Well, now! This definitely goes in the file of cool AND useful products. Check it out: a mini dishwasher that fits neatly into one side of your sink. It works with your sink’s plumbing and can wash up to five place settings at a time.

So what’s the problem? This product was discontinued by KitchenAid. While we’re sure they had good reason to do so, it does seem too bad: here is an easy way to fit a dishwasher into kitchens. People with older kitchens might appreciate not having to rip out cabinets to install a regular, larger dishwasher, and those with dishwashers might like an extra, smaller dishwasher for overflow. Plus, we would venture a guess that it uses less water than a traditional dishwasher.

Charles and Hudson (where we found this) wasn’t able to find out why it was discontinued, but they do note that at $1,800 it wasn’t very budget-friendly for such a small dishwasher. Maybe that is what killed it. Or maybe there were design flaws. Either way, it’s a great product concept that we wish we’d see more of!

Readers–what are some great home products that you loved and are no longer available? Let us know in the comments!

Image courtesy of Charles and Hudson

Home cleaning checklist and cheat-sheet
Curbly
“Over the last few weeks, we’ve been offering free, downloadable check lists and cheat sheets to make your spring cleaning efforts simple and effective. First, we shared a list of tasks and DIY, green cleaners for the kitchen, and last week, an easy way to make it through that most dreaded of rooms, the bathroom. Today, we’re tackling everything else: carpets/rugs, windows, furniture, walls, and odors.”

Modern Kitchens Worthy of The Jetsons
CalFinder Blog
“We’ve shown how a kitchen renovation can give you the biggest return on investment in your home. Yes, even simply replacing your dishwasher and oven can majorly revolutionize the function, efficiency and beauty of your space. Well. These kitchens go above and beyond in their modernization. Not only do they incorporate the latest and most efficient appliances (steel, think steel), but they have added cabinetry and other beautiful materials to make the entire space positively out of this world.”

A sink made of leather
DigsDigs
“What is that? A sink made of leather?! It’s not, actually, this sink is made of copper. This sink is made by a California-based company Native Trails. The sink is manufactured of special copper, it’s recycled copper from pipes and wirings which are melted down. The rest of the process is made by an artisan, so it’s hand made.” And it looks like leather!

Home safety tips for travelers
DIY Life
“In the craziness of planning for our holiday travel and vacations, we often forget to take the necessary steps to safeguard our home from intruders. It’s not necessary to have a home security system such as a home alarm or security camera, although those types of precautions are a great deterrent. Here are some tips for homeowners who don’t have home security systems but want some piece of mind before locking up.”

FSC Reclaimed Teak by IndoTeak Design
Jetson Green
“California-based IndoTeak Design has what it calls “the greenest teak products on the market.“ Its FSC-certified, post-consumer, recycled teak products — flooring, paneling, siding, and decking — come from Indonesian structures up to 300 years old.”

Crazy Rooms (That We’re Crazy About) From New York Magazine
Shelter Pop
“This week’s issue of New York focuses on extreme design…and we’re extremely excited. Check out our five favorite spaces.”

Do You Dance While You Iron?
DIY Life
“Everybody, at some point, has busted a move while cleaning. These people were kind enough to share their methods on YouTube. ”

America’s Most Decadent Kitchens
MSN Real Estate
“Forbes compiled a list of some of the most luxurious kitchens in homes now for sale, with help from Realtor.com, Trulia.com, Sotheby’s International and Coldwell Banker.”

How Much Can You Save with Green Remodeling Tax Credits?
Calfinder
“Happy Earth Day, folks! In honor of the 41st anniversary of this greenest of holidays, I’d like to share a breakdown on energy-saving home improvements, and the federal tax incentives that make them affordable.”

‘Fake Clean’ Your House in a Hurry
DIY Life
Yes, the context for this tips article is Super Bowl, but the advice is timeless. This article from Francesca Clarke encourages homeowners to focus their cleaning time on the parts of their house where they’ll get the most impact for the energy they expel.

Interior design: Nicole Hollis
Dwell
“To call interior designer Nicole Hollis’s portfolio ‘eclectic’ is an understatement. On one page you’ll find a modern man-cave with a colorful LED-lit staircase and on the next, a rustic kitchen outfitted with copper pots and wicker baskets. Each project has its own merits, but Hollis’s greatest strength as a designer lies in her chameleonlike ability to channel her clients’ desires.”

18 ways to make a small space look larger
Houzz.com
“Lots of people live in a small home, a small room, or just a small space. Others want to live in an intimate way versus dealing with the maintenance and cleaning of a large square footage space. Small is beautiful, easy, and practical, too. No matter what your reason for living in a small space, you’ll undoubtedly have to make some compromises in your decorating, get really organized, and make some adjustments to your lifestyle in order to live efficiently. With color, strategic furniture buying, space planning and interesting lighting, your place will feel wonderfully YOU with all the space you need. See if some of our tips will work for you.”

10 Architecturally Wondrous Staircases
Curbly
“A friend forwarded me one of those emails her husband got at work. It was full of photos of amazing staircases plus some strange magic eye type puzzles. Being the visual person that I am, I became completely fixated on the staircases and even went so far as to search for more and more visually indulging photos of creative staircases. I couldn’t get enough. Who thinks of these designs?”

Early Spring Maintenance Checklist
Charles & Hudson
“We may be getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but it’s time to think spring! Even if you’re not quite out of the winter weather woods, we’ve got a short list of tasks you can tackle to get your home–both inside and out–ready for warmer months.”

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!

In one of the 30 states hard hit by the monster storm? We hope you are safe, warm and at home! With Punxsutawney Phil failing to see his shadow yesterday on Groundhog Day, we are supposedly due for an early (and much-needed) spring! If you’re going stir crazy, we’ve gathered up some links around the blogosphere to warm you up.

