September 4th, 2010
A home’s exterior makes or breaks the first impression when prospective buyers see your home initially. If you’re looking to add value to your home without spending a lot of money, consider enhancing its curb appeal with a new front door. A spruced-up entryway can add as much as $24,000 to a home’s perceived value. Your home competes for attention with the other homes in the neighborhood and even on your block. But you’ll never get an offer if potential buyers don’t make it through the front door. The good news is that you can give your home an inviting new look by simply upgrading your front entryway. It’s one of the fastest, easiest and least expensive home improvements you can make.
Whereas many doors are made of wood or steel, newer fiberglass materials and design options make the rich look of a wood door more affordable and easier to maintain. Fiberglass won’t rot, swell or peel like wood; requires minimal maintenance; provides excellent thermal protection; and offers unlimited possibilities for styles and finish options. .
Today’s manufacturers also offer a wide array of choices for your home’s entryway, from doors that complement your home’s architectural style to custom looks using decorative glass, sidelites, transoms and more. Here are some “IDEAS” for choosing a new entryway system for your home: .
Don’t ignore the Small Stuff
Remember that an entryway is an entire system of components, not just the door slab look for a complete door system designed to work together with high-quality, durable components. From door hardware to beautiful glass sidelites and transoms, an attractive, high-performance entryway can go a long way toward making your home more appealing and drawing potential buyers to at least look inside. .
One door or two?
If you have a single door, you can simply replace it with a new door in the same size. But if you add sidelites (stationary glass panels next to the door opening) you will enhance the beauty of the entryway and also bring more light inside the home to showcase what’s inside. If you currently have double doors, instead of simply replacing them, consider installing an extra-wide single door (3 feet by 6 inches) and use sidelites to fill in the opening. Or, for a truly grand look, expand to double doors and add decorative glass sidelites and a transom window above. This may be a little more work, but it will transform your home with a completely new look. .
Evaluate Your Current Entryway
Check the door opening to see what your home can accommodate structurally. Measure the height and width: most doors are 3 feet wide and 6 feet 8 inches tall. But some of the most popular doors are now 3 feet 6 inches wide and 8 feet tall, so you may need to enlarge your opening. In addition, consider adding columns on the outside of the home or crossheads which will not only add style and elegance, but increase the home’s value and appeal. .
Assess What Glass Meets Your Needs
Adding decorative glass to your entryway can greatly enhance the curb appeal of your home. For example, use decorative glass with wrought iron designs to add sophistication to a Rustic or Spanish-inspired entryway; choose oval-shaped glass with curved or angled geometric designs to enhance a Victorian home; or select glass with crossover designs to add personality to a Prairie-style home. .
August 28th, 2010
The search for big ideas starts with big questions. What’s the basis of spirituality? Why can’t people motivate themselves to do what they really need to do? Is there a better way to organize a city? Do we always need to understand a problem to solve it?
To generate big ideas, then, whether for a book you’re writing, an essay, a discussion, or just for your own intellectual entertainment, start with powerful questions. Ask how things might be different. Questions that seem silly are okay too, as long as they are “big” questions like, “What if there were no wars?” or “What if cities had no streets or cars?” The “what if” questions are some of the best.
Big Ideas Come From Challenging Premises
Of the many specific idea-creation and problem-solving techniques that can yield new and big ideas, one of the simplest and most profound is to challenge existing premises. For an example, let’s look at the licensing of doctors by governments and how it affects people’s perceptions.
Licensing is a widely accepted idea which requires a minimum standard that is primarily measured in terms of education and training. Despite not measuring performance, licensing leads the public to think it means safety. People will typically spend more time researching which stereo to buy than which doctors to go to. This complacency comes from the premise that doctors are licensed and so are roughly equally safe.
Now, for some types of heart operations a given doctor might have one-in-a-thousand patients die on the operating table, while another has four fatalities. You are four times as likely to die with the second doctor, a fact not published anywhere, since his having a “license” is supposedly all you need to know. Well what about a system of ratings that tracks the real achievements and statistics of doctors and makes the information publicly available?
Then you could to pay according to the doctors skill. This may offend doctors with lower performance scores, and the first reaction of many is that they just don’t want the four-deaths-in-a-thousand doctor at any price. Of course there will always be better and worse doctors in any system, and there is no way for the best doctor to treat everyone, so doesn’t it make sense to pay less for lower quality?
What big ideas might come from challenging the idea of jobs? Could we all be self employed somehow? Are there advantages to this? How about the premise that lying is bad? Can a rule be found for when lying is a morally good thing? What about “punishing” those who commit crimes. Can we have a safer system by challenging this premise?
Creative Combining
An entertaining and effective way to generate new ideas is to combine ideas. Combine “car” and “kitchen,” and you get a “mobile restaurant,” for example. To use this technique for generating big ideas, you just start with at least one “bigger” concept.
The “free bonus” idea from marketing and “virtue” from morality might result in a better way to promote virtue. With products the perceived value is higher due to the addition of bonuses. Could you “sell” virtue by increasing the perceived value in a similar way? We’re so trained to respond to the word “free,” that this might translate directly. Nevermind a boring book on morality. Have a catalog of virtues, and after making a case for honesty, add, “Free bonus – buy this virtue today and get a better reputation, which translates into more success in business.” The fact that we “pay” with effort rather than money in this case may not matter. The bigger, more general idea here is that maybe virtue needs to be “marketed” better.
What else could you combine to generate ideas? Love and business, childhood and spiritual growth, survival of the fittest and ideologies, and on and on. You could even combine the concept of “art” with “big ideas,” to see where that leads.
August 18th, 2010
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