The summer months are perfect for trying out new kitchen gadgets, and none more so that that sparkling BBQ you bought in winter for a great price, but haven’t had a chance to use yet.

When deciding what accessories to buy to go with your outdoor kitchen, consider this exclusive basting pot from Williams-Sonoma. It is perfect for adding flavors to steaks, chicken or other meats, and you don’t have to wonder where to put the brush when you’ve used it.

→ continue reading "Basting with the Best"

There are many ways to participate in home recycling, from reusing items, to recycling paper and plastic. A new contributor to this economical trend is battery recycling.

Through the national program Call2Recycle, the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (RBRC) can help you recycle your old portable rechargeable batteries and used cell phones. This corporation is dedicated to preventing rechargeable batteries and cell phones from ending-up as waste, therefore contributing to the preservation of natural resources. With the popular Richard Karn, a.k.a. “Al” from TV’s Home Improvement, as their spokesperson, this campaign is sure to have success.

→ continue reading "More to Recycle…"

To have the most amount of kitchen fun, multiple gadgets are a necessity. Or are they? What with rice cookers, waffle irons, the almighty kitchen aid stand mixer and ice cream makers, you are bound to have more kitchen gadgets than you know what to do with. Not to mention a cupboard’s worth of manuals which you will have to search through any time you want to use any of them.

→ continue reading "Too Many Kitchen Appliances?"

A small kitchen can seem like a problem for homeowners, no matter how modern it is, sometimes there just doesn’t’ seem there will be enough room to fit even the basics. This is where the Arclinea Boston showroom comes into play.

Owned by Philip Guarino, this showroom displays the work of Italian architect Antonio Citterio. Celebrated for his large kitchens, Citterio and Arclinea also like the challenge of a small kitchen.

→ continue reading "Small Kitchen? No Problem!"

As the hot summer months take their toll, what better way to cool down than with your favorite flavor of ice cream? Or better yet, homemade ice cream? Why not try the Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker with Extra Freezer Bowl available on the Williams-Sonoma website, and able to make ice cream in as little as 20 minutes.

This nifty kitchen gadget is simple to use, just add the ingredients and flip the power switch. It also has extra space for your favorite add-in, like nuts or candy, and can make sorbet or frozen yogurt as well as ice cream.

→ continue reading "Homemade Frozen Desserts"

There are a number of cool kitchen gadgets available for the contemporary chef, and but site which boats a large variety of progressive and insightful gadgets is www.knifecenter.com.

Among the many useful kitchen gadgets presented on this site, three of the coolest are the Chef’n Garlic Zoom, the Chef’n Wisecracker Crab Cracker and Splitter, and the Chef’n Palm Peeler.

The Chef’n line of products promises to solve problems in food preparation and cooking by creating innovative and uncommon gadgets for the everyday chef.

If you’re like me, opening all kinds of different food and condiment containers - from new ketchup bottles to stiff jar lids - can be a hassle. There are a number of accessories from opening either a bottle, or a can, or a jar, but now there is one that can do all of this, and more.

Crate & Barrel have created a modern 6-Way opener which is perfect for any kitchen. Along with its sleek design, this kitchen gadget can open snack bags, jar lids, bottle tops, pull tabs, safety seals and bottle caps.

→ continue reading "Necessary Kitchen Accessory"

Without a doubt the most important appliance in any kitchen is the oven or stove. With the development from wood-burning, to gas and electric ranges, there are many options concerning how to power you stove, as well as what is looks like.

If you have a modern kitchen, then an electric stove seems like the way to go, but you could also purchase a dual fuel range, which can use either gas or electric. For a more tradition kitchen appliance, Heartland Appliances Inc. is always a good bet.

→ continue reading "The Center of Attention"

This funky Tritech Stainless Steel Halogen Spotlight makes a very fashionable statement to you under cabinet lighting, providing both task lighting for times when it’s most needed, as well as excellent ambient lighting to accent your kitchen design style.

Lighting Your Kitchen Task Areas

If you’re having a hard time seeing if that was cayenne or cyanide you’re putting in the sauce, maybe it’s time to improve your under cabinet lighting situation. There are many types of cabinet lights, including the old standard fluorescent, LED under cabinet mount lights, xenon and halogen. For best results, it is suggested to use xenon lights under your cabinet as they are cooler and have a longer bulb life than halogen.

Visit our article on kitchen cabinet lighting for pictures and links to online retailers.
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It’s been almost 4 months since we held our “$5000 Remodel, Blog & WIN Contest“, and my sincere apologies to our Grand Prize Winners, John and Sherry of ThisYoungHouse.com for my belated post about how their amazing blog won our contest. It’s sort of a blessing in disguise though, as I can take this opportunity to announce that they’ve remodeled! - They have a new blog design! ….Very nice, I might add - it reflects the style and motif of decor for the house. Great job John & Sherry, your home and blog provide inspiration to me and many others!

We had over 50 entries into this contest, and gaining entry wasn’t simple. There was lots of work involved for each contestant - not just in the remodeling project itself, but contestants were required to extensively document and blog about their project in order to gain the favor of the judges. We were very happy at the high quality of many of the blogs that entered - it meant judging wasn’t easy either.

