Luxury Housing Trends & Home Improvement Ideas

Though they can be handy from time to time, handheld vacuum cleaners aren’t exactly a booming business. Maybe that’s why manufacturers are tinkering with their design to make them stylish as well as functional. The sleek $130 Alessi hand vacuum is made from plastic and stainless steel with an almost sculptural shape. I suppose when you’re not using it, you’re supposed to mount it on your coffee table to impress guests (yeah, that’ll be happening). At the very least, it might look better than the old Dust Buster you’ve got hanging from the wall in a forgotten corner.

The vacuum is available at Kitchen Kapers and other online stores.

Whether you’re installing a new driveway to a new home or trying to figure out what to do with an old worn existing drive, you have several options for materials. Popular choices are gravel, asphalt, and concrete, while more exotic options are brick, patterned concrete, or pre-cast pavers.

Depending on the size of the driveway you need and the climate you live in, gravel can be a very economical choice. It starts out at about 50 cents a square foot, which makes it the cheapest driveway material (asphalt starts at about $1 per square foot and concrete about $2–less if you install it yourself). Gravel can make a lot of sense if you have a long driveway with a lot of space to cover. There are some downsides to the material however:

• Gravel is a fairly high-maintenance surface.

• It’s hard to keep it on grades of more than 8%.
• Gravel tends to escape its boundaries, and it can wreck havoc with your lawn mower.

If well-maintained, though, gravel can be a reasonable choice, especially with homes on acreage where it can be quite a trek off the main road to the front door of the house.

Source: IdeaWise Garages: Inspiration & Information for Do-It-Yourselfers

Just because you live in an apartment, condominium, or small house doesn’t mean you don’t want to entertain, right? But it can be hard fitting furnishings for lots of people into a small home. And what to do you with all those chairs when your guests are gone? Well, these Alvar Aalto stacking stools are an option.

Made by Herman Miller, the stools feature an interlocking stackable design that lets you store several pieces in a tight little column. The stools are $149 each from Design Within Reach, and they are available in birch or black. There’s no limit to how many you can stack (until you hit the ceiling, I guess), so you can outfit an entire family get together if you want.

DWR

This fire truck bar set from Bed Bath & Beyond is more of a gift idea than a home improvement, but it’s cute, so I’m writing about it here. Fun for anyone with a home bar and who entertains often, the bar set is made from stainless steel with a silver finish, and it’s based on the design of the 1928 model Dodge fire engine.

The accessories are neatly “hidden” within the frame of the truck. The 16.5 ounce cocktail shaker is on the back. The shot glass is a bucket hanging from the side. The ice tongs are the ladder, the corkscrew is the steering wheel, and drink stirrers are neatly stored on the opposite side from the ladder. There’s also a bottle opener hidden away in there somewhere. The entire fire engine measures 12″ long, and the set is available for $30. Drink up!

Bed Bath & Beyond

Shoveling snow out of the driveway may have been okay when you were a kid (though even then you probably hated it), but as you get older and the back is a little less flexible, doing it by hand is a little less enticing (okay, it plain sucks). If you’re willing to invest a couple hundred dollars, you can get an electric snow thrower that takes a lot of the man-power out of the job.

The Toro 1800 12 Amp Electric Curve Snow Thrower, aside from having a name longer than your driveway, has quite a few positive reviews over at Amazon.

According to the product description, it can “clear 4 inches of snow off a 50-by-20-foot driveway in 10 minutes flat.” It looks like you control it a bit like a floor buffer (for those of you without military service who didn’t have to wax the floors in the barracks, I guess you could compare it to a lawn mower too), holding down the handle to get it to go and releasing it to stop. The rotary blades spin and throw snow up to 30 feet. Though it’s doubtlessly not as powerful as a gas-powered model, one review noted that it could handle snow up to 2 feet.

The MSRP is $380 (though Amazon had it for more than $100 off when I looked): Toro 1800 Electric Snow Thrower

Tired of washing loads of nothing more than towels? Well, an automatic hand dryer for your bathroom might cut down on the burden a little bit. In addition to the less-laundry-for-you-to-do perk, hand dryers are more sanitary than other options, especially if your whole family is reusing the same towel several days in a row. Even though you’ve (hopefully) just washed your hands, towels harbor germs and mildew when they are continually dampened. So, you take your clean hands and promptly get them grimed up again when you’re just trying to dry them.

This unit has motion sensors, so you don’t have to chance a germ jumping onto your hands when you start up the dryer. It whooshes out heat with 1,500 watts of power, which is apparently the same intensity as commercial hand dryers. According to the retailer’s site, the wall-mounted unit plugs into ordinary outlets, so no complicated installation process is required.

The price is $65 from SmartHome:

Automatic Hand Dryer

You’ve probably heard of hot water heaters having leaks, but in some conditions, they can even burst. An incident like that is exactly what prompted the folks at Liquid Breakers to come up with the Omni Breaker Panel, which is sort of like a circuit breaker for your hot water heater. The device electronically monitors and controls a series of valves that you install in your home’s plumbing system (works for condos as well as houses). If something happens, the Liquid Breaker will shut off the flow of water. This prevents 400 gallons of water dumping into your home if the heater bursts.

The system will alert if you something goes awry when you’re not home (via e-mail or text messages), and you can shut off the water from any computer with Internet access. (Yes, now even your water heater is online… talk about the connected house.) The device costs about $1,000 for the average home.

http://www.liquidbreaker.com

If you’re a wine lover looking for a mini bar, you can combine both your interests with this “barrel head bar” from Master Garden Products (I’m not sure what mini bars have to do with gardening, but kicking back a few before you head out to pull weeds might improve the experience).

Made from a recycled oak wine barrel, the wall-mounted bar sports cedar wood shelves and stainless steel hinges. There’s enough room inside to hold a couple of bottles and glasses for everyone. The door folds up when it’s time to close the bar. The piece sells for just under $150.

Master Garden Products

LG Electronics’ Steam Washer made it into Popular Science’s Top 100 Product Innovations of the Year. The washing machine uses a steam generator, projecting the steam into the 4-cubic-foot wash tub. You can try the 20-minute-steam-only cycle to de-wrinkle your favorite shirt, or you can use the steam-and-water cycle that “relaxes the clothes’ fibers, allowing more moisture to penetrate than with water alone.”

The laundry appliance is a water saver, too, using 1 gallon less per load than your standard washing machine. The Steam Washer is available with a matching dryer, and there’s even a remote control so you don’t have to push all those tedious buttons on the machine yourself.

The washer will run you $1,600 (hey, who said steam was cheap?).

LG Electronics

While it’s true that some birds fly south for the winter, others stick around, scavenging for seeds and worms all year round. That’s particularly true here in the Pacific Northwest where we never get massive snow dumps (or tiny snow dumps for that matter). That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get chilly outside now and then. If you’d like to attract birds to your yard all year around, you can put out a feeder, of course, but you can also try something fun in the winter, such as this heated bird bath.

Available in deck-mounted or free-standing versions, the 14″ diameter bath keeps water from freezing even when it’s 20º below zero. The built in thermostat saves energy on warmer days and only turns on the bath when the temperature drops. The cozy bird sanctuary starts at $59.95 from Gardeners Supply:

Heated Birdbath