While perusing the latest news on Apartment Therapy, we saw their beautiful slideshow of cool bathrooms. You should check it out! One picture in particular captivated us:

It’s a modern and chic take onthe bathroom, with what appears to be slate floors and walls, lots of natural light and a monochromatic look accentuated with pops of color.

But it’s the bath-shower that really draws attention. We love the curved showerhead that allows water to pour down like a waterfall and we especially love the sunken tub. It makes the bathroom look 10 times bigger. The eye barely registers that it is a tub-shower combination.

The one thing we wonder though: Is it safe? Without any (visible) handrails, could stepping down into the tub be more of a falling risk? What do you think? Is a sunken tub-shower combination a fresh new look for the bathroom?

Ah, the great outdoors. There’s nothing like spending time outside, including — bathroom time? That’s right, there is such a thing as an outdoor bathroom (and no, we don’t mean a porta-potty). You’ve heard of fabulous outdoor kitchens to take your alfresco dining beyond grilling, or even outdoor showers, but have you can also expand your outdoor living to bathrooms?

Apartment Therapy recently featured some gorgeous outdoor bathrooms, and we have included two of our favorites below. It’s a different concept — the entire bathroom outdoors. An outside shower could be an unusual luxury, or a necessity if it was designed for rinsing off after swimming. But using the toilet outdoors? Brushing your teeth in the breeze? It might take some getting used to.

Needless to say, before you call your builder to build an outside bathroom, bear in mind that these are probably best for homes with lots of land and privacy. No one wants to see their next-door neighbor showering on the other side of the picket fence!

What do you think of outdoor bathrooms? Make sure to check out the rest of Apartment Therapy’s round-up of outdoor bathrooms!

Images courtesy of Apartment Therapy.

Everyone loves a clean house, but it can be so hard to achieve and maintain. Between work, family, friends, and social and volunteer activities, the last thing most people want to spend their precious free time doing is cleaning. But there’s nothing like the serenity of a perfectly clean house where everything is in its place.

Shelterpop offered up a list of cleaning tips for every room in the house. Here are our favorite tips of theirs for each room.

• Create an inbox in the entryway. This can serve as a repository for bills and other mail to take care of — no more mail strewn on the kitchen table! Don’t forget to recycle junk mail and toss unwanted credit card solicitations and the like in the shredder as soon as they arrive.
• Recycle all those magazines and newspapers in your living room. Unless you are a collector, you probably will never read old magazines. Clip or scan articles you find interesting and get rid of the rest.
• Pare down the “bag of bags” in the kitchen. Whether they are paper or plastic, trust us: there are more where they came from.
• Sleep stuff only in the bedroom. Shelterpop suggests removing “anything that doesn’t relate to your nocturnal life.” It’s a tall order, but really, what do you need in your bedroom? A bed, of course. Drawers and closets for storing clothes. A bedside table for a few  necessities. A chair or bench maybe. Keeping your bedroom clutter-free can only improve your sleeping.
• Streamline your products in the bathroom. Got through drawers and shelves and only keep the stuff that you use on a regular basis. Toss old or expired makeup, use up the lotion bottles that have just a tiny bit of lotion in them and ask your friends if they want that styling creme you bought at the salon a few months ago and only used once.

Check out Shelterpop to read the rest of their tips!

The bathroom may qualify as the most used room in the house — certainly the most necessary! Due to this, it seems like many homeowners  want to add on another bathroom (no more morning shower rush!) or remodel an existing bathroom (no more orange and purple tile!).

Via the New York Times, we found this cool product: it’s a bathroom in a box! From Bath Simple, it’s designed to take  the guesswork out of bathroom building and remodeling.

“Designing a bathroom takes an inordinate amount of time,” said John Crowley, a designer in Berkeley, Calif. “You have to get different pieces from a lot of different vendors.”

Mr. Crowley’s answer is a “bathroom in a box,” with every item needed for the job — paint, tile, fixtures, tub — arriving in one crate, ready to install. Customers of Mr. Crowley’s new online company, Bath Simple, answer a few questions about style and budget, enter measurements, then choose all items needed for anything from a simple powder room to an elaborate master bath.

