Popular counter top material are being used in new and exciting ways. Corian and Quartz have long been favorites of homeowners and designers for kitchen countertops due to the durability and endless color range. But recently designers have been looking at these surfaces in a whole new way.

According to Remodeling Magazine:

Departing from their usual horizontal kitchen and bath applications, solid-surfacing materials are creeping up adjacent walls to serve as backsplashes, shower walls, fireplace surrounds, and more.

These materials are infinitely flexible. Corian can be thermo-formed into custom shapes, bent around difficult angles, and can be requested in special sizes and thicknesses that make it weigh less than traditional countertop surfaces while still maintaining its durability.

Cambria, a Quartz product, comes in thicknesses down to 1cm, meaning it can be used for things like outlet covers. And it is the only quartz product to be manufactured solely in the United States. Cambria is also a certifiedGreen product. The company is committed to environmental responsibility in its product manufacturing and business practices.

If you are thinking of a remodel in the kitchen, bathroom, pool side, or a wet bar, or even perhaps a new fireplace surround, you might one to consider Corian or Quartz for your project. The applications to which it can be applied are endless, and the flexibility means your project can stand out as unique. Who doesn’t want to inject some personality into their home in this era of mass produced houses?

I am notorious for bringing home a hundred paint swatches and taping them all over the walls. Then going and buying a gallon of paint. Then hating the paint color once it is up on the walls. I am not sure that I have painted any room and loved it the first time around. And yet, I continue doing it.

The worst in recent memory was a yellow I picked for one of our downstairs powder rooms. I wanted a soft buttery yellow. What I ended up with was something which was reminiscent of what should be in the bowl, not on the walls. I went over it several times with different yellow paint, until I gave up and swore off yellow paint forever.

Recently a friend of mine, who was completely confused by the myriad of paint swatches she had put all over her bedroom walls, hired a designer to come over and help her chose the right color. She was able to tell the designer a general color scheme that she wanted and point to her ill-fated attempts on the walls. The designer looked at the green swatches and immediately went to her extensive fan decks of paint colors and picked the perfect color. And a perfect color is one that looks good ON the walls, not in the book.

Consultants from their International Association of Color Consultants North America (IACC-NA) are here to help. Their fees range from $60 - $200 per hour. Which sounds expensive until you consider the cost of all those ill-fated gallons of paint that average $30 a pop.

Homeowners living in small spaces are always looking for ways to eek out extra storage. Using the dead area behind stairs is nothing new. How many of us grew up in homes with the small triangular coat closet under the stairs?

But what about storage in the stairs?

Turning your stairs into drawers is a pretty brilliant idea. Especially for people living in homes where space it at a premium. The idea for this application is taken from boats, where stairs turned drawers are common. Living with children, however, the idea of one of them opening the drawer and not closing it properly and therefore causing the next person to fall down the stairs, frightens me.

Here are instructions for building your own stair drawers some of you more adventurous DIYers out there.

Truly unique and innovative are these stair bookcases. The entire thing is like walking up a bookcase, rather than a staircase.

It is amazing. Functional and beautiful, I have to admit that as a fellow bibliophile I am also exceedingly jealous of all those books. I would love to perch there on their steps and browse through them.

Of course my practical side wonders how those stairs are to use every day. What if I accidentally started off on the wrong foot, would I go tumbling down? Possibly injuring myself or, even worse, my precious book collection. I think I would be more inclined to keep my steps as traditional steps and line the wall along the side of them as bookcases.

I do wonder though if the solution to many of the storage issues that would cause a person to need to utilize staircases could be solved by simply having less stuff.

Who knew! Honestly I have been wondering why my children would not just sit posed in the corner where I left them. Now, thanks to the New York Times, I know. Children are not decor. I really wish I knew this before I had them.

Seriously though the article tackles the issue of marrying your needs as a grown-up person with those of your child in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to all of you. As couples are marrying and having children later, many have already developed expensive tastes in furniture and decor. They don’t want their homes turning into Romper Room.

While some of the parents in the article seem to have taken things to an extreme that I personally wouldn’t for safety reasons, like leaving staircases open without railings or keeping razor sharp coffee tables in the middle of the living room, I think that the article raises some interesting points. No pun intended.

One of the things that people comment on when they come to my home is the lack of clutter and toys strew about. This is not because I don’t want my children to play. Or I want my house to look like children don’t live there. It is because I think long and hard about what toys I bring into the house and where they toy will live once it gets here.

This reminds me of when I was shopping for new throw pillows for my family room couch. My husband is opposed to throw pillows. He says, and he is right, that the children will just throw them on the floor and run all over them so why bother. I say, that for me the few hours that the pillows remain on the couch where I put them is worth it.

I bought overpriced silk covered pillows that were quickly turned into trampolines and forts. But I was okay with. They were for our family room, not a formal living room. And the fact that they have small stains, eh I am okay with that also. Now if they went into my bedroom and tore the pillows off of my bed I would have an issue with that.

Bookcases and baskets are great solutions for toy storage. I wrote about this issue extensively at A Year Off about a year ago and all the same advice still applies. Create a house that is child-friendly, not child-centered. Children like things to look nice just as much as you do.

Home owners wishing to upgrade their electronics are often faced with a dilemma. Run unsightly wires across walls or pay lots of money to have someone run them inside the walls. Both of these options leave something to be desired, either aesthetically or because what happens when the wiring you paid to have put inside the walls needs upgrading. Are you going to go through that again?

Enter Wire Tracks. Wire Tracks is an innovative system designed to hide low voltage wires behind the crown and baseboard molding. A track, or channel, is installed to hold the various wires. Then traditional molding, whether you want have the expensive custom molding or inexpensive off the shelf of your local big box store molding, is installed on top of it. The exact same way that it would have been without the track behind it.

