Ralph, one of our faithful readers pointed out this great deal from Eurway. Above and to the left you see the Bantam Sofa from Design Within Reach for the not so reachable price of $1398. To the left you see the Vandyke Sofa from Eurway for a much more affordable $849. That is almost $550 dollars cheaper for basically the same couch. Having never seen either in person, who knows if the quality is exactly the same but it does raise an interesting question. Would you buy a knock off? Personally I would, and have. My arco lamp is a great example. But on some things I would want the original, like an Eames Lounger. Why, just silly I guess, but for some reason it just wouldn’t be the same to sit in anything else. So, how about you?

Some time ago I did a little wright up on Voss water. I had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth all the money for the water, but the bottle was worth every penny. Recently though we did have a comment that stated they felt the water was far superior to the others.
Voss has recently ventured into the energy drink market, and is taking a typical Voss approach to it. It’s all about the image. They were nice enough to send me a couple of samples of their new G Pure Energy Drink. Their press packaging was beautiful, I felt more like I was opening a box of perfume, not an energy drink. The bottles are quite a bit smaller than even the smallest Voss water bottle. The 200 ml bottle had a nice shape to it and fit in the hand nice. At $2.99 a bottle it’s not really more expensive than any of the other energy drinks, you just get a little less. As far as taste, maybe my taste buds are not quite refined enough, but I think I prefer a Rockstar. Still, you just cant beat G for looks.

G Pure Energy Website.

I started tiling our bathroom last week. I set the floor tile on Wednesday night and grouted it on Friday. Let me just say for the record, that grout is a wonderful thing. It makes a not so hot tile job look pretty darn good. On Saturday I put up the rest of the dura rock (minus one side of the tub that I was still clamping and gluing) and started on the wall tile. My stepdad and father in law both stopped by Saturday night and helped with all the wall tile. It was a huge help too. I never could have gotten so much done without them. I ended up getting close to half the bathroom done, and we are getting very close to being able to shower. We can hardly wait!

We spent last weekend and a couple of nights this week getting everything ready to tile in the bathroom. Since we want to be able to get the whole floor wet without worrying about it getting funky under the tile we went ahead and covered the whole floor with a PVC membrane. It is a bit overkill, but at least we know it is done right. Next we had to get the slope correct so that the water goes toward the drains. I cut some thin strips of wood with the proper slope to help guide me as I put down the drypack. It ended up raising the floor almost 2″ at the far side. The first time I did the dry pack I made it too dry, and I had to go back and redo it all a couple days later. I got it right eventually. We are going to spend the weekend tiling, and will have all the floors done, and hopefully a good deal of the walls too. My wife can’t wait, it has been almost 8 months since I tore our old shower out. Did I ever mention how wonderful and patient she is?

After much preparation we finally got our floor poured yesterday. For a while I almost thought we weren’t going to make it. There were some last little things I had to get done with the radiant tubing, and I had forgotten that I had to get a mechanical permit for the radiant system as well. When the inspector came by on Tuesday, he pointed out these short comings and said we had to fix them before we could pour. I scrambled Tuesday to get a permit, and finished up the radiant at 10:00 that night. The weather was beautiful yesterday, and it was our one window before it starts to get snowy again. The crew from Savage Construction put in a long day, and did a beautiful job. They ended up power troweling the house section, and hand finishing it until it was super smooth. I bought them all dinner while they waited for the last section to cure enough to finish it, and it was after 7:00 at night before they got out of here. Today they will seal it well and get it covered before the snow storm tomorrow. Next week we should hopefully start framing our house up.

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The Gritt Chair with it’s wide corduroy upholstery is definitely a kick back to the 60’s mid century modern. It’s generally pretty hard to pull off a good looking corduroy chair, but the Gritt Chair manages to do it well. It has nice clean geometric lines, and the sleek chrome base balances out the slightly frumpy top. Perhaps the best thing about the chair though is the price. At $169 for the chair and $69 for the ottoman, it’s mid century style that you can afford.

Available from Eurway for $169.

I have to admit, Dwell Magazine has been a love hate relationship for me. When I first discovered it several years ago, I was thrilled to see that there were like minded people out there. I read it religiously every month, and then…. Well things changed. The houses got more expensive and it felt like they were loosing their sense of direction. I even went as far as to write the editor to ask what happened to the ideals of the fruit bowl manifesto. I got no response and my subscription lapsed.
Yesterday while I was at Lowes picking up some stuff to tile our bathroom, I saw the new copy of Dwell, and the cutline caught my attention. Modern Living on a Budget. That sounds more like it. The story turns out to be a good one, about a Austin couple who managed to stumble into a 1200+ square foot newly built modern home for $110,000. That includes the land. The story actually inspired me to wander over to Dwell’s new website to see what was new. There is a bunch going on like a podcast, a daily video (but no video podcast, who knows why) a blog, and the big surprise was a forum/community area called Dwell Connect. I took the time to sign up, and wasn’t completely impressed, but it is at least a step in the right direction.

My wife and I have this talent. We can walk into any store looking for something, and inevitably the thing we fall in love with is always the most expensive. Unfortunately for us, car seats are no different. We made a couple of choices up front. We plan on using a sling, so we didn’t really want or need a car seat that was easy to tote around. Being cheap, I like the idea of not having to buy multiple car seats as the kid grows. This lead us to wanting a conversion car seat. Britax generally receives top reviews for all their conversion seats, and when we saw the print on the Britax Marathon Couture Soho, we were sold. Of course it was the most expensive print from the most expensive manufacture of conversion seats. The $299 price was hard to swallow, but throwing down a bunch of cash for our babies safety is pretty easy for me to justify. plus I still had some birthday money left (Thanks Lucia).
The next challenge was finding a store that actually had it in. After literally hours of searching online and countless stores that were sold out, Albee Baby came through for us. You couldn’t order online, but you could call in to order. I placed my order first thing this morning, and was told that it was amazing that they actually had it in stock.

More info on the Britax Marathon here.

Available from Albee Baby for $299

Its hard enough to make a chair that looks good all by itself, throw in the challenge of looking good, and being able to stack on top of each other for storage and it gets even harder. The Lela chair not only does it well, but it also throws in a couple technical extras. Take for example the fact that it is the first stackable chair to fulfill the requirements of German fire-safety norm B1, and it can hold up to the weather outdoors. All technical parts aside, I just think it looks good.

Available exclusively from Topdeq for $159.

We got our final grading done the other day. It’s crazy to see those four foot walls just get buried. We also went and picked up all the supplies we need to put our radiant heat in. It was only $730 for everything, and it should be fairly easy to get it all hooked up, especially compared to what we had to do when we put it in the house. Once we get the radiant in, we should be ready to pour. I am meeting today with the flatwork guy to go over any last details, and I hope that we will be able to pour on Friday. It’s supposed to be in the 50’s, so it would be a great day to get it all done.