Almost everything you need is in the box, from appliances to paint. The site allows you to make some choices regarding appliances and design and ships it to you, ready for your building professional to install.

It’s simple and perfect for a quick bathroom solution. What do you think?

Over at the Builder Blog, produced by the folks at our sister brand Integrity Windows and Doors, we recently interviewed Sal Alfano, the editorial director at Remodeling Magazine and the Journal of Light Construction. These titles may not be familiar to the average homeowner, but take it from us: they are very well-respected, widely read trade publications. If you’ve recently remodeled or renovated your home, your building professional probably read them to keep up with the industry.

Sal discussed many issues of importance to builders and remodelers, but there’s some valuable information in there for homeowners, as well. The following is an excerpt. To read the whole interview, please visit the Builder Blog.

What’s your favorite architectural style?
The American Four Square is one of my favorites, and I also like bungalows. And of course, working in New England, I saw a lot of Capes and Colonials. I spent a lot of time remodeling and adding on to classic Vermont farmhouses, many of which started out as post-and-beam Capes, and had at least two major additions by subsequent generations. In my experience, the original, which was built by grandpa, had the best bones, and it was all downhill from there. But during those years working for the design-build firm, which was operated by three architects, I built a lot of modern stuff, too.

Comparing cost to value, year after year, which remodeling projects stay near the top?
Replacements are always near the top. In fact, over the years, they have consistently outperformed additions and interior remodeling. That said, kitchens and baths are still the focus of a lot of remodeling activity, and they are the rooms that prospective buyers are most interested in.

Let’s talk footprint: Add on, bump out or work within the existing footprint?
The recession has really changed the way homeowners look at this issue. Big additions are simply too expensive, because they involve breaking ground, foundation work, and a lot of exterior matching to the existing home. Plus, permits are often harder to get. For the same money, you can often remodel within the existing footprint and end up with higher-quality finishes.

Do you think consumers are remodeling for function or style?
Back in 2005, homeowners were standing in line, waiting to get on the list for a major addition or whole-house remodel. Everybody wanted the best of everything and the sky was the limit. Those days are over. There’s more interest now in “need to do” projects than “want to do” projects. Even homeowners who have no intention of selling feel less wealthy because they are unsure of what their home is worth. So they are spending to repair and maintain, and postponing major makeovers. And credit is still hard to find.

I do believe, though, that there is a lot of pent-up demand out there. As soon as people feel comfortable about economic stability, they will start thinking about remodeling projects that create new space, different space, better space. That’s especially true if they aren’t planning to sell or aren’t sure they can get the value they want out of a sale. In that position, they’re likely to think, “Why not remodel?”

Is the formal living room dead?
That’s a more important question for a builder than a remodeler. One advantage remodelers have is that their clients have already spent some time living in the space and they know what works and what doesn’t, what they want to keep, what has to go, and what’s missing. They can’t always articulate it plainly, but a good remodeler who asks lots of questions and listens carefully to the answers eventually deciphers the message.

That said, in general I think spaces that are visually connected have been the norm for a while. Small, cozy spaces are still important, but there are ways to accomplish that without actually erecting walls between those spaces. Designers like Sarah Susanka have made those ideas accessible to the general public, but the design principles have been around for a long time.

In honor of our last post of 2010, we’ve decided to round up our most popular posts ever. Below are the top 10. Enjoy and we will see you next year for more great home living information! Thanks for reading this year.

• Built Around You: Laundry in a Closet
• Remodeling Using ‘Quality Over Quantity’
• Unusual homes: Cool conversions
• How To: Grow Tomatoes Upside Down
• Space-saving ideas for small spaces
• Built Around You: Stylish Bathroom Overhaul
• Small on Space, Big on Style
• New Uses for Old Windows
• Amazing Windows Created By Amazing Artists
• myMarvin Architect’s Challenge: Lake Cottage

Overwhelmed by cleaning? You’re not alone! We all have busy lives and jobs and sometimes in the evenings it can just seem too exhausting to think about cleaning. And then the weekend rolls around and, well, isn’t the weekend better devoted to the pursuit of fun rather than cleaning?

