3-11-17 At Home

At

HOME

Spa-like retreat Turn your bathroom into a sanctuary

Home farm

There’s always space for gardening A special publication of the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer

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Table of Contents IMPROVE LIGHTING

LETTER from the

EDITOR With the first day of Spring a little more than a week away, I am excited to start to a new season and looking forward to all the changes that it brings.

While “springing forward” isn’t my favorite thing about the upcoming season, I am excited for more sunshine in the afternoons.

This also means more time for outside activities.

In this edition of At Home you will find how to tackle a garden — no matter if you 20 feet of space or acres of available land.

This edition also features tips on how to make your house brighter with lighting, reminders on what filters you should change regularly and how to achieve a spa-like bathroom.

I am still looking for homeowners who have tackled a big DIY or home renovation project or anyone who has an interesting story about their home. If you would like your story told, please contact me at mrichardson@messenger-inquirer. com or 270-691-7233.

— Meghann Richardson Special Publications Editor

New windows, decorating tricks brighten rooms pages 4-5

FILTERS IN YOUR HOME Add to these to your checklist pages 5-6

HOME FARMING

Enjoy gardening on a large or small level page 8

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MAKE YOUR BATHROOM SPA-LIKE

BY BPT

A

merican homeowners’ desire for spa-like bathrooms shows no signs of waning, says the latest Design Trends report by the National Kitchen and Bath Association.

From freestanding bath tubs and floating vanities to LED lighting and soothing color schemes, some of the most-requested bathroom renovations focus on creating the atmosphere of luxur y and calm found in world-class spas.

With the average mid- to upscale bathroom remodeling costing in the range of $30,000, homeowners are also looking for the most cost-effective way to create that spa-like feeling. Many are opting to build their bathroom renovations around a focal point, such as a freestanding tub or luxur y shower, and round out the effect with more modest accessories and fixtures.

CHOOSING A FOCAL POINT

Homeowners are choosing to install freestanding soaking tubs in their master bathrooms, in particular, to create an exclusive sanctuar y of relaxation. In fact, in 2016 half of NKBA members were asked to install freestanding tubs in bathroom remodels, and 60 percent expect to be doing more of them in 2017.

Traditionally styled freestanding tubs were often claw-footed fixtures that meshed well with conventional design themes, but struggled to fit into the sleek, contemporar y lines associated with a spa-like setting.

Strikingly modern freestanding tubs offer expanded design flexibility as a focal point in today’s spa-inspired bathroom settings. Options like the American Standard Coastal-Serin Freestanding Tub in high-gloss cast acr ylic enhance the deep soaking space of a luxurious tub with a clean, simple and modern profile that fits well in spa-like bathroom design.

Few bathroom fixtures speak of luxur y as clearly and loudly as a showpiece bathtub. A deep, sumptuous freestanding tub not only provides a restful spot for a soothing soak after a long day, it also ser ves as a striking visual focal point for modern baths.

CONSIDERING FIXTURE ALTERNATIVES

Already have a standard alcove tub, but still want to create your spa at home? Tr y installing a deep soak tub drain, which has a unique overflow feature that allows 2-inch deeper water than a standard bathtub drain. This universal drain works in most standard bathtubs — and that could be yours.

Replacing a standard toilet seat with an upscale option like the DXV AT100 SpaLet Electronic Bidet Seat furthers the luxuriousness of the bathroom without the cost commitment and permanency of installing a full bidet. Its heated seat, choice of water temperature and volume for the two cleansing wands, and the oh-so-decadent warm air dr yer are the ultimate self-indulgence to bring the spa right into your home.

Wood vanities and storage cabinets for bath linens continue to be popular with today’s consumers. Floating

vanities and open shelving, which are gaining in use with interior designers and homeowners alike, can further the effect of an upscale spa by creating a visually clean, uncluttered effect.

ROUNDING OUT THE THEME

Soft, pale greens and aquas have long been associated with spa-like design, but in 2017 bathroom color choices are trending toward grays, off whites, blues and violets, according to the Design Trends report. Sedate and subtle are the hallmarks of spa color schemes, so when choosing yours keep in mind the calm effect you want to achieve. Also, remember your color scheme doesn’t have to be limited to the walls; consider incorporating your chosen colors into cabinetry, countertops and accessories.

