September 2001

What's Your Home IQ?

Subscribe or Renew Fast!

Celebrate Our Birthday. Join Today!

Garden Shopping

Fall Florals

Quick-and-Easy Meals

From the editor

Top It Off

Go over the edge with fun, stylish valances and cornices. A great topper draws the eye to the window treatment and the view beyond.

Pillowcase Embellishments

Try your hand at these fun projects for dressing up pillowcases. Made with either sew or no-sew techniques, they're suitable for everyone's skill level.

Corner offices

When you need a home office but don't have the room for one, backing yourself into a corner might be your best move.

Volumes of Ideas

Hardworking Pantries

Pantries are fashionable again. No longer dark, stuffy little rooms where nonperishables are hidden away, pantries have become eminently practical storage and work spaces located next to kitchens or dining areas. Accoutrements include everything from refrigerators to gardening stations, depending upon your needs. It's even a fine spot to hide that extra dishwasher. Let's take a peek.

Easy-access design

A wide-arched entry with double doors and an almost invisible slope creates an elegant welcome at Jim Passe's home in Raleigh, North Carolina. With no steps to climb, the entry is as easily accessed by family and friends as it is by Jim, who uses a wheelchair.

Beyond basic beige

Sound simple? You bet. To add eye appeal to a beige room, start at the top. Introduce an interesting shape at the upper wall-- below the crown molding or above the windows. Old or reproduction iron construction stars are a stand-out when silhouetted against white walls. But any kind of architectural fragment or even a painted-on stencil would work as well. Now inch down the walls and bring nubby or rough-wood texture to the windows. Bamboo shades, woven-wood blinds, or wooden shutters provide a nice counterpoint to the room's soft seating.

Light Fantastic

Sun Screen Porches

1 In the daytime, Polly and Jim Reed's new porch basks in just the right combination of shade and sunshine. After dark, it enjoys the freedom from insects that only screens can provide.

Solid-Surface Windowsill

Karen and Tom Tobler lived for years with a dark kitchen in their Leawood, Kansas, home. Not much sunlight made it through a window above the sink, and dark blue laminate countertops and brown tile back-splashes further dimmed the scene. "The one thing we really needed to do was remove the old double-hung window and put in much larger windows," Tom says.

Multipurpose Privacy Fence

Good fences may make good neighbors, but great fences are rewards in themselves. Happy neighbors are just an added benefit.

Dressy Driveways

Even up close, it's tough to tell that this Des Moines, Iowa, driveway is paved with asphalt, not with brick. Using templates as large as 6x12 feet, an asphalt contractor applied a pattern to warm, newly laid pavement. The surface was then sprayed with a colored sealer and brushed with a roller that removes excess material from grout lines and creates a skidresistant texture.

Rosy Reception

Synthetic Flooring Update

Today's flooring choices are designed to fool our eyes-- which makes telling the difference between what's natural and what's synthetic more difficult than ever, Two manufactured materials, laminate and vinyl, are making particular strides in replicating nature's patterns and hues.

Have a Spook-tacular Halloween

Happy Everything

Tech@home

Keep Your Child's School Safe

That's a fact, despite the chilling TV images we have all seen. School is safer than the local park, a parent's car, and even a child's home. Still, a majority of parents believe a shooting could happen in their kid's school.

Work lessons

Adults walk the line between telling the not-always-inspiring truth about work and inspiring kids to want to work.

When dummies disagree

Federal government safety experts recently crash-tested two Ford F-150 pickups and gave them excellent ratings-- four and five stars out of five. In report card terms, the trucks earned all As and one B. Meanwhile, the insurance industry's safety center crash-tested a similar F-150 and flunked it, giving it their worst rating-- poor.

Sensibly Simple

Gardening in the Round

When you have a wild passion for plants, sometimes you must restrain yourself in the manner of your planting. Dulcy Mahar, who admits to forever "falling in lust" with collector plants, has simplified the design of her backyard over the years. Now, she says, of her oval landscape, "the main point is to be able to stand on the porch and see a sweeping curve of garden spread out before you."

More to the Fore

A shared garden bed on the property line makes two couples' front yards twice as nice. Here's how four neighborly gardeners shared a vision.

Touched by a Blossom

Am I blue? No, periwinkle

And did she mention texture?

A snip in time

A bouquet at your door

Almost any yard-- yes, yours too-- is a bouquet waiting to be gathered. That's the view of Louise Mercer, a floral designer on Long Island, New York.

Eased-up elegance

Traditional style doesn't have to mean starched and stuffy. Designer James Spiers found the fun side of formal for a budget redo of his own tiny flat in Phoenix.

Clean country living

3 double-the-recipe kitchens

Thanks to busy schedules, getting meals on the table and hosting dinner parties takes teamwork these days. But many kitchens hark back to the time when solo cooks were the norm. If an outdated scheme is crimping KP duty at your house, take a close look at how these three families addressed the problem. In each example, the "recipe" was formulated to fit the family's lifestyle by adding special design tweakings-- ones that might be a good fit for your family's mealtime maneuvers.

THERMOMETER/TIMER

TWO-BURNER REVERSIBLE GRILL/GRIDDLE

Nutrition Information How to make it work for you

A Shot in the Arm for Adults

Immunizations aren't reserved just for children heading back to school-- adults may also need to roll up their shirtsleeves. Thanks to immunizations, once rampant diseases are nearly extinct among children. On the other hand, more than 30,000 adults die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Oh, That Aching Back! Ahhhh, Massage...

Fiber is back in favor

The jury is still out on fiber's role in staving off colon cancer, but studies clearly show that a high-fiber diet has other health benefits.

BACK TO SCHOOL

Get ready for school with our crafts, projects, and games for every subject, starting with first period reading and ending with sixth period art. We didn't forget about recess or lunch. There's the bell!

The family next door