What Is a Mortgage Contingency?
Real estate contracts include contingency clauses. These are announcements indicating the sale is conditional on something else happening. Among the most frequent contingencies is to get a mortgage. The contract permits a limited quantity of time for the buyers to…
Meet a Houseplant Which Does Not Mind Neglect
If you are like most active homeowners, you need your indoor plants to endure insufficient growing conditions and a few neglect and then. The umbrella plant, also called schefflera, delivers on this. I reside in a subtropical climate in which…
Kitchen of the Week: Wonderful Kitchen
How do you get storage, prep space, cooking space and a washer-dryer into 40 square feet? Request Palmer Thompson-Moss, that did just that to get a New York customer. “These constraints actually helped us create something nice that works really…
Spring Patio Fix-Ups: Install an Outdoor Fireplace or Fire Pit
More than any outdoor feature I can think about, a fireplace (or fire pit or bowl) immediately makes the yard the location where everybody wants to be. It readily becomes the focus of a space, drawing friends and family together…
Shape Your Surfaces With New Tile Textures and Forms
Technology has taken our movies, TV shows and printing to three dimensions, and now it is taking tile. Tile not merely has taken on textures like damask, stacked fabrics and stone in its new appearances, but has become an integral…
9 Award-Winning Kitchens from KBIS 2013 to Drool Over
I am still giddy about all the great design ideas and product improvements I saw in the 2013 Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in New Orleans in April. The design awards for kitchens and baths were a highlight. You can…
View 6 Homes That Rise to the Rural Landscape
In the dawn of time, humankind has built various forms of shelter in all kinds of landscapes. Our ancestors’ chief concerns were shelter and protection. Contemporary design concepts as well as the notion of construction sensitively weren’t a part of…
6 Must-Know Lessons From a Serial Renovator
Over almost four decades of marriage, my wife and I’ve revived, in whole or in part, five of our own homes. We’ve just purchased a home in a golf community so will, again, embark on a renovation job, our sixth….
7 Ways to Produce a Beautiful Outdoor Space
It’s spring! Long days, sun, birds, barbecues, flowers! For the next six weeks or so, it is outside time (sorry, people in the Northeast; your own time will come). Which means, of course, you should have an outdoor room, a…
High-End Modernism in a Jet-Set Town
Aspen is a small town in western Colorado famous for skiing, actors — and prosperity. Four ski regions serve its 6,658 residents and the traffic to exactly what the Wall Street Journal called “an anointed halt on the global jet-set…