The hot chocolate with marshmallow hearts and sugar-dusted pecan linzer cookies on the magazine’s cover look good. So do the Quick Jambalaya (prep time: 10 minutes) and buttermilk biscuits in the “What’s for dinner?” section. But what you really want to chow down on — visually — in the February issue of Martha Stewart Living is Martha’s basement.
The diva of organization takes readers into the bowels of her 1925 Colonial-style four-bedroom house in Bedford, N.Y. The space was unfinished, shod in dirt and low in height, some of it crawl space — until Stewart had her way with that 2,600 square feet. She turned the cavernous space into her underground command center.
She has “a professionally equipped laundry room” down there, a room for crafts and gift-wrapping, a couple of storage rooms, a bathroom and wine cellar. Her pipes/valves are labeled. Her brooms and mops hang tidily from wall hooks. Rolling food storage bins (from restaurant-supply stores) are her recycling containers. She stores her extra dining chairs on raised aluminum pallets, should the basement get water. She decants her cleaning supplies into “attractive, manageable containers.” And yes, the sight of Martha’s factory-basement will make you chuckle. But after you stop, you’re bound to find one or two nifty ideas (for storing, stashing, organizing) to implement in your own lower level.
INSULATION AND HORROR: Weekend warriors who have an older home with not-so-great insulation in the walls will find an excellent piece on how to retrofit insulation into the house in the January/February issue of This Old House. The story (“Warming Up the Room”) gives readers the lowdown on a number of insulation choices (expanding foam, batts, loose fill, etc.).
And then, to get psyched for the project, be sure to flip to the back of the magazine for TOH’s “Black-and-Blue Thumb Awards 2007.” The magazine bestows blooper awards on 13 warriors who have “screwed up worse” than socially acceptable in warrior circles.
There’s the guy who “fixed” a hole in his apartment floor with 120 pounds of dry dog food, topped with concrete. (The ceiling caved in one year later on the person downstairs.) And the guy on the roof with the air compressed nail gun who slipped and shot a 4-inch spike “through his pants and into the roof — via his left testicle.” Paramedics had to pry him loose from the roof.
SOFT AS BAMBOO?: What’s the softest towel in the land? It’s made from bamboo (believe it or not), according to the Winter issue of ShopSmart. (That’s a new quarterly shopping magazine targeted to women from the publishers of Consumer Reports.) And the designated favorite bamboo towel is from Lands’ End. The magazine also delivers its choices on microwave ovens, cookware sets, Bluetooth phones and diaper pails, among other things.
OPULENCE IN 1,000 SQUARE FEET? New York interior designer Todd Romano shows how (in the January/February issue of Elle Decor) in his own Upper East Side one-bedroom digs where Louis XV armchairs, a George III console, big-deal draperies and a collection of early 19th Century Wedgwood Queen’s Ware dare to share the same little space.
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Romano used a variety of “space-enhancing visual tricks” to coax a feeling of grandeur. Among them: installing 8-foot-tall custom-made doors that “seem to raise the ceiling” and painting the interiors of bookcases black “so they appear to recede into the walls.”
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