High Thorn: traditional African design + contemporary. via

DESU Design just goes to show that simple, beautiful and green can coexist beautifully. The Inversion Bowl (left) is made of certified renewable cellulose fiber and resin. The white material for HUG (right) is similar to Corian or Avonite, and looks equally clean & elegant.

The usual margins of accuracy aside, general rules of thumb for renovating a kitchen are as follows:

Facelift to Sell: If you’re sprucing up the kitchen to sell your home, you should budget about 5% of the overall value of the home. So, for a $300,000 home, that’s about $15,000. What can you do for that?

• Replace countertops. Maybe you want to update plastic laminate and go for engineered stone like quartz ($45-90/SF) or something like concrete ($80-100/SF).
• Replace fixtures and appliances. A new sink, faucet, dishwasher, microwave, range, cooktop, fridge and oven could easily run anywhere from$5,000 up for all of them.
• Paint. Paint is the cheapest way to improve any room in your home, including the kitchen. Under $200 buys 4 $40/gallon cans.
• Cabinet hardware. You could change out knobs and drawer pulls for $100 +/-, depending on how many you have. As an example, figure about $5-6 each if you go with stainless. Prices vary wildly, just remember you get what you pay for and it looks like it.
• Lighting. Replace any burned out bulbs, and make sure there is plenty of light. You can update a light fixture or two for anywhere from $100 up. Again, you get what you pay for, and even though it looks semi-ok to you, a discriminating buyer will definitely notice.

Staying 5 years or more: If you’re going to stick around – say, you love the neighborhood, the neighbors, the location, and you are just a s happy to stay, you can spend up to 25% of the overall home value. So for that same $300,000, that’s a whopping $75,000. That’s a very nice budget for a kitchen, & you could pretty much update everything, including flooring and backsplash tiles if you wanted.

What’s the Return on Investment?

This one is tougher to gauge, and depends on many variables. You probably won’t get your project money back if you put $30,000 into a kitchen renovation in a $100,000 home. Depending on other factors like location and comparables in the area, you can recover anywhere from 75 – 100% of the project cost. In other cases, a kitchen renovation can add up to 15% to the total home value.

A kitchen update can make or break a deal: a buyer might come in & fall in love with it and that’s what they want. Then again, someone could come in and open the cabinet to look at the construction, and see that there are new doors on the cabinets but the boxes are unchanged. Or, maybe it’s too dark or cramped. Those all scream “money pit”. And though it can be a negotiation point for the price, it probably means work for the buyer sooner rather than later. Moving is work enough without having to jump right in to a construction project.

Bottom line, for folks who want to update and stay, the average kitchen renovations can run between about $19,000 and $50,000.

LG’s new lift-up door microwave has some serious capacity and exhaust venting power for over the range installations. Glad to see another lift up door appliance to compliment lift up doors on wall cabinets. It’s quiet, too – a mere 58 decibels.

On the less glamourous side of green kitchen & bath design, there are the behind-the-scenes considerations of how it all works. Like the magic of hot water.

There has been plenty of debate about going with a tankless hot water heater – that is, one that heats the water as it’s used, not sitting in a big tank being heated even when it’s not being used.

Rinnai has a line of tankless water heaters that can be mounted on the interior or exterior of the home, and take up far less space than a conventional hot water heater tank.

From the Rinnai site: 25% of every household energy dollar is spent producing domestic hot water. Other very useful info on their site under the Tankless 101 link

One caveat: Rinnai only makes LP and natural gas water heaters. Why no electric? Their answer:

Does Rinnai make electric tankless units?

No. There are electric tankless units available, but they have two distinct problems:

First, the cost of electricity is, on average, significantly higher than LP or natural gas. The operating cost of electric tankless units tend to be much higher.

Second, electric tankless water heaters can only produce a relatively small amount of hot water. This is because they require a large amount of electrical current to produce a significant amount of hot water. For example, in order to have the same capacity as our smallest unit you would need to provide about 120 amps of power to an electric tankless unit. This represents well over half the amperage capacity of a typical home and 5 times the amperage of a typical central air conditioning system.

A January 2008 report by the United Nations Population Division takes a look at the distribution of humanity on the Earth’s surface.

In 2008, half of the world population is expected to live, for the first time in
history, in urban areas.

The urban population is highly concentrated in a few countries. In
2007, three-quarters of the 3.3 billion urban dwellers on earth lived in 25
countries whose urban populations ranged from 29 million in South Africa to
561 million in China. China, India and the United States of America accounted
for 35 per cent of the world’s urban population.

Over the coming decades, the level of urbanization is expected to increase in all major areas, with Africa and Asia urbanizing more rapidly than other major areas.

What it means for cities, and living in them.

As for why population is projected to increase in urban areas, there are lots of reasons, but mainly because that’s where all the stuff we need is. It’s where most of us work, send our kids to school, exchange ideas, and get medical care.

• It means a lot more multi-unit buildings for us to live and work in.
• Which means living/working space goes vertical (not just up, but down, too) and has no choice but to become efficient.
• Which in turn means reduction of living and storage space (quit accumulating junk!).
• And somehow balancing that with production of local food to reduce transportation costs.

It’s possible to be comfortable in less space. It’s possible to be sane in less space, if:

• spaces are efficient, and provide basic living comforts with neither extravagant nor bare bones style
• provide for soundproofing within and between living spaces (who wants to hear the neighbors?!)
• private places to retreat from busy city life
• ways to connect with nature (like community gardens and greenways) in an urban environment

All of the above relate to efficient design, and with regard to living space, the two rooms in the house that require it most are the kitchen and bathroom.

NAR: more demand for green, & rising

HGTV & NKBA team up for kitchen & beth design series.

These are a couple of years old, but they are insanely cool and I would totally use them in a kitchen or bathroom. I’d do the discus in a single course like a backsplash or something higher run all the way around the room. The checker tile could be cool in a big field. All were created by Andy Blick for Ann Sacks.

We stayed in a hotel in NYC a few years ago that had a shower floor flush with the rest of the bathroom floor. It was nice, and not nearly as water messy as I thought it would be. Curbless showers are great even if you’re not disabled or elderly. Plus, if you put blocking in the walls from the get go, you can install rails and a seat later, should you become disabled or if you plan on living out your life there. They look cool, and gives the room continuity with finishes and the flow of space. And you don’t need a shower door or curtain – I’d happily give up those gunk collectors, not to mention trying to scrub the additional surface area of a curb and jambs for the door.

Not sure if they still make it, but Dural has a product called TILUX that integrates the shower pan into the floor. Here’s a YouTube video showing how the installation works: