your yard can welcome you back, cheer you up as you exit the car, and help you on your way to hearth and home.

The layered look

Planting a 2-foot-tall Moonbeam coreopsis behind a 4-foot-tall Iceberg rose is kind of like placing your favorite footstool in back of the La-Z-Boy. If you can't see the flowers or the footstool, they don't serve much purpose.

Havens for hostas

Take a shade tree, plant a ring of hostas around its trunk, and here's what you have: a landscaping scene repeated in countless yards across the country. So why not try something different? Make a solitary hosta the center of attention, for instance. That's what Jim Fitterling did in his Kansas City garden with Blue Mammoth, a chalky blue hosta with grand presence (above). He placed it front-and-center, where a dark oak-leaf hydrangea and fine-textured ground covers emphasize this Mammoth's blueness, bigness, in-your-face assertiveness. Now, there's a hosta that won't fade into the shrubbery.

Chintz charming

Like kissing a frog and hoping for a prince, envisioning a nondescript 1979 builder home as a charming beach cottage took a lot of courage and imagination for Dottie and Herb Moore. But they puckered up and took the plunge. Take inspiration from their tale to create a happy ending for your home.

Staying put

In 1956, Alice and Frank Smith, then a young couple with dreams of building a home for their growing family, sent away for a mail-order home plan from Better Homes and Gardens magazine. They bought a lot, built the house, and laid the foundation for their future. Today, after 43 years, four children, and countless redecoratings and remodelings, the couple's idea of "dream home" has changed. So has their house.

Nutrition Information

With each recipe, we give important nutrition information. The calorie count of each serving and the amount, in grams, of fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, fiber, and protein will help you keep tabs on what you eat.

BH&G kids

Don your spring bonnet and get ready for an eggstravagant time. Start with our puzzling tale featuring the Yolk twins, Cal and Sal. Find their little brother Al, and then create your own Crazy Egg People. You can also make quick-and-easy Egg Flowers, rabbits (who have a curious resemblance to eggs), and elegant Thread Eggs. Did we mention we're doing eggs? Not another peep! Let's get crackin'.

The Shopper's Mart

The man next door

Dr. Bob Hannelly says more patients than ever are asking him about the latest "miracle" drugs coming out on the market. The patients aren't asking because they are sick. "They just want to know which pharmaceutical stocks they should buy," he says.