Flexible lighting is also key for a spa-like bathroom. Remember to incorporate brighter lighting where you’ll need it most, such as around

vanities, and add features like dimmers that will allow you to reduce the amount of light in the room when you want to create a relaxing atmosphere.

Finally, adding touches that appeal to all your senses, such as music, mood lighting and aromatherapy can elevate a bathroom to a spa-like environment. Whether you opt for a full surround system in your bathroom or add waterproof blue tooth speakers in the shower, it’s easy to bring music into your spa bath. Scent adds yet another layer of luxury and is easy to achieve, whether you choose a simple arrangement of essential oils and diffuser reeds or an electronic diffuser that gently mists aroma into the room.

Americans view their bathrooms as more than just a room to take care of business. Infusing your master bathroom with spa-like features can turn the room into an oasis of relaxation and luxury.

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LIGHT SOLUTIONS

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What to do when your house feels like a cave

BY BPT

A

house with ample windows can win your heart with silent promises of sun-drenched rooms and warm breezes wafting through open windows. The truth, however, is that even a home with windows galore can have rooms that feel dark and cave like.

Some of the most-loved aspects of modern design — open, expansive floor plans, wood flooring in darker tones, walls of windows — may leave portions of a room dazzled with sun and other parts dim and poorly lit.

For example, a room with a wall full of picture windows will often lack windows on other walls. Near the windows, you’ll get plenty of sunlight and some glare, but the natural light might not make it to the far corners of the room — especially if it’s a large space like a great room.

What’s more, interior spaces like powder rooms, laundry rooms, mudrooms and closets often have no windows at all, making them feel small and dark. No one wants rooms that look like caves — not even if your house has an actual “man cave” or “woman cave” in it!

Fortunately, a few smart decorating tricks and some budget-friendly, high-impact enhancements can help brighten rooms and relieve that cavelike feeling.

SUNLIGHT SOLUTIONS

Of course, the sure-fire way to get more light into a room is to add

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if you have a windowless powder room, adding a transom above the door can help the room feel bigger while borrowing light from adjacent rooms. The tactic of borrowing light can also work if you’re able to put a pass through between a closed off room and an adjacent one that has windows.

DECORATING TRICKS

Finally, don’t overlook the power of decor in making a room feel bright and welcoming. Light-hued walls of white, cream or pale yellow or blue not only make a room feel bigger, they evoke the visual qualities of natural light.

Large windowless rooms, like a basement play room, can benefit from large framed art. Select scenes that mimic the view you might get from a picture window, such as a seascape, mountain scene or city skyline. more windows, but that’s not always light and air y, and use blinds or Filtered overhead light can a practical or cost-effective solution. shades to control the amount of also create the effect of a natural Instead, look for alternative ways to light coming from the window. light source. For example, drape bring more sunlight into a room.

Install curtain rods 2 feet wider than light-colored, opaque fabric above a Daylighting systems can bring windows so that when curtains or sunlight from a rooftop down into drapes are open, they don’t block any bed, so that the cloth conceals the overhead light fixture. As the artificial a room, allowing natural light to of the window or the light coming light shines through the fabric, it will illuminate dark spaces where light from through it. windows can’t reach. For example, the You can also “dress” walls to mimic imitate the diffused look of natural light.

Solatube Daylighting System captures the look of windows. For example, daylight with a rooftop dome. A highly reflective tube funnels light inside the home, where a decorative fixture on the ceiling spills the natural light into dim areas. The tube fits between rafters, so there’s no need to cut through critical structures, do frame work or make repairs to sheetrock.

An options light kit provides electric illumination on cloudy days or at night.

The included integrated solar-powered nightlight provides gentle, low-level illumination at night, and qualifies the entire system, plus installation, for a 30 percent federal tax credit. With the tax credit, Solatubes start at less than $500 installed, making them a cost-effective option for any room in the house, and especially in master baths, powder rooms, mudrooms, hallways and laundry rooms. To learn more, visit Solatubedaylighting.com.

Another option is to amplify the sunlight coming into the room.

Strategically positioning mirrors 1019 Lincoln Ave. t Evansville, IN can help reflect natural light to dark 812-423-2338 t therugmerchantevansville.com corners. What’s more, a large mirror Exclusively at mimics the feeling of a window, making rooms feel bigger and brighter.

