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Nisheisha lives in Jamaica, but there’s no chance you will find her home. I have learned from experience that you never trust directions given by children or by people who do not drive. I’ve also learned from experience that those are the people who will ask you for a ride. Oh, they may be able to show you where they live, but you’ll be past a turn before they tell you to turn “back there.” Go ahead, ask a child near you for directions to some nearby landmark! -via Cynical-C
How did this happen? Maybe when they decided to list the house for sale in a hurry, the only exterior picture they had was a dud from the wedding album. Or maybe it was a Photoshop Disaster. Either way, potential buyers are going to assume the house is haunted! Link
The Welcome Home Blog posts videos of military personnel coming home after a deployment. You are welcome to browse or even submit yours! This video is called Soldiers Surprising Their Loved Ones: PART ONE, a compilation of returning service members surprising their parents, spouses, children, siblings, or pets. There are several compilations listed under “best of” at the blog. The Welcome Home Blog is not limited to surprise videos, but that’s what most of them are. Link -via Breakfast Links
When you get your first place of your own, upgrade to a bigger house, or when the kids move out, you may get your first totally personal man room.
The man room or “man cave” can be defined as any place a man sets aside to pursue his interests, whether with friends, family, or by himself. It can be an office, a study, the basement, or a shed out back. For the purposes of this post, the man room is not a shop or workspace, but rather a place for a man to relax and enjoy himself.
To best fix it up, follow the advice of men who have gone before you and follow the three rules: quality, comfortable, and personal. The Art of Manliness has tips on all these plus pictures of the manly rooms of manly men. Pictured here is Mark Twain’s billiard room. Link -via Nag on the Lake
I know you Neatoramanauts are a smart bunch, so many of you probably have piles of books lying around your house. If you’re looking for some new bookshelves and bookcases to put all of those great books away, here are some of the coolest book shelving systems that money can buy.
With a little clever placement of elastic, Instructables user fungus amungus was able to create this simple, but seriously eye-catching inverted bookshelf.
If you have a lot of books, you may have wished your home came with a set of bookcases built into the walls, but I’m willing to guess you never conceived of using your staircase to hold all of your novels. Architect Tim Sloan did though, and the result is perhaps one of the most functional staircases I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m always running out of space in my bookcases, which is why I simply love this expanding Twin Bookshelf by Zeynep Cinisli. Essentially, you get two sets of cupboard shelves and when those fill up, you can just pull them apart for even more shelf space.
Like the Twins, REK by Reiner de Jong is brilliant in that it can be consolidated or expanded as needed. As a bonus, the detailed linework in the design makes it look cool room no mater how extended it happens to be at any given time.
more …
I know you Neatoramanauts are a smart bunch, so I know most of you would rather read a book than destroy it. That being said, there are still far too many books in this world that are destroyed or contain terrible stories. Even if you like a book, you might end up with a copy you just can’t get rid of because there have already been 10 million copies of that book printed. So if you have a few extra titles you have no further use for, here are a few ways you can still use your books even after the words inside have lost their value.
Before I get started, I want to give a special thank you to WebEcoist and WebUrbanist, who provided a wealth of inspiration and research to this article.
Starting on the big scale uses for leftover books, you can build entire structures with them. While Slovakian artist Matej Krén’s building inside The Museum of Modern Art in Bologna (above) may not be structurally sound enough to exist outside another building, the Yellow Pages building (below) might be able to hold its own in a storm. Students from the Dalhousie University Department of Architecture in Nova Scotia built the house using a few wooden and metal beams to hold the thick books in place.
Of course, even if a book building could survive the elements, it would soon become subject to destruction via mold and insects.
Just because your home can’t be made completely from books doesn’t mean they can’t improve your home though. According to Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller magazine, books are an excellent form of insulation, so even if you don’t want to read certain titles any more, they still can be useful for filling up bookshelves that line the exterior-facing walls of your home.
In 1973, architect Ricardo Bofill bought an abandoned cement factory in Barcelona and converted it to use as his business offices, creative studio, and home. He spent two years remodeling: tearing down some buildings, converting others, and leaving some of the original equipment in place for its charm. The result is an inspiring and overwhelmingly spacious headquarters. See more pictures at yatzer. Link -via b3ta
How do you save your house from foreclosure? Play the lotto of course. Well, at least that was the technique that worked for one South Carolina man. The winning ticket brought him a top prize of $400,000.
