Joy to the Home Blog

Getting ready for a Speed Date
TLC’s TV show hosts Nadia Geller and Bob Guiney

Bob Guiney, former reality show Bachelor (the only one who married), says you wouldn’t get married without dating, so why make your largest purchase without a “test drive?” (Bob has been happily married for four years.)

Nadia Geller, a designer who stages new home models, helps design and stage the homes while the owners take a 24 hour break. Some of the home sellers fell in love with their house all over after Nadia’s special touches.

The show airs tomorrow night on TLC at 8:30 PM Eastern.

Listen to a podcast of bloggers (including me!) interviewing the stars: Date My House Podcast 

Carbonized Bamboo Flooring Looks Like Traditional Hardwood

lthough bamboo is harder and more resistant to both moisture and termites, its also one of the most environmentally friendly and sustainable alternatives for flooring, with the potential to replace a huge majority of the hardwood trees that are rapidly disappearing around the world. But that’s not all bamboo has going for it. Here are some other advantages to using bamboo in your flooring situations.

Bamboo is one of the easiest types of flooring to install as a do-it-yourself project. It comes already sanded and finished, so there’s no cloud of dust or messy stains to deal with, which is a big advantage to the average homeowner–and to professional installers, for that matter. That means that installation also goes much faster, so the family’s lives aren’t disrupted nearly as long.

Bamboo is also cost effective, making it an even more attractive alternative flooring material, especially when you consider how beautiful bamboo floors are. They’re also tough and stable, regardless of whether they’re used exposed to high humidity or extremely arid conditions. When given a UV coating, bamboo floors are highly resistant to fading, as well. Finally bamboo also doesn’t absorb stains or dirt, so cleaning a bamboo floor is easy, usually only requiring a mop or sponge.

If you’re searching for a tough, beautiful affordable floor that and can also help save the planet, check out bamboo. You won’t be sorry!

Free interior design psychology information: Joy to the Home

Copyright © 2008 Jeanette Fisher

It’s a long-held custom among many cultures to remove your shoes when you enter a home. In Asian homes, for instance, it’s considered a gesture of respect for your host and a way to honor a house’s purity and cleanliness. On the other side of the world, it has been considered impermissible to enter someone else’s home without removing your shoes since the 15th century. However, for some reason, that custom has never been universally accepted in America–but there are some good reasons for considering starting that custom in your own home. Here are just a few:

Removing your shoes can be seen as a symbolic gesture, meant to represent kicking off the cares and worries of the outside world when you enter the home. It’s a way to emphasize and honor the role of the home as a sanctuary–a place of peace and refuge away from the insanity of the world at large.

At a more practical level, there can be no doubt that removing shoes will bring less dirt and small rocks into the house, thereby lessening the chance that those stones will leave gouges in hardwood floors and dirtying up the carpets. You’ll also spend less of your time having to clean those floors if people remove their shoes when they walk in the door.

On the physical front, there is much to be said for the pure sensation of walking around the house in your bare feet and feeling the sensation of the hardwood or other floor coverings. As an added benefit, your hardwood floors will actually receive a gentle buffing as they’re being walked on by bare feet in the warmer seasons or by feet covered by soft slippers when the temperature begins to go down in the winter months.

Infants and young children with more sensitive immune systems inhale cleaner indoor air in homes where everyone removes their shoes at the front door, because the soles of shoes track in whatever you’ve been walking in, including pesticides and other pollutants.This is especially true for very young children, who generally spend more time on the floor than other family members. Your pets will benefit from the healthier home environment, as well.

For the health of your family, both physically and psychologically, as well as a way to save clean-up time and energy, you may find it well worth your while to consider instituting a “shoes off” policy in your own home.

Copyright © 2008 Jeanette J. Fisher

Jeanette

Home Decorating Interior Design Ideas 

My latest interior design book has a new cover and subtitle and is finally ready for print!

Residential Design Guide book 

The underground cistern in Istanbul features vandalized marble columns. This ancient building with a water floor houses fine dining. The lighting and water reflection create interesting colors and shadows. This photograph is the inspiration for a bathroom remodeling project.

Joy to your home in 2008!

Jeanette

See more ancient Greek art in Seven Secrets to Glorious Home Design

I made a new friend on Facebook through Five Degrees of Separation. Check out Lynn Whitsitt’s German Castles.

I can’t wait to go see German castles. I took pictures of Aimee’s Castle and Scotty’s Castle in California and used them to write the chapter in Seven Secrets to Glorious Home Design on “What the Eccentrics Knew.”

My friend Alexander Christiani invited me to go drive his race car in Germany. I wonder what will be the most fun, castles or cars?