WINDOW DRESSING

Maximizing the amount of light that comes in through the windows you do have is easy. Keep curtains

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SIX FILTERS YOU

DO NOT

WANT TO FORGET

BY JURA KONCIUS THE WASHINGTON POST

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Saturday, March 11, 2017

ne humid morning last summer, our faithful basement dehumidifier just wouldn’t turn on. I dug out the instruction booklet. Under troubleshooting tips, it said to check the filter, which should be “cleaned off and rinsed” ever y one to two weeks.

Filter? What filter? We had owned the unit for three years and never even realized it had one. I located the filter and gingerly pulled it out of its slot. The mesh and plastic filter was a thick blanket of dust and cat hair.

We had choked our dehumidifier to death.

There are lots of hard-working things in our homes equipped with filters that trap dust balls, pollen and many other impurities. Some filters, such as those in dehumidifiers and dr yers, are reusable and must be cleared regularly; others, such as refrigerator and HVAC, are disposable and need to be replaced on a regular basis. But with our hectic lives, changing a filter can get pushed to the bottom of a jammed to-do list. This can result in costly and unhealthy consequences.

In certain home systems, filters are essential to keeping air circulating.

“You must keep airflow moving. It’s as important as changing the oil in your car,” says home expert Mike Holmes of DIY Network’s “Holmes on Holmes” series. “Imagine I wore a dust mask and did demo all day long with debris and dust in the air,” Holmes says. “It will plug that mask, and I’ll have trouble breathing.

Your furnace is like your second set of lungs in your home. If you don’t change the filter often, you will tend to have a breathing problem within your system.”

Neglecting HVAC filters can increase your power bill or strain your system and damage it, says Cartier Kirby, customer experience manager at online filter store Filters Fast. “It can also impact indoor air quality and can affect people with allergies or asthma.”

Kirby says consumers should not tr y to save money by reusing disposable filters. “We’ve had customers vacuum their disposable furnace filter and put it back in,” Kirby says. “They don’t understand that used filters still have super-small particles embedded in them. You can’t vacuum those out and reuse.”

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Holmes advises consumers to keep all instruction booklets. “Never throw out any directions. If you buy a new product, sit down and read the manual,” he says. As for remembering to change filters, he says: “Set up alerts on your calendar.

If we can get alerts about birthdays, we can get them about cleaning our filters.”

Here are six common places you’ll find filters in your home. How many of them have you checked lately?

COFFEEMAKER

Coffeemaker charcoal filters often go unnoticed. Says Kirby: “They are so small you forget about them. In the morning when you’re making coffee, you aren’t thinking about maintaining the equipment.” Kirby suggests replacing them about every 60 days, or after 60 uses, for better-tasting coffee. “It also will increase the life of your coffeemaker because it reduces buildup of minerals and scale,” Kirby says.

DRYER

The plastic and mesh pullout lint catcher in your dryer needs to be cleaned after every load. Not doing this causes a potential fire hazard, Kirby says. Every once in a while, rinse the lint catcher under a faucet. If the screen in the lint catcher becomes ripped, order a new one. Even small holes will let lint get into the exhaust duct.

REFRIGERATOR

Many refrigerators have water filters that ser vice icemakers and in-door water dispensers. According to Holmes, most manufacturers recommend replacing them ever y six months. Says Holmes, “If you keep a water jug with a filter in the refrigerator, you tend to pay more attention to that but forget about the other filters in there.” If you aren’t interested in filtering water, many units come with a bypass plug.

VACUUM CLEANER

Disposable vacuum cleaner bags also act as filters. Never let them fill to the maximum capacity, Kirby says.

Replace the bags when two-thirds full.

Holmes cautions that a stuffed bag can burn out a motor. “If your bag is clogged, you might detect a slight burning smell,” he says. “This means something is overheating.” If you have the option of adding a HEPA (highefficiency particulate air) filter, it can trap even smaller particles, which is especially beneficial if you have allergies. These are often good for one year. Confession: I just checked my HEPA filter: It was last replaced in 2014. Major filter fail.

