AHAM report: Consumers are choosing efficient appliances.

Breathe Easy Cabinets are a great choice for a healthy conscious kitchen or bath project. They’re well made, to boot.

• formaldehyde free 3/4″ plywood boxes
• maple dovetail drawers
• matching veneers
• Blum hardware, including soft-closure mechanisms
• bamboo door & drawer front options
• water based stains
• low voc paints
• multiple door style options, as well as custom door availability

Thumbs up from Ecomod on Breathe Easy.

It’s the acoustics, not your eardrums

We have 14′ ceilings in our house, and all our surfaces are hard & sound reflecting: hardwoods, gyp board walls, windows, and countertops. The acoustics leave a lot to be desired, which is a nuisance, since our living room and kitchen are an open plan. So the place where we spend the most time is also the most difficult to have conversations.

Cork it!

Cork has so many great things going for it:

• it’s renewable
• it’s rot and mildew resistant
• it’s lightweight
• it absorbs sound
• it’s waterproof

I would love to have a couple of grids of these modular cork tiles on the ceiling designed by Daniel Michelik out of Brooklyn NY. They’d give it some interesting 3D relief, and they cut the noise reflection at the same time. We have no ceiling mounted fixtures, so it’s a playground of space waiting for something like these tiles. They’re also a neutral color, so paint colors on the wall could be as wild or tame as you like without overpowering the whole room.

Availability

I’ve contacted Daniel inquiring when these panels will be available to purchase and what options may apply. I’ll update when I hear from him.

Look no further than Mythic Paint. Developed in cooperation with the University of Southern Mississippi, Mythic rated better than its competitors in subjective performance testing which included:

• thickness
• sheen
• sag resistance
• flow and leveling
• gloss, and
• resistance and durability

Colors Galore

Mythic has a  1,232 color palette (plus they can match any other color you want), including an earthtone selection. It’s safe for pets, and has been successfully used by individuals with severe chemical sensitivities. They have an excellent faq page as well.

It can be purchased directly from their website (no shipping fees!), or via local dealer if there is one. You can also call them at 888-714-9422 to find out where to buy it.

Plus, their ads are funny.

To curb or not to curb

My vote is not to curb the entry to a walk in shower. Save the extra framing and tile, and leave it flush with the rest of the bathroom floor. Keep it simple. As you can see, the pans themselves don’t look glamorous, but they’re very important for the eye candy (tile) that goes on top of them.

As for splash, we have a curbed shower with a door now, and there are always spots of water on the floor when we get out. So it’s not like the whole bathroom becomes a bath tub. And that’s what bath mats are for, which you will have anyway.

Tile-Redi

Tile-Redi makes shower pans that are leak proof and mold resistant. The pan shown at right is their 48″x37″ fully curbed model. The design I’m actually after is essentially a walk-in shower – literally walk in, as in no curb at all. Their ADA compliant model seems to fit the bill. It’s a good size at 48″x37″, and the drain is shifted a couple of inches past center further from the curbless side, so water heads away from the entry with the built in slope of the pan.

The pans are polyurethane with integrated drains. The curb walls are 1/2″ wide, so you can set it directly on the subfloor, and then set wallboard right on top of it. These pans can be installed and tiled in the same day, which is also a plus. Here are their technical faq’s.

Not high on the green scale in terms of material, but it does eliminate some installation framing and finish materials and time.

For comparison, a previous curbless shower product post.

EcoFlip Classifieds: Greener classifieds for products, services, for sale, etc

Arm bone = connected to the neck bone?

So everything’s disconnected in your beloved kitchen. Seems a little more important now, doesn’t it? We don’t realize how much we use it until it’s not entirely there. Ok so maybe the fridge is still available, and the table & chairs are just relocated temporarily. But how are you going to cook, or prepare some semblance of a healthy meal? You can’t order pizza and Chinese every night. Well, you could, but I digress.

Makeshift, make do

If you’re into camping, you could put your gear to use – your trusty stove and grill. But you still have to deal with finding surfaces to slice & dice, and function like a built in kitchen would.

Or you could snag this outdoor kitchen setup from Viteo. It comes in modules, so the sink & surface module could be inside, hooked up to your water & drain connection, but out of the way of construction.  It’d be even better on lockable casters. Then you could wheel it up to the hookups and away only when you needed to use it.

Project complete: Indoor – Outdoor

Once the kitchen remodel’s finished, you can hang on to the modules and have a ready made outdoor setup. Closer to the compost pile, out with Mother Nature.

Frozen space

In a good year, summer gardens can produce more than can be eaten in season. The typical freezer-fridge combination probably wouldn’t have room to freeze much garden surplus. An extra freezer comes in handy for meats and pre-made meals, which are great for fighting the lazy after-work, what-can-we-eat mode. Big families have also been longtime freezer users since they buy in bulk – it’s cheaper.

50% of US households now have a dedicated freezer in addition to the ubiquitous refrigerator-freezer combo appliance. Our freezer (we have the fridge-freezer usual) is always packed to the gills.

August report: freezer sales up 7% from a year ago

Research firm NPD Group reported this week that more than 1.1 million freezers were bought during the first 6 months of 2008. But the buyers were not necessarily gardening folks or large households. They’re people buying in bulk, trying to offset the increase in food prices.  Food prices have risen in part because of transportation cost increases to get it from farm to storefront. So buying more, less often, is not only cheaper, but fewer trips to the store, which burns less gas.

Upright, chest, drawers?

If space is limited for an upright freezer model, which is roughly the size of a conventional fridge, a chest freezer is an option. Small chest freezers are less than $300. The problem with chest freezers is that the top surface can’t accumulate anything, because it’d have to be moved on & off and back everytime freezer access was needed. And they take up floor space.

Upright freezers store a lot, but again take up floor space. Small, narrower upright freezers start around $500.

There’s a 3rd option for freezer space in the form of under counter freezer drawers. Many models are on casters, so they can be wheeled out to clean behind easily. They are also standard cabinet width if you ever decided to replace it with a base cabinet.

We don’t need a ton more freezer space, so adding a 2 drawer unit would be ideal. And since cool air sinks, it seems like less would be wasted when opening a drawer than a door. The drawback is price. But it may be the most efficient solution in the long run if not that much extra freezer capacity is needed.