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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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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Time was that products and materials were either recycled or not. These days, “upcycled” products are becoming increasingly popular. The difference between “upcycling” and “recycling” being that the former involves reusing a material without degrading its quality or composition. So, used beer bottles being turned into jeans or asphalt or new beer bottles are examples of recycling (because the old beer bottles are melted down into cullet before being reused). But used beer bottles being turned into, say, a Thai temple is an example of upcycling.

In the increasingly diverse (and, some would say, nutty) language around eco-friendly concepts, other terms for reusing material emerged. One can not only recycle or upcycle but also downcycle, freecycle, precycle and e-cycle. But there’s only one other -cycle we’re concerned with for this post: Hipcycle.

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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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The fern and moss don't need to be watered. But keeping this artwork out of a house cat's paw reach is highly suggested.

It’s common practice for people to decorate the walls of their homes with pieces of art. And it’s common for people to decorate the interior of their homes with plants. But doing both of those with the exact same item—now that’s unusual.

And that’s exactly what you can do with Fern and Moss Wall Art.

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We love trap doors and hidden rooms. And we love wine. So how can we not write about the super cool Spiral Cellar wine storage area?

Now, by “wine storage area” we aren’t talking about dedicating a section of your closet to a wine rack. And we don’t mean some electrified wine storage appliance where you can keep a case or two. The Spiral Cellar is a special room placed underneath the ground floor of your house where as many as 1,870 bottles of wine can stored under perfect conditions.

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Spot Cool Stuff previously reviewed three unusual and creative cereal bowls for kids. The idea in that review was to feature bowls that were affordable, unbreakable and fun. Hidden Animal Bowls fell miserably short of that first criteria and failed to meet the second. But, oh, how they excel at the third. Each bowl has an animal shape that appears when filled with liquid. But if you find that the price tag puts you off—and it will—then check out some alternative Hidden Animal Tea Cups.

More on both, below:

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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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