ebay :: extreme cave home for sale

In December of 2003 Kurt and Deborah Sleeper purchased a St. Louis Missouri 15,000 square foot cave for about $160,000 on Ebay. Now, 6 years later after spending over five years turning the cave into a livable home and offices, and living in it for less than one, (and giving birth to their third child in it just last week!) the couple is forced to sell, due to the economy. And they are selling it on...you guessed it....Ebay!

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Check out their eBay Cave Home Auction here and see and read all about caveland here. It is amazing and JUST COOL!

green :: hot water, low heat bill!

How about a hot shower without sweating your next electric bill? Takagi tankless water heater delivers! It heats and distributes the water as you use it and doesn't waste electric or gas like a convention tank heater does, keeping 50 to 100 gallons of water constantly hot. Although the technology has been used in Europe and Asia for some time, it's just made its way over here and just in time for the energy crisis too!

Read more details about this green, energy efficient water heater from the source,Takagi.com

Its all about hot water but its JUST COOL!

home :: protecting the future

If you are in the market to purchase a home for the first time, the home insurance market may be a new thing to you. There are several different types of home insurance that you should be aware of. Two important ones, mortgage protection insurance and mortgage insurance are so important to have. As the head of the household you have responsibility to your family to provide them with peace of mind that your home will be paid for at the time of your death. After all mortgage insurance is not just a piece of paper, it’s an investment in peace of mind.

Another important insurance coverage is of course life insurance and universal life insurance. Without these, your family would be left out in the cold and perhaps with no means to continue the comfortable life that you had provided them with while you were alive. It's important to have these insurances and get them now before it's too late. Confused yet? ;) A good place to learn about these and other insurances is at the NAA Life website. Go check it out and get some peace of mind for you and your family.

cool products :: smart light switches

Necessity is the mother of invention and these JUST COOL inventions from Keep it Cartesian have turned necessities into some very nifty modern "must-haves" for your contemporary space!

keyholder /lightswitch
plug wrap
letter holder / light switch


I love multi-tasking devices. They're JUST COOL!

technology :: OLED - light of the future

It's the light of our future and it's called ELOD.

Very soon, we will be illuminating whole walls of our homes with OLED wallpaper that will turn them into ambient lighting and even massive whole wall televisions. OLED will illuminate an office cube or a bike, even the veneer of your countertops, cupboard doors, and appliances making them light sources for your home! Just what is OLED?

Short for organic light-emitting diode, OLED is a display device that sandwiches carbon-based films between two charged electrodes, one a metallic cathode and one a transparent anode, usually being glass. The organic films consist of a hole-injection layer, a hole-transport layer, an emissive layer and an electron-transport layer. When voltage is applied to the OLED cell, the injected positive and negative charges recombine in the emissive layer and create electro luminescent light. Unlike LCDs, which require backlighting, OLED displays are emissive devices - they emit light rather than modulate transmitted or reflected light. OLED was invented by Eastman Kodak in the early 1980s. It is beginning to replace LCD technology in handheld devices such as PDAs and cellular phones because the technology is brighter, thinner, faster and lighter than LCDs, uses less power, offers higher contrast and is cheaper to manufacture.

General Electric is a leader in OLED technology and the quest to push efficiency in lighting applications to the next level. The glimpses we’ve been seeing are an exciting taste of what’s to come. Check out this video by GE that explains this mercury free and green technology and how it will change the way we think about lighting.

WOW! OLED is JUST COOL!

architecture - my island home

I wish...I wish...

I saw this adorable cottage over at ReModelista and fell in love with it. A tidy 1000 square feet of breezy island bliss make up this sweet Victorian Carpenter Gothic house on Martha’s Vineyard - probably over a hundred years old and still alot of it original! It was recently given a facelift by Hutker Architects who, I think, did a fab job keeping all the cottage charm intact! Don't you?

I think Moxie Matilda would think it was the cats meow too!

Sea Cottage Cat by moi - buy it here>>>

architecture - Thailand dream house with dreamy view

Perched about 200 feet above the sea,John Chadwick’s spacious living room has a wall of windows set above an infinity pool that makes it seem as if the water stretches all the way to Patong Beach, a popular night spot in Phucket, Thailand {how is that pronounced?} ;)





But seriously...when Greenwich Connecticut native,Chadwick switched jobs and ended up in Thailand , he fell in love with a property in Phucket and built a house there. It was all about the view and having his custom dream home be Frank Lloyd Wright inspired. "I told the architect I wanted to build a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Thailand," said Mr. Chadwick, a real estate executive. "I want strong horizontals. I want big, broad-shouldered spaces." And thats exactly what he got. The sprawling 7,500-square-foot house, sitting on a 12,350-square-foot lot, cost more than $2.5 million and was completed a few years ago. The top floor of the two-story house includes the living room, dining room, kitchen, master bedroom, office and patio. The bottom floor is designed for parties, with three more bedrooms, an exercise/game room and a massage room, all surrounding a pool equipped with lighting and sound systems.