Officials with the South Carolina Education Lottery say the man, who moved to South Carolina from New Jersey six years ago, was unemployed and about to lose his home before his ticket matched the winning numbers.
Isn’t this an adorable house? You almost expect to see Frodo coming out of it! Owen Geiger built this earthen dome in Thailand in 2007. The main component is bags of soil. You can build your own with his tutorial at Instructables. Link -via The Daily What
This Halloween, Neatorama’s already given you costume ideas and spooky food inspirations, so now it’s time to think about your home decoration. Whether you’re planning to decorate for a killer Halloween party or just want to impress the local trick and treaters, these cool geektastic decoration ideas are sure to impress.
Because pumpkins are one of the most critical elements of Halloween decorations and because there are about a billion pumpkin galleries online, the first half of our decoration ideas focus exclusively on Jack-O-lanterns. If you’ve already got your carving planned or are sick of looking at orange sculptures, then feel free to skip further down.
Video link
When you want to do something more techy, try making your own LED pumpkin with an artificial pumpkin wired with lights and controlled externally so you can change the expression at will.
To take LED lights to a new level, you can always try installing circuitry that will tell your pumpkin to turn on when it is dark. While I haven’t seen this done, I think a motion detecting light would also be pretty awesome. Any readers want to give it a shot?
Video link
When you want to go a step beyond LED lights, try buying a mini-pumpkin and engineering it to snap its mouth at passers by. This is also a good decoration for your cubicle since it doesn’t take up much space but is sure to get a lot of attention.
Video link
While there are plenty of pumpkins that look like robots, this is the only one I have seen so far that actually is a robot.
I know you Neatonauts are torn on the whole steampunk thing, but those who do like the art form are sure to appreciate this awesome steampunk pumpkin.
The first Monday in October (October 4th this year) is designated by the UN as World Habitat Day, a day to raise awareness of housing needs globally and in our communities. Habitat for Humanity is participating, as they do every year, with a variety of events.
Habitat for Humanity’s 27th annual Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project is a World Habitat Day event this year. It will be held Oct. 4 – 8 in six cities in the United States. Held in a different location each year, Habitat’s Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project is an annual, internationally-recognized week of building that brings attention to the need for simple, decent and affordable housing. This year, the Carters will work alongside volunteers in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore and Annapolis, Md.; Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.; and Birmingham, Ala. to build, rehabilitate and improve 86 homes.
Habitat for Humanity has a schedule of events, and suggestions for ways you can become involved with providing housing to those who need it in your community and around the world. Link -Thanks, Liza!
In 1991, star trend tracker Faith Popcorn wrote The Popcorn Report. The book was a best seller that offered a catchy list of future trends she foresaw. Included in her list was a trend she named “cocooning” which reflected “…the need to protect oneself from the unpredictable, the stressful and often hostile, outside environment.” In the Glossary she added an extreme form of cocooning, “burrowing”. Burrowing would be “..the ultimate expression of Cocooning in which consumers dig in, ever deeper, with a bunker mentality.”
While Faith was writing The Popcorn Report, I was burrowing at home in Sacramento, California, creating Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-A-Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century. The book was published the same year as The Popcorn Report. I was essentially tracking the same trend.
I depicted a future product called the Television Life Support System:
Cautious Americans, sensing danger at every turn, may seek the passive, indrawn personal life of the television spectator, or “couch potato.” Superchairs are sold that can be customized to meet almost every need.
In the same chapter I showed the TV Sleeping Chambers, a cocoon-shaped piece of furniture specially suited to the needs of selfish teenage boys and juvenile males in general. I wrote:
Addiction to television, a disease, can lead individuals to buy bullet-proofed, sound-deadening television-watching cocoons.
In the 1990s I continued to think up home furnishings that incorporated aspects of cocooning. The Potato Couch Room Group allowed one to get comfortable inside a snuggly, split-open baked potato while at home watching TV.
