Create Enough Space for Your House

Large space is an important things to build comfort home. First step is consider how wide your land and how far your house with your neighbor. Enough space also support health house. The necessity of large space for building grows are important to consider of our building grow. Someday, we will build another room for another functions, such as if we need to build another room for our children, of guest room.

In another case, the lost of building space function will make another impact and problems in the future. Based on this case, so we need to optimize our design to avoid that problems. Followed picture is a design for enough building space. The green color is the minimum proportional for the space. We can add more large space if we have planned to build another room such as garage or garden.

Steampunkish Design Templates

While I was brainstorming about what to do with my kitchen cabinets, you may have noticed the nice piece of clip art that I'm considering for a stencil. Since I'm not that graphically talented (notice the lovely stock blog template...) I've been looking around for ideas and templates to use for projects.

The best resource I've found, so far, are the Dover Electronic Clip Art CD-ROMs & Books. They come with a coloring book sized book of designs (useful for looking through and dreaming about projects while *not* in front of your computer) and a CD with the designs in 6 different formats (gif, jpg, tif, eps, pct, and bmp). The image quality is high and the designs I was drawn to will be relatively easy to enlarge to the size I need for projects.

I ordered a couple -- one on 293 Art Nouveau Designs and another simply called Old-Fashioned Frames. I considered some of the Victorian ones, but they looked a bit too fussy for DIY projects.

I was disappointed in the Art Nouveau ones -- not they weren't wonderfully Art Nouveau, I'm just not sure I realized quite how *floral* Art Nouveau graphic design was. (The image at the top of this post was one of the better Art Nouveau clips.) Old fashioned frames yielded the best options for the sort of projects I'm thinking about. The nice thing about the old-fashioned frame set in particular was that it has a breadth of types of frames -- Victorian, Art Nouveau, geometric, scrollworks, simple, ornate, etc. Something for everyone and every project that requires framing. I can see some of Mr. von Slatt's Electrolytic Etchings with these designs. Or perhaps you'd use one to incorporate a little bit of steampunk "bling" to your laptop casing.

The images are royalty free, including for web use (up to 10 images per "publication"), so feel to grab the ones I'm using in this post to get you started.


Old-Fashioned Frames CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art) via Amazon.

Old Charles Street Jail

NYTimes.com today has a slideshow of Boston's Old Charles Street Jail which has been turned into a hotel. Many of the design elements -- exposed brick, iron bars -- would work well in a steampunk home.

More inspiration posts.

ebay scavenging...

Spent some time today poking around Ebay looking for things to use in the house. Thought I'd share these with you -- but there are plenty, plenty more.




Large Shell Casings
I'm not sure what you would do with these, but I thought they were neat. Bud vases, perhaps?




Antique Switch Plate

Just the switch part, without the cover plate, costs $35 new... so far this is a steal. And way cool. I'm going to bid on it for my hallway.

Also worth checking out is this Lightning Rod -- I can't get an image, and I can't tell if it's antique or not from the description, but it does look pretty unique.

The Steampunk Interiors of Tuomas Korpi

I recently ran across a link to Tuomas Korpi's artwork on the Steampunk Forums. I love the broken down magnificence. The light quality is wonderful -- all icy grey or warm sunshine. (Too bad we can't all have vaulted glass domes in our homes...)



Tuomas says I am huge fan of steampunk myself and I certainly consider some of my works as a steampunk - well at least I've tried to capture the atmosphere and style of applying something 18-19th century technology and roman or english and soviet architecture etc. to huge scale of buildings etc.

His interiors come from his imagination, inspired by images he sees online.

He doesn't sell prints, but will sell high resolution images for printing for about $50 each. (Use the contact email on his website to discuss specifics with Tuomas.)

Other steampunk art posts.

Hundertwasser's Incinerator Works, Vienna

I was struck by the steampunk whimsy of this incinerator works in Vienna, designed by architect and artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Most of his other work isn't very steampunk, but I liked the brass pipe, the swirling mural, and the minaret on top.

(thanks to my sister for pointing out Hundertwasser's work.)

