Link Love Around the Web
December 4, 2007 by Jennifer Chait
Filed under Home & Living
Last month was crazy; to say the least. The worst part of the crazy busy was my blog surfing time was considerably cut. I hate that. Today I was trying to catch up with some of my favorite architect and design-minded blogs and man, what I’ve missed. There has been so much cool stuff posted that I’m not low on link love material for sure.
Here’s what I suggest for your reading (and viewing) pleasure.
Link to bookmark:
This first link has been a long time coming. I meant to plug this far sooner but now is better than never. Followers of Offbeat have heard me mention Architecture.MNP countless times — these guys can’t help it if they rock.
However, I recently found out that they’ve got some other fine ninja sites including a music site, music.mnp and a killer green site, green.mnp. Their music site is a bit too funky fresh for me — a little low on the chill factor, depending on your definition of chill. However, green.mnp is great. It’s actually been around for a long while but as I’ve been know to do, I miss stuff.
Right now they’ve got a series going on about building a straw bale house and oddly enough the home is going up where I built the passive solar house — in the East Mountain area near Albuquerque. Very strange. I was looking at pictures of the land at green.mnp and it brought back all kinds of memories.
But I digress. Check out green.mnp; you will not be disappointed. I’ll be adding it to the blogroll here and at Tree Hugging Family — it’s that cool.
A winning link:
The always slick Dezeen has the scoop on The Prototyp Einfamilienhaus by Italian architects AKA architetti. This beautiful home design recently came out ahead in a low-energy wooden house competition.
See many more great photos of this award winner right here.
Offbeat home item links:
CubeMe has many note worthy items to see but my two big recommendations would be the $75,000 toilet (yikes) and the item made from these:
Can you tell what these items in the picture above are? Can you guess what household item might be made with them? At a loss? Find the answer at CubeMe.
You know, I’ve got a few more cool links to share but maybe I’ll save them for later in the week. Enjoy the ones above.
Don’t forget to gather points for the December Offbeat Homes Contest — you could win one of three great prizes.
Pencils! We have a ton around here that are never used. Why didn’t we think of building with them? Yeesh. That is pretty creative.
Hey you, the pencil stool is crazy cool and reminds me of X-files. Mulder’s pencil obsession.
Heya!
It looks slightly uncomfortable to me. With the pencils able to be removed, what if one became tangled in someone’s clothing? Neat idea, but I don’t think I could actually use it unless I glued each one into spot. Still think it is creative.
Julie ~ Ha, thought you were my other Julie. That’s it I’m re-naming one of you! Who shall it be. I suppose if you really do pick a pen name for a new saucy blog we could go with that.
thanks for the link love jennifer! i would love to hear more about your experience building in the east mountains…though ‘10 reasons building your own house sucks’ does not make it sound too glamorous. it’s ok though, because i like spiders. and 2 years? wow, my parents are already planning to have christmas there in 2008, and construction doesn’t even start until april. was it just the 2 of you (plus the little ones)? when is the 10 reasons it rocks post coming??
Thanks for the link love!
I’m a big fan of the AKA home you featured, not only for it’s sustainability, but for it’s interesting take on the standard silhouette of the house [I may have to steal that for architecture.MNP].
Orangemenace ~ You’re always welcome. I like the shape of the AKA home too; they took such a normal home shape and really made it their own.
Jessie ~ Well, since you reminded me I suppose I should do why it rocks. I’ll do that soon. There are perks.
I guess the one thing to keep in mind is organization skills. For some reason most of the self builders I knew in NM seemed very unorganized and that wastes so much time. I’m super organized and had I been the architect you can bet I’d have made a much better to-do list.
Really, in home building timing is everything. Like certain inspections need to happen before other things can be completed and since it’s the East if you’re working with certain material they can crack in the cold. Also, costs go up and down with the seasons in NM (for building supplies) so our costs went up due to tasks getting done later than planned. We also thought doing things like a composting toilet would be easy to approve but no… I suppose just line everything up solidly before you start and it can be done.
Thanks for visiting; I will write the positives up soon as I just found a few newer photos.
P.S Jessie ~ Are you building in Cedar Crest or the Edgewood side of the mountains?