When Nikki of WhiMSy Love had a friend staying over for a short bit, she wanted to make her living area more inviting than just the standard airbed. As you can see, the solution was not only cute and clever, but darn right cheery.
For a time in the late 1950s while I was an undergraduate in college, I studied architecture. I wanted badly to be an architect. Yet the world is a better place than it might have been had I taken up the field! The field of architecture is no place for persons like me who run too easily after strange ideas.
Take my Punk Roofs for example. Please, someone, take them! It is not all that difficult to conceive of a neighborhood where “keeping up with the Joneses” means having a weirder roof than one’s neighbor. Yet can you imagine the upkeep and maintenance issues? How does one clean such a roof? How much insurance would roofers need before they climbed up a ladder to re-shingle a roof, or re-sharpen a roof’s spines? What would happen if a balloon full of tourists, operated by a nearby hot air balloon concession, lost power and sank into this neighborhood?
America is a strange place. It is a great and wonderful place that allows odd fads, cults, communes and crazy Utopian villages to thrive. It is a place where adults live basically without supervision much of the time. Since Americans are so into their cars – the rest of the world will never be able to compete with the U.S. in automobile fanaticism – I reasoned that an entire village could be built that would simulate the experience of being in one’s car or motorhome every day of the year. The concept above shows a happy couple inside their Auitohome, waking up to the recorded sounds of cars at rush hour. A mist-spraying device emits a non-toxic perfume that mimics the smell of exhaust fumes and motor oil. The village that I imagine is on a pleasant, sunny hillside. The occupants do not actually need to go anywhere. One of their rooms, fitted out like the interior of an automobile, would provide a Naugahyde-lined office space with computer and Internet, perfect for fulltime telecommuting.
I have always believed that no dumb concept is worth leaving unexplored. Here, I tried turning useless attic space into an upper-floor garage. It could be argued that this concept, which requires steel girder construction to support the attic garage and ramped driveways, simply creates new, and even more useless, spaces. It could be argued that the entire house would vibrate when the breadwinner pulled into the garage after coming home from work. It could be argued that this idea has few virtues.
Every time I read of a home invasion robbery, or an in-the-window abduction of a sleeping child, I feel angry and also frustrated. Why should we be so vulnerable in our homes? I’m annoyed with architects. Why aren’t they designing homes in which we can at least relax and feel safe?
If architects won’t do their job, I’ll volunteer to step in and do it for them. Here’s an inverted, upside down single-family home. Do you see a problem with this? Do we really need windows on the first floor? Burglars, rapists and child abductors will not find it easy to get in! The tapered walls on the building shown on the left could even be coated with grease. Not shown are support pillars, embedded deep into the subsoil, that support the building and also afford space for a small basement. In case of fire, occupants either exit from the front door or jump from second-story windows into soft, deeply-tilled soil covered with ice plant or similar soft bedding plants. Note how bushes, potential hiding places, are few and kept trimmed small.
If living in an upside down home seems restricting or strange, there are other design solutions that can at least minimize one’s interaction with strangers, especially ones who might have criminal intent. Just as gas stations and mini-marts provide slide-out trays and bullet-proof glass to protect their employee-attendants at night, so can a Home Solicitor Interrogation Room be added to a single-family residence. A plus feature, not shown in the illustration, is the electronically-lockable front door. The resident, safe inside the home, is able to lock a criminal or criminals inside the tiny entry room, creating a holding cell until police arrive.
Another type of holding cell can be located underground directly in front of a fake front door. The real front door is located elsewhere, its location known only to friends and family. If the resident doesn’t like the looks of a person, he or she presses a button causing the porch to collapse into the cell below. Not shown is the ample padding that lines in the floor and wall of the brick-lined holding cell.
A deceptively simple yet effective design is the Home Perimeter Dog Run. Rather than setting an alarm when leaving the home for the day, or when retiring to sleep at night, the resident unlocks an interior gate, giving the dog full run of the entire balcony. Dogs are very sensitive to sounds and vibrations, especially those made by strangers. Should a criminally-inclined stranger step anywhere on the metal walkway, a large dog would leap out of its house and attack.