I must admit, our judges did an excellent job of selecting this outstanding example of what our contest was looking for. ThisYoungHouse.com exceedingly met all of the judging criteria we set forth, and we’re sure you’ll agree they made it fun and interesting to learn about their extensive remodeling project. The following will describe what John and Sherry did to meet all these requirements, and you’ll see why our judges were so impressed.

At the bottom of this post, I’ve embedded a recent video from ThisYoungHouse.com, featuring Sherry bringing the viewer on a guided walk-through of their close-to-being-finished-but-never-done remodeling project.

This is a very cool video of an expanding dining room table, that easily seats (what looks like) 8 people when closed, to about 20 people when open. It is easily opened by one person, with the simple latch, then a twist if the tabletop, and it magically unfolds in a series of geometically symetrical peices that all fit together in various positions.

I want one.
→ continue reading "Dreaming - The Ultimate Dining Room Table"

The Thanks

Firstly I would personally like to thank everyone that was involved in this contest. It was an absolute HUGE success for us! It was even greater than we anticipated… and it was only and all because of YOU!

Visitors

To the many visitors and viewers of the contestant sites, thank you for your time and we hope that you were informed, entertained and came away with something valuable from your visit. Thank you. You are why these amazing bloggers share their stories.

Voters

To those that voted (there were WAY more of you than we anticipated), thank you so much for your time, putting up with our registration process, and encouraging our contestants. Your participation made the contest fun and exciting. There was quite the fury of votes at the end, too! Thank you for voting!

Judges

To the judges… sincere thanks for your time and effort. I know how tedious reading all these blogs can be - and how valuable your time is…. so please know your participation was invaluable, and helped to step the contest up to ‘the next level’. (SIDE NOTE: This is where we encountered a small snag earlier today. We could not get in communication with Alister Cameron to include his votes in the final voting. We sincerely hope all is well with him and his family down under in Australia. In his place we substituted Cathy Patterson of www.2GreenThumbsUp.com - Cathy is the person responsible for writing all of your contestant bios on our site. She knows all your sites better than anyone, so there was no better person to ask to fill this spot at the last minute. Thanks so much to Cathy for her participation, and especially, her excellent job of writing the bios of your entries. We received no less than ten emails of thanks and gratitude for her great work. Please check out her blog to see some of her own great stories.

The other judges who participated were:

Meghan Carter - AskTheDecorator.com (check out her new site!)
Stu Silverman - Contractors.com (thanks for the sponsorship, Stu!)
Grace - Design*Sponge
Stan Tham - Home Rejuvenation Blog

Thanks so much to the judges - you made us look good!

Contestants

Wow. You blew me away.
Thank you so much for making this a greater success than I ever could have imagined. You are all inspiring, creative and deserve to win the $5000.

Thank you. See all the entries here.

The Stats

Entries - 47

Voters - 662

The Winners

Random Voter - Ms. X, voter #475 (hasn’t responded yet to our notification) - voted for “One Woman’s Cottage Life” - you can see that entry here.

People’s Choice - Lostview Farm - 156 votes!
You can visit their entry here.

Grand Prize

This Young House
You can see their entry here.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS!

Thanks to you all for participating.

Slight Delay

We’ve run into a bit of a snag here - like any home remodeling project, but we’ve fixed the problem and we will be announcing the winners here PROMPTLY at 7 PM EST, TODAY (December 7, 2007).

Please visit then to see who wins!!

Thanks for your patience.

Are you here to see who won our Remodel, Blog & WIN Contest?

Please play the video below for an intro…

And the Winners Are:

To be announced later today!

We’ll tell you in a few hours. We should have all the votes in from our judges by 9 AM EST today, and we will have to notify the winners to get some legal stuff handled with them before we make our announcement, but we should have a post here by 5 PM at the latest today.

The suspense is KILLING ME!!!!!!

As you may know, we are hosting a very neat little contest that’s just wrapping up and is currently in the judging stages. We have results in from one judge already, and the suspense is very thick around here…. there’s $5000 dollars on the line - HELLO! Winners of that contest won’t be announced till this Friday, December 7th, 2007.

So, in order to temporarily satisfy the ‘WHO WON?’ itch, we held an open contest over the weekend for anyone to write a creative post about our recently added ‘Christmas tree decorating ideas’ page. See our free decorated Christmas tree pictures for some of the lovely trees in our collection. We had a handful of great posts that shared about everything from family Christmas tree picking day to needing to decorate the tree to accommodate ‘new hands’ in the house, but, as we’re sure you’ll agree, (my Mom was the judge of this contest, and I just hung up the phone with her….) the winner of this little contest we held for a $100 grand prize, has to go to….

The Winner Is:

For new readers here who may not be aware, we are just about to wrap up our hugely successful contest for the most creative remodeling project / blog documentation - it’s called our $5000 Remodel, Blog & WIN Contest.

We have received so many great entries that judging is going to be VERY difficult - they ALL should win!