Mazel tov on your expected first born child. Now comes the first fun part of being a parent — coming up with the perfect baby name — and the first expensive and time consuming part — buying all the stuff you’ll need for when little Terwilliger enters the world.
Picking out baby furniture can be especially daunting. Much of it is as expensive as adult furniture. Except, unlike a quality sofa or bed, you can’t enjoy baby furniture for long before your little one outgrows it.
Or maybe you can. Some baby furniture is designed to grow with your child from baby, to toddler, to kiddo and even into the tween years and beyond. Here’s our review of five especially cool examples:
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Imagine the typical prospective home buyer or renter. They learn about a property of interest to them, either online or through an agent, and then go in person to check it out. And then they decide against it. What’s the most likely reason why?
According to a new survey from mortgage broker Oceanfinance.co.uk, the most commonly cited answer is: noisy neighbors.
Of course, if you aren’t looking for a new place then you might already feel stuck in a stentorian living situation. But you needn’t resort to moving, undertaking a major soundproofing renovation or adopting passive aggressive tactics to find some peace and quiet. A few simple home decor changes can help promote silence by absorbing sound. Here’s a look at five of those:
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Looking to construct a home chair using reclaimed materials? Three things you’ll need:
1) The proper equipment. If you don’t have that already you can hire tools here.
2) A sufficient quality of whatever material you are working in.
3) Inspiration.
To help out with the third item on that list, we’ve found three examples of chairs made from upcycled materials: skis, jeans and traffic signs.
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You needn’t have a spooky mansion, eccentric tastes or a now-it-puts-the-lotion-in-the-basket creepiness to have a secret door in your home
For as long as Spot Cool Stuff has been fantasizing about the house of our dreams — the mansion we would build if money were no object — our imaginary plans have included trap doors, secret rooms and hidden passageways.
For some time, we assumed that installing a hidden door in real life would require a hiring a general contractor who would surely shoot us a suspicious look when we explained what we wanted. But once we started doing the research we learned that there are over a dozen companies with the specialty of installing stealth entrance ways. Some even stock pre-built hidden doors you can install yourself!
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If you have kids who incessantly bang on whatever pots, pans, books, bowls, saucers, spoons and sibling’s heads they can get their hands on, the last thing you need is a furniture that’s designed to double as musical instrument. But if your home is in need a certain melodic touch, the furniture from Musical Furnishings is very cool.
Every item from Musical Furnishings is meant to be enjoyed as a bone fide musical instrument; all manner of tunes, from simple songs to complex scores, can be played on them. At the same time, each item serves as a useable piece of furniture. Your can eat on the musical tables (the tripled-layered polyurathane finish is resistant to spills), sit on the musical chairs and store stuff in the musical chests.
There’s a variety of Musical Furnishings items to choose from. A look at our favorites:
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Humans, being wing-less creatures, are used to seeing our world from ground level. Even in the jet age, we are surprised when we view the planet from overhead.
Munich-based designer David Hanauer sought to take advantage of that element of surprised when he created his World Wide carpets. The floor pieces all use graphics taken from directly from Google Earth.
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With respect to the philosophy held by those tiger mothers amongst our readers, childhood should be fun. Kids’ bedrooms should be fun too. Here are three unusual and creative dressers spotted by our editors:
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Spot Cool Stuff previously wrote about an airline that was selling it’s in-flight meals in local grocery stores. But if that doesn’t sufficiently bring the airplane cuisine experience to your home, consider getting an artsy airline food cart from Bordbar.
Bordbar trolleys are, at their core, like those meal service carts used by airline flight attendants (on the dwindling number of flights that still have some semblance meal service). But Bordbar spruced them up in such a way that they are not only cool, but useful too.
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