I worked on the problem of home invasion over several decades. The solutions that are shown above, drawn in the mid-1980s, seem silly today, but that was before there existed sophisticated home security systems with night-vision cameras, body heat detectors, and web cams.
A Swimming Moat would offer an opportunity for residents to relax in their pool, do laps or invite friends and neighbors over for a pool party. But at night, or when homeowners are away from home, the pool becomes a moat. Drawbridges are raised. Unauthorized entry is effectively discouraged, since burglars do not wish to contemplate climbing slippery walls in wet running shoes, balancing delicate electronic appliances overhead. Posted signs suggest the added possibility of serious electric shock. The sign would be false. If it were not, cats, dogs and squirrels – or drunk revelers who climbed the fence – would be electrocuted.
My favorite solution is the Underground Bedroom. The bedroom, located anywhere on the property, is approached through a secret passageway. In this example, residents enter at night through the door of a stacked washer-dryer machine (fake) and crawl down a sloped ramp. The bedroom is stocked with food, television, computer, VCR, phone and a very small toilet. This room is the quietest in the house.
This dust bunny is one of the many household creatures that bedevil Christoph Niemann in this funny photo essay. You’ve probably seen some of them in your home, too! Link -via Boing Boing
A beautiful 1927 colonial-style waterfront home with 5 bedrooms, 3 and a half baths, and a ton of history behind it in Long Island can be yours for as little as $1,150,000. The home has had many owners, some more notorious than others.
The home gained its notoriety when Ronald DeFeos killed six family members while they were sleeping in 1974 and subsequent owners George and Kathleen Lutz claimed to be haunted for 28 days, which were detailed in the book “The Amityville Horror” (on the cover: “This book will scare the hell out of you”—Kansas City Star). However, James Cromarty, who lived in the house after the Lutzes were foreclosed upon, “Nothing weird ever happened, except for people coming by because of the book and the movie.”
Link to story. Link to listing. -via YesButNoButYes
Looking at the pictures, I would definitely live in this church in Kyloe, North Cumberland, England, which was converted into a home. Look at the beautiful stained glass! But, based on all the comments, there are certainly some other strong opinions. For example, you have to consider the graveyard just outside your windows.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by ninigoat.
A few months ago, photographer and environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand and his non-profit organization GoodPlanet released the movie HOME, a documentary about life on Earth and the current environmental challenges of our planet (Arthus-Bertrand is famous for his aerial photography, and the movie is quite wonderfully shot - if you haven't seen it before, it's worth a look: HOME is available in full, free on YouTube).
As a companion to the movie, Arthus-Bertrand released a companion book
HOME:
A Hymn to the Planet and Humanity
It was hard to pick just a few segments from the book to excerpt - the whole book is interesting. And yes, undoubtedly there are many oversimplifications that is inherent in presenting complex problems in short vignettes - but Home: A Hymn to the Planet and Humanity is a good starting point for many of us in understanding the environmental problems of today.
Here are 5 short segments from the book, published on Neatorama with permission:
Blocks of flats on Seoul's south bank, South Korea
The world’s population quadrupled over the course of the 20th century and now stands at 6.7 billion. Since 2000 it has increased by 700 million, which is equivalent to the entire population rise in the 19th century. In the 18th century, it rose by a mere 200 million. As their numbers have grown, human beings have gravitated increasingly toward cities, which have also grown as a result. Since 2007, more than one in two of us live in a town or city.
There are more people in some of the bigger cities – such as Tokyo, with its population of 35 million – than in some countries as a whole. In developing countries, urban growth can occur at a rate that is simply mind-boggling. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, had a population of 300,000 in 1950, whereas today the figure stands at more than 15 million: a fiftyfold increase in fifty years. Boom towns such as Dhaka face immense problems in terms of infrastructure including electricity, drinking water, and waste disposal.
Nevertheless, this demographic explosion and the urbanization linked to it seem also to hold part of the solution. Birth rates have been shown to be decreasing over a great many parts of the globe, particularly in urban areas. The current average stands at 2.6, with significant regional disparities. In many Western countries, it has even fallen below 2.1, the threshold for population increase. The world population is shrinking and ageing. Whereas earlier projections for the coming decades envisaged a global population of 12 billion, the estimate has fallen and it is now thought that the population should stabilize at around 9 billion by 2050.