This stone fountain looks ancient. In fact, the entire castle-like setting is a new home in Southern California. We have castles, too!

Joy,

Jeanette

Every year many of us get wrapped up in holiday decorating. Whether you plan a big party of a small gathering, you need not get distressed over decorating for Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate.

You can leave some of your Christmas ornaments packed. You don’t need to use all your finery every year. In fact, I found that when we skipped Christmas decorating and spent the holidays out of town, we appreciated our holiday decorations more the next year.

While decorating for Christmas, listen to spiritual music.  You will be amazed at how the daunting task of over-decorating becomes a celebration of love.

Celebrate life and live with love. I’m working on a new website that speaks to our spiritual side: Sacred Era.

Joy,

Jeanette 

I’ve been busy writing a new book, which went to print today, Seven Secrets to Glorious Home Design.

I tried to get a domain name for the title, but all the seven secrets domains are taken by adsense junk sites.

In the meantime, I’ll test a couple of sites I’ve had for awhile:

Joy Design Science, a site that is intended to cover design psychology, design philosophy, and the power of home and commnunity, and Residential Design Guide, a site that examines differing house building styles.

Joy,

Jeanette

Happy Halloween! What’s your dream castle look like?

If you have not downloaded your free copy of The Power of Home, do it soon. Some of the text was used in my new book Seven Secrets to Glorious Home Design, which goes to print today and the free report may be taken down because of publishing rights. For more about The Power of Home, see the Home Decorating Interior Design Ideas Newsletter.

Joy,

Jeanette

My daughter-in-law Natalie hosted a fun party last night. I went as the “Divine Design Psychic.”

Scary! Big hair makes me look weird. The color isn’t as bad as the cut.

The best costume award went to the book worm wearing a copy of “The Wizard of Oz.” We had two Dorothys at the party and a bunch of Harry Potters.

Halloween is a time when anyone can be a kid at heart. You can celebrate the spookiest holiday of them all to your heart’s content without spending a lot. With a little thought, you can create great-looking Halloween decorations. You’re limited only by your imagination.

Spooky Halloween Decorating Tips

Halloween can be a wonderful time for decorating, since it’s so different from any other holiday, and it has really taken off as a chance to let people’s imaginations run wild over the past few years. Here are a few ideas for adding some spooky Halloween spirit to your home:

You can easily make a very attractive display by carving holes in apples the size of votive candles and then allowing the candles to float in a large glass punch bowl, galvanized metal bucket, or tub. It can be especially effective when all the lights are dimmed.

If you’re having a Halloween get-together, you can keep the punch cold by freezing water in a rubber glove and then adding it to the punch bowl. It will effectively keep the punch from getting too warm while adding a wonderfully macabre touch to your table decorations.

Another fun thing you can do to dress up your punch bowl is to add plastic spiders and other creepy crawly things to your ice cubes by simply adding them to the water when you put your ice cube trays in the refrigerator. They’ll add a nice eerie touch of holiday spookiness to your Halloween party.

On the outside of your home, make sure to add plenty of dry leaves around the porch. Their crunch and dead looks will make your Halloween decorations even more convincing, lending a haunted-house look to your holiday décor.

A Tree for Halloween?

Another unusual, but effective decoration is a Halloween tree. Manufacturers turn out strings of outdoor lights for almost every holiday nowadays, so it won’t be hard to find orange lights and other spooky decorations for your tree. Just check your local home improvement center or large department store. Your kids will also have a wonderful time helping to create skeletons, bats, witches, and all the other assorted characters that have a special place at Halloween time to hang on your tree. Take a standard artificial Christmas tree as your starting point and then let your imagination run wild.

If you have railings on your porch, you can also find Halloween-colored garland to thread through the rails at the same store where you found your Halloween lights for the tree. It can be especially potent when combined with your spookily decorated Halloween tree.

There’s an ever increasing variety of Halloween-related decorating choices to add spookiness to your holiday décor. You can put a special welcome mat in front of your door, you can get stick-on figures for your windows, you can get motion sensitive manikins that will make scary noises and move around when someone gets too close, and you can even buy fog machines to turn your front porch into one of the spookiest places in town on Halloween night.

Your decorations don’t need to be expensive, however. Even small touches like painting river rocks along your walkway orange and adding figures or phrases like “boo” can help add to the overall ambience of your Halloween decorating. If you have a tall tree branch hanging in your garden, hang a stuffed sheet “ghost” and attach it to a hidden rope. Have someone hide and pull the rope back and forth to make the ghost move.

The bottom line: have fun with it. Halloween may be thought of as a children’s holiday, but it can make for some of the most fun decorating that an adult can do every year! Free holiday decorating tips and Home Decorating Interior Design Ideas.

Happy Halloween!

Jeanette