This is a system that any home owner with moderate diy skills can do themselves.

The advantage to a system like this is that it can easily be upgraded in a few years when whatever system you have now is rendered obsolete. And you know that will happen, probably sooner than you imagine. I remember just seven or eight years ago when everyone was scrambling to run wires for their computers all over the house. Now with high speed wireless, multiple cable outlets in every room really are unnecessary.

Black and white together are a classic combination.

Sophisticated.

Timeless.

Delicious. Oh wait, we weren’t talking about food.

When it comes to design, the same words apply.

There is a “rule” in interior design that says every room should have something black. It acts as a foil around which all the other colors dance.

Black and white used together are classic design elements. They can be used in both modern and vintage applications. Serving as a clean palette, They highlight whatever you want to put the focus on in your room. When paired with another color it will make that color pop. Look at the photo example above, the lines of the elegnat brown couch are obvious in a way that they would not be if the room was filled with distracting colors.

I especially love black and white paired with a bright color like apple green.

When we were remodeling our children’s bathrooms we decided to go with a vintage look that would be appropriate for a house this age The clawfoot tubs have a black painted exterior and the floor is white hexagonal tiles with black accents. This allowed the walls to be a blank canvas. Each of the bathrooms has a completely different feel based solely on the wall color.

Anchor bay Tile has a new line of black and white glass tile for sale. The Urban Living Collection of Glass Tile come dot-mounted on either 12 x 18 inch or 13 x 13 inch sheets. Use it in a kitchen backsplash, a bathroom, a shower, or even in exterior applications. The possibilities are endless.

There are many renovation enthusiasts who are trying to restore their old homes back to their original splendor, as much as possible while still being able to function in 21st century life. I admire people who are willing to go that extra mile to make sure that how ever they update their house is appropriate to the original style.

As much as I love 18th and 19th century houses, I love indoor plumbing, central heating, and modern kitchens more. Much, much more.

We are in the process of our second restoration project. Neither one of our old houses had much character left by the time that we got to it. Something which can be both a blessing and a curse.

Light fixtures that are historically accurate and as beautiful as the one pictured above would be welcome at my house anytime. Although they would look out of place for being too nice for my old farmhouse.

Luckily there are places like Bevolo Gas and Electric Lights. Named one of the top secret sources for products by This Old House for 2007, Bevolo craftsman handcraft light fixtures out of copper and brass in aesthetically compatible designs. They can also make fixtures to your exact specifications should you not find one of their standard designs appropriate.

They are located in New Orleans and have been providing light fixtures for buildings, residential and commercial, since 1945. They could be just the secret source you have been searching for.

Are you looking for a little incentive to get started on some small projects around your house? How about a contest to light that fire under your tool belt? Did I just write that?

Anyway, the editors of Blueprint have teamed up with Apartment Therapy to bring you the January Jumpstart Project.

This is not a whole house renovation project contest, but a small project that you have been meaning to tackle. The sort of thing you constantly put off because it won’t take that long. And so you never set aside time to do it. Because it won’t take that long. And then you find yourself stuck in this never ending loop.

I have this at my house, but I call it the Christmas Holiday People Are Coming Over Freak-out Project. Last week while most (probably normal) people were busy baking, wassailing, and spiking the egg nog, I was repainting my mudroom. And then the bathroom.

The January Jumpstart Project has to be accomplished solely by you, I assume this means no professionals rather than being a statement about spousal involvement. It has to be small in scope, something you can do in a weekend. The deadline for completing your project is January 21.

The best part? Aside from having a project that is completed, is that there will be prizes.

I am trying to think of some small projects that I have and am drawing a blank. I mean, I have plenty of small projects it is just that none of them are worthy of an entry. Unless staining, sealing, and installing a new threshold between my kitchen and mudroom would count?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.  But I still have 23 days.

At only 1 meter wide, this house is possibly the narrowest in the world. It certainly is the narrowest in Brazil where it has turned the tiny town of Madre de Deus into a tourist attraction.

While there certainly have been other narrow houses built over the years, The Spite House in NYC comes to mind, I can not recall any of them being freestanding, instead wedged between buildings or anchored on one side to an existing structure.

It has three floors with plans to add on a fourth.  And contains all of the modern amenities that one expects in a home.  It is just narrow.

I am fascinated by the fact that the owner chose to build a house like this. I have not been able to find anything online that specifically says why the house had to be built on such a narrow footprint.  I assume that it was because of the availability of land, but I suppose it could just have been for the aesthetics.

It definitely brings new meaning to the phrase the walls closing in on you.

Using a simple modular design, Ofis Architects created a highly flexible and economic design solution in their proposal for low-cost housing along the Izola Bay, Slovenia.

Part of a state run contest, this winning entry designed two housing blocks for the Slovenia Housing Fund- a government-run program providing low-cost apartments for young families. This proposal won largely for its excellent ratio between gross vs. saleable surface area as well as for its flexibility in design.

Each building contains thirty apartments of different sizes and structures, varying from studio flats to 3-bedroom units. The apartments are small, with minimum-sized rooms according to Slovenian standards, however there are no structural elements inside the apartments which lends itself to reorganizing as needs change. A great idea for apartments that might be utilized by growing families.

The apartments all have the verandas that jut out off of the building, creating an interesting design element from the exterior of the building, as well as providing additional outdoor living space for the occupants. I love the multi-colored canvas shades that can be pulled down for privacy or shielding the sun’s rays. The verandas also allow views of the Mediterranean coast, bringing the outdoor feeling into a small interior space.