This seems to be due to the fact that city-dwellers generally have better access to education. For many women, in particular, this signifies access to information and to methods of contraception. It also means that these women are often able to work in addition to having a family. Having children becomes a choice, to be balanced against a career, for example. Urban life, moreover, changes people’s behavior and living requirements: couples have fewer children than those living in the country since they no longer need help in the fields. This reduction in the birth rate responds to one of the major challenges of the century: that of population control as a means of successfully feeding the world and saving the planet.
Oil fields near Bakersfield, California, USA
Oil will not run out suddenly. It will be a slow, agonizing decline. As oil becomes scarcer its price will rise, and what used to be very cheap will become expensive. Society will be wholly transformed.
The reason for this is simple: a finite planet has finite resources. Once we have consumed all of our oil and other primary materials, there will be nothing left. Oil is not a renewable resource on any timescale comparable to its rate of consumption. The chemical reactions which led to its formation occurred over millions of years.
There are, undoubtedly, oil deposits that remain to be discovered. But the easiest have already been found and exploited. Each year, we consume more oil than we find. This is clearly going to cause problems.
It is not only a question of when oil will run out, but how society will change as it does. A world in which oil is much rarer – and therefore costlier – will be different from our own. The modern petrochemical industry will have to change dramatically: everything from lipsticks to fertilizers and plastics of all types will either be made differently or not at all. Transport will obviously become more expensive. This will spell the end of the West’s huge retail and supermarket networks, since these rely on road transportation and economies of scale. The price of imported products will rise, and international tourism will return to what it used to be in previous centuries: a luxury for the privileged few. Competition for access to the last remaining oil deposits will increase, and may lead to conflict.
These developments are inevitable, and will only be temporarily delayed by the current recession which is slowing down the global economy. Developing renewable forms of energy and reducing consumption are the two most basic measures we can take to prepare ourselves.
What is the current state of world fisheries?
How important is fish to the average diet?
Moshav (co-operative village) farm at Nahalal, Jezrael plain, Israel
Today a third of humanity is suffering from water scarcity. Specialists use the term “water stress” when the demand for water exceeds the available freshwater supply by 10%. Although 10% of renewable resource may not seem like much, we should not forget that before mankind’s invention, 100% of this water was used by ecosystems. This extra demand is enough to dry a water course, drain a spring, or prevent the replenishment of groundwater.
While the population of Canada and the Amazon or Congo basin have a plentiful water supply, the people of the Mediterranean basin, Central Asia and Mexico are at greater risk of scarcity. The particular problem with water is that it is difficult to transport in large quantities over great distances.
One solution is to use the same water several times. An increasing number of industries are reusing water, retreating it up to 30 times in some cases. Domestic washwater, known as “greywater,” can be reused to water a garden or flush a toilet, reserving drinkable water for human consumption, cooking, or washing. In countries where water is scarce, wastewater from cities is retreated for use in agriculture. In Israel, for example, where the average rainfall is 1 inch (25 mm) a year, 70% of wastewater is recycled, allowing 49,000 acres (20,000 hectares) of land to be watered.
There are many other ways of saving water, especially by being aware of how much of it we consume. Some of this water is invisible: it is used to make a product, but is not present in the product itself. This is called virtual water. One pound of grain means hundreds of gallons of irrigation water; a pair of cotton jeans require 2,860 gallons (10,850 liters) of water; a cup of coffee 9 gallons (35 liters); a sheet of paper 2.5 gallons (10 liters). A single tomato contains 3.5 gallons (13 liters) of virtual water, which is more than many people use in a day. Paradoxically, some countries that face water scarcity are actually exporting some of their limited water resources in the form of agricultural or manufactured products.