And so the grime continues to build. If you can do a little bit each day though, the rewards will come in the form of a clean, uncluttered and calm home. To get you started, Apartment Therapy offers an awesome tutorial for how to get (and keep!) your home clean.

Our favorite Apartment Therapy tips include dealing with things right away, whether they be credit card offers to be shredded or dirty dishes in the sink, finding an awesome soundtrack and setting a timer on your cleaning. Everyone has 15 minutes to clean before your favorite television show starts (or during the commercial breaks!). Anything is easier when you know it won’t go on forever.

They even offer a day-by-day cleaning guide that you can follow every month. No more excuses and no more weekends spent feeling guilty you haven’t been cleaning. Check it out!

Image courtesy of Todd Baker on Flickr

It’s the little things that count, right? To make the world a better, greener place, we can recycle, take shorter showers and drive less. There are a lot of things manufacturers can do to make sure we have products that make things a little more environmentally friendly (e.g., selling recyclable goods, low-flow showerheads and non-gas guzzlers). But here’s a good, green and simple idea: tube free TP.

Yep, toilet paper without the cardboard tube in the middle. You can still use it in your regular toilet paper holder, but the slightly useless tube isn’t there.

Think it doesn’t make a difference? According to Treehugger, those tubes add up to 160 MILLION pounds of trash per year. Imagine the difference it could make if toilet paper tubes went the way of the dodo!

Image courtesy of elycefeliz on Flickr.

Good taste and restraint can go a long way in designing a home remodeling project.

When the owners of this bathroom were looking to remodel, both they and architect Jean Rehkamp Larson understood that the existing layout offered the best configuration.

“The space was already well laid out, and as we weren’t making any changes to the size of the bathroom’s footprint, it was decided we could better improve the functionality in other ways,” says Rehkamp Larson.

Built in the 1890s, the home features a great deal of traditional detail, which the owners were keen to reference within the bathroom.

The Marvin windows used fit the style created throughout the bathroom. Marble countertops, bronze accents, and dark wood trim complete the look.

Kind of makes you want to see the rest of the house, doesn’t it?

[photo]

Marvin Windows was delighted to have architect and author Sarah Susanka as a guest of Marvin Windows and Doors at this year’s Remodeling Show. Here are some tips from Sarah’s latest book, “Not So Big Remodeling,” written with Marc Vassallo.

Bathrooms are among the most expensive rooms in the house per square foot. Carefully consider personal patterns and preferences before determining the best remodeling solution for the situation.

1. Positioning the Plumbing. Avoid added expense by leaving plumbing locations alone.

2. Control Costs. Before beginning, identify parts of the existing bathroom that can be saved, such as tile work, half walls, faucets and fixtures. Use available tools such as mirrors, reflected light, clear glass shower partitions and ceiling height variety to make the space look and feel larger. Identify ways to introduce natural light with glass block or frosted-glass windows, skylights and solar tubes. Do not overspend on bathroom tile or jewelry such as faucets and fixtures.

3. Express Yourself. Add simple, yet creative, deisgn flair with tile. Place a single, more expensive feature tile in a field of less costly tile to create a focal point. Or use only low cost tile, but several sizes or colors to create an innovative pattern.

4. A Tub for Young and Old. It is a good idea to have at least one bathtub in a house. Tubs are needed for bathing small children, and the elderly often prefer baths to showers.

5. Daylight in the Shower. When adding a window to a shower, make sure the window is installed properly, or it can cause moisture problems. If possible, use a metal or fiberglass covered unit and make the sill and surround out of tile or a solid surface material.

6. The Throne. For extra comfort in a bathroom or powder room, choose an elongated toilet bowl over a standard model. Given how much time we spend with this trusty fixture, it is worth a few extra dollars to make the experience a pleasant one.

7. Mirrored Gains. No room benefits more form the use of reflecting surfaces than the bathroom. A wall-to-wall mirror can double the apparent size of a room without adding a single square foot.

8. Small Space, Big Effect. Powder rooms have the most impact per square foot of any room in the house. They do not have to be spacious to make guests feel well taken care of. What is important is the design and the attention that is given to the details, such as lighting, cabinetry and countertop design, and color. In this room, beauty matters more than you might expect.