Drains of Canada -- steampunk landscapes

Ben pointed me to this fascinating interview of Michael Cook, an urban explorer, on BLGBLOG today. ("Drains of Canada")

It's fascinating. Poke through some of the pictures -- I can't believe the urban drain system is this steampunk. Old brickworks -- rusty hydraulics -- arches -- pinpoints of light in the dark -- dirt and grime -- cogs and gears. Inspiring.

Robert Houston's Colonial Steampunk

I received an email from a gentleman by the name of Robert Houston last night:

A very good friend of mine just sent me a link to your blog a week or so ago, this after I mentioned to him that my living room (I'm slowly but steadily remodeling my entire house) was shaping up in the mode of an English gentleman's club.

I must admit that I have never heard of steampunk before, a deficit in my knowledge of contemporary culture. I was quite taken with what I read on your blog and did some subsequent exploring. I myself am an artist (sculptor and painter) and a punk rocker from the 80's.

I was amused by Robert's realization that his living room might be steampunk, because I've had the same conversation many times, most recently with the Edison Bar's Andrew Meieran. (It's this experience of knowing what you want your house to look and feel like, having someone introduce you to steampunk, and saying "so that's what you call it!"

Robert sent along some pictures of his living room, which I've dubbed "Colonial Steampunk":


After all, not many gentleman's club's of the 1890s would have yellow bookcases and saltillo tiles -- unless you happened to be in Mexico. I like how it integrates the colors and materials of the new world with the furniture and styles of the old world.

It's still a work in progress -- he's finishing all the saltillo tiles by hand -- but I think it will be lovely when it is done. Do click on the above picture for a larger version, and zoom around the room for more details.

Robert also built his wife a fountain that is nicely colonial steampunk:



Its wood cast concrete and copper. Water drips from inside the roof down the wires holding the copper candle holders and over them. This is a steampunk object all the way even though I didn't know it....

Most of Robert's artwork is in more of a folk art tradition, but this unfolding hexagon box reminds me of something a Victorian magician would use:



He also has an intuitive grasp of the punk in steampunk:

I think that the real problem today is that mass production, plastic and the bottom line have not only homogenized our culture but have completely separated us from craft. Skilled labor barely exists now as manufacturing gets outsourced to the 3rd world... When I was looking at the steampunk sites I felt that what people are looking for here is a return to quality, a return to a way of living where 'how' your living is important. The punk attitude of rejecting convention and I do as I please is a perfect fit as modern culture continues its race to the bottom for everyone who is not a multi multi millionaire.

Welcome to steampunk, Robert!

Remember -- I'd love to see and share pictures of your homes, workshops, and home projects. You can always contact me as saracarl -at- gmail dot com.

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An Attractive Small Kitchen

Small kitchen with suitable structuring are an ideal choose for small family whom want to buy or rent small house. Good room structuring is the main key of health kitchen, we can reduce the size of the kitchen, but don't forget to look lively about the health of the kitchen or the house owner, and also the safety. Place the gas burner near the ventilation or blower fan to guarantee the safety. Use hanging cabinet above the gas burner, count the high of the cabinet, so we can reaching anything well.
Place wash basin near the window, so we can investigate well when we wash the vegetables, cooking tools or eating tools. To make the room more comfortable, just use hanging picture on the wall, use suitable wall color.
The design was taken from www.astudio.id.or.id.

Kitchen Cabinets

While out refrigerator shopping today, the question under discussion was "how do you make it work in our kitchen?"

Now, my house was built in the late 1960s. The solid wood cabinets, brass "bamboo" looking hardware, and white speckled formica are original, although the cabinets were painted white before we bought it. A couple of years ago we had a yellow and white checkerboard linoleum tile floor installed, which I still love. "Not so steampunk", I hear you thinking, and you are right!

So what to do? I've dreamed about steampunk kitchens before -- all marble countertops and custom wood cabinets, sigh. Fundamentally, though, I am too cheap to get custom cabinets made, yet find most of the cabinets on the market today of an inferior quality to the solid wood ones that are currently in the house.

The best option I've come up with is to paint the existing cabinets. We happened to drop by some friends' today, and they were having their kitchen cabinets painted for around $500 (plus materials). This seems quite economical to me, and we wouldn't even have to do it ourselves.