Remove Snow (Without The Backache) With The Wovel
Charles  and Hudson
“The Wovel has been independently tested by the University of Massachusetts and shown to perform at equal or better than your standard snowblower. Also, the Wovel has been shown to need no more force than you would normally exert walking, which is great for those of us unable to chuck that heavy wet stuff about like powdered sugar.”

Hunt, Gather and Host: Winter Picnic
Design*Sponge
If you feel like some ambitious winter entertaining, this beautifully photographed post will give you some ideas!

All About Gas Fireplaces
This Old House
“There’s only one thing better than a roaring fire on a wintry night: a roaring fire that needs no tending, requires minimal cleanup, and doesn’t leave the rest of the house freezing cold. That’s what you get with today’s gas fireplaces.”

10 Things to Do Around the House When You’re Snowed In
Apartment Therapy
Stay busy around the house with these tips from Apartment Therapy.

It’s that time of year when we maybe get a little introspective and start to take stock of how the last year has gone. Did we lose that weight we wanted? Read all those books? Finally get on board with this whole Twitter thing we’ve been hearing about?

Since home is, for many people, an important extension of self, Apartment Therapy recently featured five home resolutions they’ll be keeping in the next year. Great ideas, and it inspired us to think about what resolutions we want to do, home-wise. Here goes:

• Organizing: We’re going to rid ourselves of extraneous paper and shred old bills, as appropriate. We’ll also be organizing our closets and not just shoving the mess into there. New closet organizers, boxes and bins may also be pressed into use.
• Cooking: Eating out and supporting local restaurants is great, but cooking at home not only saves money, but allows you unprecedented control of the food you put into your body. Plus, you can flex your culinary muscles and become known for sparkling hosting and fabulous dinner parties.
• Curb appealing: With all the zeal over interior decorating, it’s easy to forget the home’s exterior. No more! This year, we will be painting, repairing, refreshing and landscaping to make our houses the envy of the neighborhood. New walkway? Flowerbeds? Our only limit is our imaginations!
• Greening: We want to make this year the greenest ever. So we’ll be looking at ways to make our homes — and our lives — more energy efficient. We’re going to try to re-use stuff more, evaluate whether we really need something and think of ways to buy locally as needed.
• Learning: We’re going to attempt to pick up some sort of DIY skill this year. Whether that means something like learning some home repair basics, or a softer skill like making our own throw pillows, we’ll be doing it for ourselves.

New Year’s resolutions are notoriously difficult to keep, but we believe that if you start small and have a purpose, it can be done. What are your home resolutions? Let us know in the comments.

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

Unless you live in the desert or close by like people in Arizona, you have had issues with mildew and mold. Mildew is really the first step in getting mold, so addressing this right away is a good thing.

Indoors you might be experiencing it in the bathroom. For both issues — mildew or mold — fresh air movement is your friend. If you have a window in the bathroom and can open it, then do so. The exhaust fan should not only be running while you take a shower or bath but at least 10 minutes after you are done to pull as much moisture out of the space.

If you have a shower door, try to keep it open during that drying time as closing things up helps breed mildew. You can do this with a curtain as well, but the catch-22 is that you can start to get some mildew on the actual liner.  One thing I have found is that all liners are not created equal: Look for commercial-grade liners and expect to pay about $15 to $20.

As far as mildew where the walls meet the tub or shower floor, you can clean that with an overnight treatment of bleach. There are bleach-based spray cleaners you can buy that foam a bit when you spray them. In the evening, spray any area where you see the mildew and coat it well. Allow it to sit on the surface overnight. In the morning when you go to shower, take a nylon scrubbing brush and give the treated area a quick scrub. You will be amazed!

Mold is an entirely different story. There are more than 1,000 strains of mold and really only a handful of them are dangerous to humans, but you still need to be careful.

In the basement, try open a window, run a dehumidifier, or install an exhaust fan connected to a humidistat. This can drastically reduce the amount of moisture and odor in a basement space.

The same is true in an attic. Mold can live on the back side of your roof.  Make sure any exhaust fan vents are connected to the outside of the home. These fans should never be allowed to just vent into the attic or next to a roof vent. Also consider installing an attic fan. When set up correctly, that hot, humid air can be pulled out of the space and fresh air will be brought in from the vents under the eaves.

If you have mold and are not sure what to do, start with a home test kit. These kits, which you can get at your local hardware store, cost about $10. You take a sample and send it into a lab for an additional $30. Then the results will be sent back to you. If it is a strain that is concerning, then you need professional help to eradicate this from your home.

Mildew and mold can be controlled and eliminated. Your job is to not ignore them because they can have serious health consequences for you and your family.

It’s ironic that a thing that exists to clean you can get dirty and disgusting so fast. A fresh, clean shower can make the entire bathroom look sparkling. A grungy shower can make the whole room look dingy. If you’re tired of pulling the shower curtain closed when guests come over, you’ll want to check out Apartment Therapy’s post on how to clean your shower without the use of harsh chemicals. Here are a few tips:

• You’ve got some choices on green cleaners. Apartment Therapy recommends either a tea tree cleaner, white vinegar cleaner, citrus juice cleaner, hydrogen peroxide cleaner, or borax and vinegar cleaner.
• Clean after your shower–steam helps loosen any gunk on the walls.
• Let your chosen spray sit for a few minutes and then scrub with a stiff brush. And old toothbrush works well for getting in the grout.
• If you have a fan or a dehumidifier, run it to get rid of extra  moisture-causing mold in the bathroom.

And to prevent mold in the first place, check out Apartment Therapy’s post on that topic.

Photo courtesy of jfpeck on Flickr.