Mine are mostly small things -- like using a glass compote to hold cotton balls in the bathroom -- or a cut glass tumbler to hold q-tips. A hinged CD holder (similar to the tissue box above but a double version) used as a spot to store extra TP. I have a dresser that is a TV stand for our exercise room and the drawers have my gift wrap rolls and ribbons. A home office armoire that was going to be my craft and gift wrap station became a china cabinet when my dad moved and I suddenly acquired another set of china and crystal and I wasn't ready to make decisions on getting rid of anything. I have an old radio cabinet that I cleaned up and planned to put a new shelf and door in the top, but the stained glass panel hasn't been made. I'm thinking about painting it and redirecting it's new life for another room now. Another one I haven't done buy we've talked about a couple of times is to put a pull out bed in a window seat to add a guest bed in our gameroom. I think the inflating mattresses are going to keep that one from happening -- take less room and are probably cheaper and more comfortable now that we no longer have a sofa with the pullout mechanism to repurpose. If a new thread is started, we should try to link this one at the top so these ideas and photos aren't lost -- st least as long as we can.

Let's go back to building a state-of-the-art, quality frig - that 'll last for 50 years (or more). And it seems to me that we should contact the builders to tell them that that's what we want. Rather than purposely building ones that are intended to last for 10 years - then the rich guys in the Western world (and those not so rich) need to buy replacements. And keep people working. So - let's build as many frigs as now ... but with each planned to last five times as long ... which would cost very little more per frig to produce than now, so the price for a long-life frig would not be far above the current prices. And find ways that we can help the impoverished people of the world to have the other four frigs that we built. So, for a start, I could buy a frig for me ... and one for someone in the Third World ... and still have the price of at least two more frigs left sitting in my pocket (allowing the price of the fifth frig as extra cost associated with the higher quality: which is far more than enough). We could use some of the money that we use to build military hardware ... and people to operate it - to arrange for more of that humanitarian assistance. So that less of the world's food (and we're getting really close to shortages) goes to waste. As it is ... a lot of the too-early-died frigs get hauled to the junk heap ... and junk heaps are getting bigger (shouldn't be a problem in Canada, the world's second largest country - yet our largest city found it useful to ship their crap across the border for disposal down near Detroit). Ten - twenty per cent of the world are on perpetual diet - and they say that our kids will live shorter lives because they are getting obese ... and diabetic at more youthful ages. More allergies, too. While 80% of the world often suffers hunger. We in wealthy North America had better get used to demanding quality frigs and other products, as our parents were used to ... because many of us are going to be unemployed ... or employed for lower wages, as was the situation in our part of the world until recently and is for much of the other parts of the world still. If we in the wealthy West had gained a reputation for such helpfulness, we'd have built a different and much more positive reputation in the world. It costs a lot of precious petroleum to dig iron ore, haul it to be smelted, and smelters are fuel hogs, then to flatten, shape, and assemble into the final product, then to haul to the store. And as we make more parts of the frigs, cars, etc. of plastics - the feedstock for that is precious petroleum ... or precious natural gas. We take fuel from our gas tank - to make the plastic parts for the car! Plus ... all of that burning of fuel for manufacturing and hauling causes a lot more pollution ... and global warming. Which won't cause problems for my grandkids - I don't have any. But those with grandkids should give that part of the situation some serious thought, as well. It's important for us to be much more serious conservationists. Good wishes for considering ways that you can use the world's resources more carefully and to make full use of them rather following our earlier paths of being so wasteful. ole joyful

I'm confused, do you think the stink lingers because it's built in or do you think it would have happened with any microwave, but you'd just get rid of it if it was a cheapo on the counter? I've only had ones that sat on the counter and ones that were built in over the range with the fan for the range. Hated the location of both because I don't like appliances on the counter and want a hood rather than over range micro. However I never noticed one being more stinky that the other and we use ours a lot, almost daily for heating water, steaming veggies and reheating. I've made popcorn and it lingers and bacon which is even worse (banned hubby from that), but it eventually wet away without any major clean up. I've scorched popcorn, but never torched anything so I'm just trying to figure out is the problem due to the degree of torching or the style of micro? I planned to find a spot for a built in in my remodel, but if it's something about the style that makes the stink linger I wouldn't want that. Please enlighten me! Thanks.

Sure, and they all have memories and stories. Many years ago, I worked on one of Christopher Alexander's houses in the Berkeley hills. He used a lot of graduate student grunt labor. His team would take months to make even the most trivial decisions, with endless discussions. IIRC that house took five years to finish, and the couple who commissioned it got divorced before it was done. I once lived down the street from a pair of Thomas Gordon Smith post-modern numbers (the Tuscan and Laurentian), kind of a snarky send up of the typical suburban snout house. They were painted in a sort of Pompeii meets Miami Vice color scheme, with a neoclassical column in the middle of their wide garage doors, to break up the span. Sadly, one house was eventually repainted in boring colors, and some quirky exterior details removed. I never saw the insides, which were painted in huge classical style murals. When I first got married we went to England and saw the Colefax and Fowler building, the one with the Wyatt/Wyattville yellow drawing room. It's up on the second floor, via a dark, narrow, twisty flight of stairs papered with what look to be bad baroque paintings, but may be theatrical backdrops. The room itself isn't as wide or tall as it looks in pictures, and the arc of the ceiling is quite shallow. When I saw it, all the Nancy Lancaster furniture was gone, it was full of lamps. The paint work was a little obscured by nicotine and wood smoke, but you could still see the complicated oil glazing-- there are tiny pin point flecks of many colors in the glaze, which give an almost pearly effect. I think Fowler deliberately allowed the painters to use dirty brushes!