Home Improvement Partner

It’s spring-cleaning time, so why not include the garage in this fun project?

You can decide if you need to clean the garage by asking yourself:

Has the junk drawer extended to the garage, where everything is dumped to be organized later?

If the answer is yes, then it’s time to clean and organize that valuable space.

Start by eating a good breakfast — you’ll need it!

Then, take everything out of the garage and put it all in the driveway. Clean the garage floor and walls, if needed. Then get your head in the right place. Be ready and willing to get rid of things you really don’t need. Discard anything that is broken, no matter how good your intention is to fix it. If it’s been in the garage broken

Next, consider selling items that you don’t need anymore, but are still good. Plan a garage

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Flowers for SWFL

They’re everywhere this time of year in Florida: those desolate strips of barren soil around man-made retention and storm water management ponds.

Devoid of any kind of plant material, they resemble a Mars landscapes. Many are protected with chain-linked fences, making them an even bigger eyesores.

Because a good amount of Florida is paved with asphalt or covered with concrete, rainwater can no longer be absorbed into the ground. Consequently, rainwater runoff, which contains gas, oil, pesticides, fertilizers and more, is collected in these water retention ponds. T

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Andrew Hollingsworth bid Chicago adieu in 2009 when he relocated to San Francisco, trading in his 3400 square-foot Lake Shore Drive condo for a bright and sunny studio with a sleeping loft and large corner windows that overlook the surrounding hilltops. Located at the end of a long, narrow path behind an old Pacific Heights Victorian that was rumored to have been built by the Gump family and which survived the 1906 earthquake with little damage, the studio was added in the 50’s or 60’s, and its clean lines seem tailor made for Andrew’s elegant collections of mid-century Danish furniture and contemporary art. Downsizing into a smaller space required creative solutions and ruthless editing, but the result is so fantastic. To learn more about how he did it, please check out my recent Chicago Tribune article. T

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Several things are on my mind this week, from crazy politics to newsletters to reader email. So, let’s dig in.

Where’s the science?

Sometimes, things that just seem to “make sense” are actually quite senseless, and that’s where we start this week.

Case in point is the move to further limit the use of fertilizers for ornamental plantings. That’s why the Collier Commission wants to eliminate all fertilizers in August and September. The thinking here seems reasonable at first blush. After all, don’t we want our waterways to be clean?

I believe there is no relationship between ornamental fertilizer use and polluted waterways. Read that again. I’ll wait.

Yes, there are some obvious exceptions: Don’t fertilize the slopes of lakes, because rain or irrigation will wash the fertilizer into the water. But more widely,

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It was only after I’d finished photographing Janet Friedman’s brilliant Logan Square four-bedroom home that I realized that what felt like an hour had actually taken three. Artists and athletes often speak of a state of intense concentration when time seems to stand still, and I often experience the phenomenon when shooting places like Janet’s, which is chock-full of interesting antiques, decorative vignettes and lots of outsider and naive art. This state of consciousness or “flow” seems inherent when people concentrate intensely on an activity they love, and Janet told me that it happens to her when she decorates, which might explain why the interior designer and owner of JRF Interiors offers a fixed day-rate where she spruces up her client’s home using their own things.  Thanks

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