The color I was thinking of was black. I'm a bit color shy, and black is definitely dramatic, so I went looking for some pictures of other's black cabinets to see how it might look. Here's what I found:



Nice, huh? I think the trick to keeping this looking good is the light colored countertops, walls and floor.



Probably more like what my cabinets would look like... not horrible, but not great. I think the key would be to stay away from a high gloss paint. (But maybe not???)



I found the above at a designer's site, and Ben loved it. Instead of going for light colored countertops, the designer opted for black countertops and light colored doors. An interesting idea, for sure.

In addition to just painting the cabinets, I thought that a painted/stenciled "frame" around each door might be nice. (The doors are entirely flat.) One possible design:



If we painted the cabinets black, I think I'd do this is a warm metallic -- aged brass, bronze, gold, copper -- to match the hardware.

To get something like the last kitchen picture above, we could paint the cabinet frames black, and then stencil the doors in brown or black on an antiqued background. (Ralph Lauren Paint has 4 different aging tints; wonder if that would work over our existing white paint?) Black formica or Corian countertops would complete the look, without blowing the budget.

I'd love feedback on this idea -- are black cabinets crazy? What about two tone ones? How hard is stenciling? Aging?

Bonus: This Old House has an article on painting kitchen cabinets.

Steampunk Refigerator, con't.

So I dragged the family to the suburbs today to check out the refrigerator I've been lusting over since the refrigerator post, the Elmira Stove Works Antique fridge:



Turns out it's a GE fridge that Elmira puts a fiberglass face on. (Slightly disappointing.) The price was just under $4000 US, and that was before a $500 charge for the nickel hardware. (There are a couple other models and different hardware types available, so prices vary. The picture above and what we saw are not the same fridge.)

I wrote down the model number and did some research. What we saw was a GE PSS25MGMBB, which is no longer for sale according to GE's website. The 2 alternatives GE suggested to me were both $1800, and a web search found someone who had bought one for $1500. (The web search also turned up some temperature control problems.) Hmmm....

As Ben said, would you mod a fridge for $3000?

So, scratch the Elmira Stove Works plan, and back to the drawing board. My new thought is one of the refrigerators you can install your own panels on:



GE has one for about $2600 (they are only charging about $200 above their basic model for giving you the privilege of putting your own face on). Surely for $1400 I can make, or find someone to make, a cool and interesting cabinet face for it.

Any sugestions on what, exactly I should do? I'm all ears.

Comfort House, Like a Resort

It's not too difficult to build the house with design a la resort or small tropical restaurant. The important think is how we design the place for outdoor dinning room in the middle the house. We can open the roof so we can see the sky from the dinning room. To connect dinning room with other room, we can build small bridge and build fishpond under the bridge.

Someone will feel more comfort and feel like home and they wouldn't reject to come once again in next time. High quality places like resort and unique places usually built with several consideration. Start from environtment support, shade trees, suitable material and color, and free sound and smoke pollution.

There are several consideration before building home sense like a resort:

• If we want to consult with a consultant or an architect worker, tell him/her that we want to build comfort home like a resort.
• Give him/her several sample pictures from several resort that we want to adopt.
• Let the indoor room more opened to make wide sense, use glasses or other transparent material so we can look at outside or dinning room.
  
• Try to place garden or green trees in strategic place, so we can look at the garden from outside or from other indoor room.
• If we had some sport equipments, we can place them near or in the same place with the garden or near the dinning room.

There are more way to make the sense of the house like a resort, just improve our imaginations to get other ideas. So, just do it!

Small Family House, Elegant but Simple Enough

Family based design, we don't need a large house, just simple but elegant design. The house divided in two floors, in first floor, on the left side, we can build the garage, on the right side, we can build the special room for the guest. In the middle and the front of the room, small front room sized 3 x 2,5 m to place the guest room. In the behind of the guest room, there are small door to connect with the living room, we can place the television and other electronics goods. Behind the guest room, there is the main sleeping room.
By splitting the behind room, we can divide the room to build dinning room and kitchen room. The stairs are placed in the behind of the garage. If we up the step into the second floors, we can directly entering the multifunction room. In this second room, there are three rooms, the multi functions room, and two children's sleeping room. We usually use the multi function room for entertainment room by completing with home theater or karaoke room. In the front of second floor, we can build the balcony, so we can looking around the house, by placing several flower or ivy, we can create the conditions of the house more comfort and more cool.
The design are adopted from www.astudio.id.or.id,