FURNACE

A furnace filter is one of the most important house filters. This is especially important if you own pets, smoke, or have asthma or allergies. The more often you replace it (usually ever y 30 to 90 days), the longer your furnace could last. Says Kirby: “If you don’t replace your filter as frequently as recommended, it becomes over whelmed with dust and creates a strain. This might increase your power bill or worse, create irreparable damage to your system.”

HUMIDIFIERS

Some HVAC systems have whole-house humidifiers that dispense moisture as you heat. Most come with disposable pads or filters that absorb mineral deposits and other impurities from water. Experts say these should be replaced once or twice a year, possibly as part of your semiannual service visits.

Tom Blue Furniture and Sleep Shop 2737 Veach Rd. • Mon.-Sat. 9 am-5 pm 270-683-4921 • www.tomblue.com

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from

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BY BARBARA DAMROSCH THE WASHINGTON POST

There are windowsills all over the world filled with small edible plants, usually a few pots of fresh herbs. A city cook with a longer, wider sill might even sow a few flats of microgreens as well.

But let’s say there’s a sunny patch of yard, as little as 10 feet by 10 feet, where several soil-filled planters could surround a sitting area. Fill them with a few tomato plants, annual herbs such as basil, rows of cut-and-come-again lettuce, and you’ll have a summer of modest salads.

Take away the chairs and plant the whole thing with food, and there’s room for a more productive salad operation.

Peppers are good compact plants for summer, along with staked or trellised cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and pole beans. Sow spinach and arugula for cool fall days. Make a border of parsley, scallions and alpine strawberries.

If you want a wider range and have the space, expand the garden to, say, 20 by 20 feet. I’ve had gardens that size and found room for a zucchini plant or two, despite their tendency to sprawl. I fol-

pots to

lowed early crops with later ones such as broccoli, carrots, onions and beets.

Even a small garden adds pleasure to your life, but for many families that’s not enough. They’d like to grow most of the produce they eat, a goal that requires space and time.

A perfect example would be the garden my friend Costas Christ planted in his yard on the coast of Maine. It measures 30 by 60 feet and sustains all the vegetables mentioned above and more, including leeks, eggplants, kale, trellised peas for early summer and even a stand of sweet corn. There’s a small plastic hoop house in the garden, built by a handy young neighbor, that allows tomatoes to ripen early and protects hardy greens in wintertime.

Such a large garden becomes part of your life. You might spend one day a week weeding, watering, training crops on supports and planting new crops.

But you can reduce weeding time by using mulches or by frequently cultivating with a hoe.

That work can also be a pleasurable activity. Christ, a writer for National Geographic Traveler and a founder of

LARGE plots

the ecotourism movement, spends a lot of time on the road and takes great joy in the garden when he’s at home, as do his wife, Sally, and their two grown sons, Nikos and Costas Jr. All of them are great cooks, and a meal at their house involves a splendid array of veggies — in salads, roasted and served on platters, stuffed, skewered in kebabs, or grilled with fish. Perennial herbs such as sage and oregano plants provide seasoning.

A garden the size of the Christs’ was once a part of every American homestead. But you might be surprised to find that today’s family food gardens, though fewer and smaller, outpace the old ones in yield. That’s because traditional planting schemes followed the farm model, in which the space between rows allowed for horse-drawn equipment to till, sow and hoe. Modern gardeners tend to grow more intensively, in beds rather than rows, with less space between plants. They pay more attention to succession planting, in which one crop is followed by another in the same spot, as the seasons change.

Crops that will eventually grow

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large, such as Brussels sprouts, can be interplanted with small early ones such as radishes or head lettuce. Cutand-come-again greens bear a lot longer than those where the whole head is cut.

Trellised crops give you a big harvest on a small footprint. Season-extension techniques such as using cold frames, quick hoops and small greenhouses also increase yields. Taken all together, these tricks can, in effect, double a garden’s size without covering any more ground.

Ver y large gardens are out of the question for most people, but it’s important to know what is possible. You could grow a year’s supply of root crops such as potatoes, carrots and kohlrabi for long-term harvest and/or storage. Winter squash, sweet potatoes and beans for drying all keep well without a cellar. You might even experiment with grains that are easy to thresh, such as wheat, millet, corn for polenta and hulless oats. That’s a great project to do with kids.

Ambitious gardens are especially popular in hard times. But a garden of any size, at any time, can give you a sense of self-reliance, hope, pleasure and delicious food for the table.