Volcano of Rano Kau, Easter Island, Chile
Sooner or later, societies disappear and are replaced by new ones. As our own society enters a critical phase, what lessons can be learned from those that preceded us? One example that has been extensively studied is Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean. The island was once home to a flourishing civilization, which reached its peak in around 1500, but it subsequently experienced a rapid decline, losing four fifths of its population in just one century. According to the American expert Jared Diamond, the explanation lies principally in the fact that the people deforested their entire land. Without trees, they were no longer able to build fishing boats, and crucially the soil was eroded. As the situation worsened, the people began fighting among themselves, and developed bizarre religious practices. In an effort to erect increasingly gigantic statutes, they cut down more and more trees, accelerating their demise.
Diamond also studied a number of other civilizations that vanished largely as a result of environmental factors, such as the Maya and Babylonians, who exhausted their land, and the Greenland Vikings, who could not adapt to the cooler climate. While these societies did not vanish because of environmental damage alone, it certainly weakened their economic and social structures and created vicious cycles that ultimately proved fatal. The same pattern could easily be applied to modern society.
In Diamond’s analysis, the factors leading to a society’s collapse seem to be quite clearly set out every time. But for political, religious, or social reasons, the society is incapable of reacting and taking adequate measures to ensure its survival. What would the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree have been thinking? Another expert in the history of civilizations, the British historian Arnold Toynbee, wrote that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder” – in other words, from their inability to resolve their internal crises.
Today most people agree that we are facing an environmental catastrophe. We need to change the course in which our society is heading, and remove the obstacles to that change. It is too late to bury our heads in the sand. It is also too late to be pessimistic.
Yann
Arthus-Bertrand published more than 40 books, including the multimillion-copy
international bestseller Earth from Above
Links: HOME official website | Watch the movie at YouTube | The book at Amazon
A well-insulated 20,000 square foot home complete with an airstrip and a Jacuzzi sounds really nice. This one is underground in an abandoned missile silo! It was once the home of an Atlas-F missile built for the Cold War, but it’s been converted into a luxury home. See seven such military installations now used as living spaces. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
If you’re like me, you have a major problem with cables taking over your home life. Here’s a great, visually interesting way to overkill the solution -a whole wall of outlets.
Buildings are creatively converted or utterly demolished all the time to make room for highways and other large-scale civic problems, but the laws vary on what can be done when a single hold-out structure stands alone against a sea of fat-cat developers, builders and architects who all want nothing more but for them to move.
Sometimes they successfully force out residents or bribe them with offers that range up to 20 times the value of the home and real estate – but in many cases they simply have to give up and build around them, creating so-called ‘nail houses’ that stand apart from their surroundings.
In some cases, these incredible stand-alone structures have huge fan bases of individuals who applaud their willingness to stand up for their property.
The home that once served as the set for Ferris’ friend Cameron’s home, in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, is for sale. You can refresh your memory by watching this scene.
The Ben Rose Home in Highland Park, Illinois, was designed by architects A. James Speyer and David Haid, and constructed in 1953. It is being listed by Sotheby’s for $2.3 million. More images are available here.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Frau.
Well, the market has fallen out from under everyone but it is still nice to dream, right? And who knows, with housing prices plummeting maybe you too will be able to afford one of these awesomely luxurious modern house designs. Part of what makes them so great is the variety of ways in which they take the limitations of a given site and turn them into incredible design opportunities.
Many designers must content themselves with imagining and drawing things that may never be built – very few can realize ultramodern home visions in the real world. Like a blast from the future, these ten architects have brought to life incredible houses that most of us could not even dream of – let alone afford.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
Photographer Kevin Bauman took exquisite photographs of 100 abandoned houses in Detroit, Michigan. He has managed to turn the economic crisis, in form of crumbling houses in various stages of disrepair, into an artwork.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by algonkin.
Jay Shafer is the creator and resident of the smallest house in the world, which he has proudly named Tumbleweed. Jay is an artist and architect who lives in his home in San Francisco. He sells plans for and builds tiny homes in sizes ranging from an extremely small 50 feet to a practically roomy 500 feet.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by larryfire.
Everyone loves a good secret passageway. The idea alone sparks curiosity and makes the brain buzz with thoughts of mystery and adventure.
Normally these hidden doors are relegated to ancient sites and historic buildings, but what if you could put one in your very own home?
Whether you have secrets to hide or just want to confuse guests, The Hidden Door Company specializes in creating practical secret doorways for the home.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
