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.

12 MORE Ways to Enjoy Your New Sunroom, Conservatory or Patio Enclosure.

1. Leisure Room- Many homeowners want a sunroom so they can use it as a breakfast/sitting area. These rooms are the perfect space for drinking your morning coffee and reading the paper. Specially designed to include cable and electrical outlets, homeowners can enjoy a quiet place to read, watch TV, or just enjoy the scenery.

2. Guest Room- More and more, families are looking for a convenient yet attractive way to accommodate overnight guests. Instead of putting your family and friends in a cramped office or in the middle of the living room, a sunroom can double as a leisure room during the day and easily be converted into a comfortable guest bedroom at night with the use of a day bed. You will find this a welcome alternative to adding a conventional, single purpose bedroom to your home.

A Conservatory is really just another, wonderful class of Sunroom.

Other names used for Conservatories include: Orangerie, Solarium, Green house, Atrium, Garden Room, Patio Room, and more.

A well-designed, high quality conservatory or sunroom will quickly become the most used room in your home.

As with any addition to your home, you should absolutely seek out the help and advice of an excellent contractor, designer and/or architect to help you decide what styles and materials will best compliment your home, your lifestyle, and your budget.

Installing exterior vinyl window shutters is usually a simple, straightforward task when installing on wood or siding. However, if you are installing plastic shutters on a brick surface, some things need to be taken into consideration.

First of all, some bricks are reinforced with metal. This makes it an extremely difficult task to drill through the brick. I tried this once and it took me all day just to mount 3 pairs of shutters because I had to continually switch back and fourth between a masonry drill bit and a steel drill bit.

So, you’ve been going crazy trying to decide how to decorate your kitchen backsplash. What materials should you use for your backsplash? Should you use tile or marble, glass or copper? What would look best, as well as be functional?

Here’s a unique idea!

(Above is a sample of Julia’s hand painted kitchen backsplash tile mural, called “Wine and Cheese”)

“Hi-Can, the Ferrari of beds”

Well, with technology headed to where we will soon be embedding nano-bots and A.I. into our bodies, it isn’t a surprise that we can ‘embed’ ourselves into a technologically advanced bed.

Hi-Can [view site], the self proclaimed ‘revolutionary bed’, the ‘Ferrari of beds’, has some very unique features.

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:

Well I just went through the fun and sometimes intimidating process of picking interior paint colors for my new home. I love color and I have been a graphic designer for years so I enjoying working with color.

When I started with the task of picking colors for my new house, I knew I wanted color. So first I started with a theme . I live in Southern California near the ocean and have chosen Beach-y - Tropical with a modern twist as my theme.

Second, I used things I collect for inspiration. I collect the vintage jadeite dishes that Martha Stewart has made so popular. So naturally when I discovered that Martha Stewart had a paint color called Jadeite I knew that would be one of my colors.

As you start your new projects or dream of completing current ones, think green! Making conscious decisions to use environmentally friendly products is easier than you might think and actually saves you money, and more important, our planet.

Here at Project Kraemer Lane we’re thinking green as part of our whole house renovation. Something as simple as a changing light bulb can make a huge impact. We’ve recently begun using Energy Star compact fluorescent light bulbs which last up to 10 times longer and use about 75 percent less energy than standard incandescent bulbs. Imagine this: According to the U.S. Department of Energy, if every American home replaced just one light bulb with an Energy Star qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, save more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.

Frequently I am asked about how to measure “my house” for vinyl exterior shutters. While there is no formula that can be a one size fits all solution, this article gives some good pointers about how to make the best determination.

Choosing a measurement style is one of the most difficult decisions in the purchase of vinyl exterior shutters. The first step to replacing your vinyl shutters is with a walk or drive around your neighborhood. The first thing to look for is how the exterior shutter tops are placed in relation to the top of the window.

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!