What a place. What a view! It's JUST COOL!

gleaned from the NYTimes...read more here>>>

architecture - aluminum high rise

I'll take the little orange striped one. so cute ;)
via Call Hart Crazy

furniture - table talk...

I'm feelin' these tables over at SANDBACK.

They're a little bit modern...

a little bit retro...

alot COOL

Cast of a unique polymerized concrete material, they come in 40 colors. check them out at www.petersandback.com

it's weird and it's green...

The Amalia House started life as a request for a humble holiday cottage, but when Grid Architects got a hold of the project, it became a design of weird green angles and innovative functionality.

The first thing you notice about the place is its friendly green siding. Up close, the origins of the strange coating suddenly becomes clear; artificial grass. Chosen by the architects for its tactile qualities, as well as the way it helps the structure blend into the site it makes a seamless connection between building and surrounding landscape. It also allows the first floor roof slope to be used as a comfortable terrace and the cantilevered roof creates a covered space for lawn equipment and furniture, doubling up as a car port if need be.

On the inside there are a host of functional details as well. The living room area contains two large window openings that frame the surrounding meadow and bring the feeling of "outside" in. From the kitchen/dining area, a simple spiral staircase provides access to the upper level; a bedroom, children's room, bath and shower room.


Check out more on the Amalia House, Kirchbach, Austria. GRID | architects, via Wallpaper

It's JUST COOL!

lounge chairs...

Comfortable, green and JUST COOL! This Gotham series is a model example of optimizing materials. My goodness, the webbing is surplus automotive seatbelts and the lightweight frame is bent laminated maple, an extremely resource efficient material in itself. Now how eco-friendly is that!
... check it out at Vivavi, Inc.

sustainable somethings ...

some friendly alternatives for living green...

solar stove for a hot cup of tea

sustainable clothes dryer

electricity from the wind and not the grid

sustainable refrigerator- cool your bottles here


sustainable footwear

sustainable swimming pool


and jacuzzi

and I love this one from the fifties,

futuristic solar powered air transportation

the house that george built...

Less than a mile from the heart of town, across the street from the elementary school that my kids went to, stands a small abandoned house. It is set way back in the woods between a tangled mess of tall maples and an antique apple orchard. In the winter it can be seen from the road, a ghostly, run down looking Tudor style house. But in the summertime it is a secret hide-away; an Enchanted Storybook Cottage.

This little house has always been the brunt of urban legend stories in our town- no one every really knew what the story behind it was - why did it go empty and abandoned for all these years...decades actually. Well, last week, on my favorite day, (Wednesday, rural decay adventure day) I had the pleasure of discovering more about it, when I snuck up onto the property with my camera to get a better look. Unexpectedly I was met up with its current owner, the grandson of the man who built the house, when he drove up the gravel drive and caught me with my camera redhanded. He graciously filled me in on the houses history and invited me to take pictures (because it is so hidden in this shady glade, these photos are unfortunately rough)

George Shorey built the little cottage around 1910 as his art studio. He was a well known and successful ( listed even) artist as well as art professor in NY and this was his getaway during his time off. The structure is primitive, after all he wasn't an architect. Traditional Tudor in design it is constructed of reclaimed beams, and salvaged parts including leaded glass windows (no longer there) and rustic doors and hardware. Yup, they were even recycling and reusing back in those days. Cement was carefully troweled over chicken wire exterior and sections of the beams were decoratively carved. There is a massive chimney at one end of the studio that soars two stories high and a steep open staircase that leads to a galley type loft over this huge fireplace. We couldn't go into the building but we stuck our camera inside and you can get an idea of the interior. A mess from being vandalized and partied in over the decades.

I could see remnants of old frames and garden statues that made me wonder ... what did this place look like when it was first built?

When I left I asked the nice man what they were going to do with the property. He said they were building their retirement home on the back acreage ( he even gave us a tour of that!) and going to tear down the front house. No!


But it turns out he meant the front house, that being the big white elephant of a house that his Grandfather lived in next to the little cottage - An old 18th century gothic style house, beautiful in its own right, that has gone to ruin.

As for the enchanted storybook cottage / art studio? George's grandson will be restoring that back to its original beauty :)

Won't George be happy ...

WITHOUT DOORS

We couldn't enter

do we want to?

Nor could we leave

its pretty here...lets not...

Nor could we keep things out

awww...he's cute...lets not keep him out

Without doors we couldn't keep

little girls like calla from raiding the fridge
(however these doors don't seem to keep her out)




the grandkids away from messes
(aven & calla, my young artists at work)

they're having so much fun sooooo...whatever! Get into the paint closet!

Doors hide clutter

although these mugs are cool - why would you want to hide them?


Doors keep us safe
how easy would it be to pick this lock?

When I was young no one locked their doors - city or country. Life was safer back then of course.

But everyone did have doors.


except Josh & Sasha - still without doors ;)