Category Archive

Home

Our homes are made up of lots of working parts — bedrooms, redecorated kitchens, upgraded baths, ogle-worthy renos, ticks and tricks for cleaning and organizing, and real home tours all live here to represent the spaces of your Offbeat Home.

You can’t continue the fight if you get frostbite: how to live at a protest and learn from the Occupy movement

We live in interesting times — times when thousands of people around the world are claiming their rights to free speech extend to the right to occupy a public place as a statement of protest. Given that the Northern Hemisphere is descending into winter, how do they do it?

The lowdown on military housing culture

Here’s the thing about military houses that is unwavering: they are what you make of them, just like military life in general. I realize it’s hard to have any base house feel like “home” … but if you take the time to fill your home with laughter, love, and just the right amount of Target accessories, it can harness some semblance of “home.”

Show me your junk drawer

In the vein of the post we ran about the art project documenting the interiors of refrigerator, I want to see what y’all have in your junk drawers.

Mine’s pretty straightforward — so you’re going to get bonus points for the freakier naturally-occurring collections.

I am a genius and I invented a new filing system

The problem with inboxes is that they don’t DO anything except collect everything I need to look at and deal with. They are a stall. I still have to look at every Thing in them at least one more time, touch it, and decide what to do with it. (See figure 1.)

But a few weeks ago I had a stroke of genius. My inbox fills up as it gathers all my “to dos” from throughout the house — event insurance bills to pay, checks to deposit into three different accounts, doodles I don’t want to lose, invitations I need to respond to…I think there’s a Chuck Klostermannarf book I’ve assigned myself to read for “work” sitting near the top right now.

9 ideas for house numbers that go BOOM

You wouldn’t believe the amount of questions I’ve gotten about house numbers! I guess I’m not surprised — they’re an easy way to change up your house, but when you head to the hardware store you get, like, four choices for house numbers and they’re all pretty blah. Here are non-blah makeable and buyable ideas for displaying your house — or maybe apartment? — number.

Your cube is your castle: TONS of non-standard desk decor without a cliche in sight

Wanted: ideas for cheap and easy cubicle decor. Already considered: potted plants, pretty pictures, subversive cross-stitchnarf.

Do not want: Anything that smells or makes noise or blinks.

How far should I go to protect my family?

One of the weirdest conversations I’ve had as an adult was the time my husband and I talked about safety in our new home. There had been a few home invasions in the area, where men had entered houses at night and demanded money or else pistolwhipping. Our conversation wandered from deadbolt locks to mace to, “What if we got a gun?”

Aging beers in casks and imagining pet bats — reader photos

Start your day with our collection of interesting articles on the web and photos from our readers. In these Clicky Links you’ll find lots of sites to waste a little time on — and you’ll find a host of uses for missile silos.

Click through, too, to find our links on submitting YOUR stuff to Offbeat Home!