Aluminum Window, an alternative design with superior power and elegant form

Are you designing a modern home decoration? consider to choice a modern material such as aluminum,.Aluminum Window, an alternative design with superior power and elegant form. This window is an unique design, nowadays, designing aluminum framed windows, is a popular design, not only to perform the window more elegant but it had superior power, the windows are stainless and mothproof, so we can reduce the cost of maintenance or repairing for about five years. The forms of the windows also can be performed more flexible, we can adhesive the point of the frame. To perform the glass more wide, we can also conducting the glass, so the windows will looked more cleans and elegant. Here the picture:

The design are taken from www.astudio.id.or.id, the web are concern in architecture and graphic studio. we can also buying the materials above. In this time I would like to say Thanks!! for webmaster.

Interior Design with Wooden Art Decoration

Sometimes, we confused in configuring interior design, how to fill our room? with electronic goods or with handicraft? or maybe we just emptying the room to make the room more wide. In this case, we would like to design interior design with placing handicraft goods. People whom have high taste and desire in wooden art would place several wooden art decoration in their corner of the bar. Several wooden handicraft or traditional chairs with big wooden bench. Small cabinet in the corner of the room are placed to put the ceramics or other small rag doll or wooden doll. The picture was adopted from www.kabarejogja.com.

Javanese Tropic House Design

There are so many choice to design comfort and delightful house, after designing the house, we can adding suitable decoration in around the house and the details of the room, to create tropic impressive house, don't be afraid to try to planting several ivy flower above the roof. We can also put in order small stones to form small footpath. We can also create and forming the wall by sticking the split stones.
In above picture, we had adopted from www.kabarejogja.com, the design describe traditional and comfort house in tropical area. The location is in Markus Winarto's house in Jogja.

more hidden rooms

Just ran across this company, Hidden Passageway, that builds hidden doors and switches, whilst catching up on Brass Goggles Forum. A worthy follow up to my last post, no?

Hidden Rooms

Ben pointed me to a ruminative post on BLDG Blog about the fantasy of hidden rooms. This is an aspect I hadn't thought about, and while I can't think of a hidden room in the recent steampunk readings I've done (I'm sure you could think of some), it did remind me of the secret room Because We Can designed in the 3 Rings offices



So how could you use this idea in your home? I like the "bookshelves hiding a door" idea, like at the 3 Rings offices. We (well, mostly Ben, with some of my help), built shallow bookcases covering one wall of our guestbedroom:



I wonder if we could just extend them somehow to cover the door as well, giving the illusion of a room with no door? (Kind of missing the point, though, doesn't it, to have the hidden door on the *inside* of the room?)

Of course, there's always the hidden door at the back of a wardrobe.

Previous post on the 3 Rings Offices.

Planning The Tropical House

People whom want to planning to build tropical house must consider several conditions, first, they should provide grasses and trees around the house. Second, they should provide suitable material colors, such as brown to match with wood color. They wanted an interesting house and liked the idea of using different materials and bold colours. A big garage / workshop was a must and a concrete driveway to get the boat in and out.

They were outdoor people who hated the idea of living in an air-conditioned box. They wanted to especially take advantage of the rainforest views and bird life that comes with the vegetation.

The Art of Amy Weber

These art cards by Amy Weber are the most colorful steampunk art. Only 2.5" x 3.5", they are cute in so many ways -- I can imagine them decorating a child's room.

My favorite was the elephant:



She has a whole series of Alice in Wonderland characters done in a steampunk style. Many of her other works also combine steampunk and folk art styles.

She has different artwork scattered across Ebay, Etsy, DeviantArt, and CafePress (all linked from her blog), so be sure to poke around -- I'm sure you'll see something you like.

Other art posts at The Steampunk Home.

Elegant Dinning Room

Everyone want to create their room as good as possible, to create an elegant dinning room, we can design the room with several component that will improve price and the taste of the room, first, choose the material of the table. Round table or ellipse table will beautify the room, the suitable floor models, such as wooden floor to combine with the table will make the room more beautiful and comfortable. Furthermore, the right chairs such as European style metal chair will make the room more elegant. Second, choose the right place of the dinning room, place the dinning room near the kitchen, because we can reduce the meal steel warm at the time it provided. Third, choose the right decoration around the room, such as painting, ceramics, handicraft.
The picture was taken from www.sure-lock-homes.com gallery. With this design, we can describe and choose an elegant Dinning room.

Lethal Chandelier

M, over at Curious Expeditions, recently pointed me to this amazing church chandelier crafted of the detritus of war -- shell casings, swords, and cannon parts.

M asked if it could be considered Steampunk decor? With all the power invested in me simply by editing and writing this blog, I'm going to say "yes". After all, it is a Victorian object (chandelier), made from reused industrial age objects (cannons and shells), with a touch of both the Gothic (not required to be steampunk, but definitely does not hurt) and the post-apocalyptic. Oh, yes -- I forgot to mention it is brass.

The whole idea of "trench art" is fascinating -- jewelry and decorative home goods wrought by soliders in the trenches of WWI (and most every war before then). Two other expamples from the Curious Expedition post:

Cafe Design, Wooden Room, Simple Lightning

Designing cafe with wooden chair and table will make more comfortable for eating. We can use simple lightning to create romantic situations, we can also completing the room with live music room for celebrate special ceremony like birthday party or other small ceremony. We can use hall and long room with small table and 2 chairs each table. All of the decorations are made from wooden furniture, the floor are suited with other furniture, the wood floor.

GOURMET BURGER KITCHEN

Large Balcony, The Luxury Hotel Bedroom Design

Balcony are common used for looking around our house from above, so we can monitoring our children activities, for who want building large house with two floors, we can consider to build balcony, in front of our house or behind our house above swimming pool. From the balcony, we can look our swimming pool from our bedroom.
The balcony are seldom built because not all house design was completed with swimming pool. The balcony can be decorated with several flower and chairs. The design was taken from www.asis-leif.com.

Reception Room

The design for receptionist room are very important because, the suitable design will make hotels feel more comfort for guess to stay longer and they will continue in the same hotel on next journey in the same city. This design are taken from Bass Hotel Group, Windsor. The floor are made from wood, with suitable color of the chairs to matching with the floor.

Large Kitchen Design for Restaurant or Hotels

Kitchen are special room for cooking, the room has completed with several goods like stove, wash basin, and cooking tools places, the room also must completed by tables for food and other things. On the above room, it will make comfortable by placing smoke blower to make room not so hot.
This design was taken from www.asis-leif.com, used for inspiration for building large kitchen for hotel and restaurant. The suitable color like bright color will reduce electrician consumption.

Special Dinning Room With Live Picture

Designing the dinning room are very simple, the room doesn't have special design, the room has only need suitable dinning table with several chairs, the number of chairs are based of family number, we don't need big table with 30 chair, if we have only 3 people in our house, while we seldom invite other people.
If we want to design dinning room with large place specialized for big family or common room, we can choose the room near window and kitchen. Why, because we will feel more comfortable when have meal while looking around our out side of our house and sufficient light. We also consider to choose the room near the kitchen, because we will work more faster to carry the warm food from the kitchen.
The design was taken from www.asis-leif.com, used for considering to build large dinning room with live picture and near the kitchen.

Living Room Based on Future Design

Everyone who want to build large home sometime will confused about the design for their living room, if we had fault in designing, the room will not optimized well. To optimized we need to use several things we consider. First, how many room we want to build, two, what common material are used for building, and third, what model are we want to build.

This design are used to consider for who want to build large living room. The design are based on future design, with wood color floor, and decorated with sofa, the room also suitable for entertainment room by completing the room with home theater or television or other live music peripheral.

Not only for living room, the design also suitable for hall hotel room, the guesses will more feel comfortable with live music or watching film room.

The design was taken from www.asis-leif.com, with future design, if we want to change the design with Chinese design, we just change the color with red and gold color, and by completing the room with Chinese lamp, Chinese ceramics and furniture.